When talking about video games that take place in theaters of war, you’ll see a few key words and phrases regularly popping up. It’s hard to find a newspaper’s review, online forum thread, or YouTuber’s first impressions without hearing about the weapon variety, game modes, or map design. There’s another term — historical accuracy — that has always been present in these discussions, but is becoming more and more highlighted in recent years:

And for good reason; it’s all too easy to pass historical accuracy in war games off as something of lesser importance. The term ‘arcade shooter’ is often used as a defense for games not representing real historical wars by consumers of the genre, and “if the game is fun I could not care less” is another common sentiment. But it is becoming increasingly easy for people’s views of actual history to be influenced by video games. Academic psychological publications such as this one by Frontiers in Psychology are arguing that commercial games should “play a more prominent role within mainstream education.” Away from academia, we have reviews on family-orientated websites, where parents praise games such as Battlefield 1 for offering “so much to learn” and being a “good game to teach your kid history of wars,” mere months after EA CFO Blake Jorgensen stated concerns about younger consumers even knowing World War One happened. At first these reviews seem to be offering an answer to Jorgensen’s concerns, but this becomes worrying when the game he helped create has had a ton of criticism in showcasing a completely different Great War than the one that actually happened in history.

You can tackle the issue of historical accuracy in a bunch of ways, across a myriad of different factors — historical accounts, like all accounts, are going to be biased, and this carries on through to the games that draw from them. Developments in technology can also be factored in: between the releases of the Playstation 1 and the Playstation 4, you’ll find loads of depictions of D-Day, each different, and none wholly accurate. One aspect of historical accuracy in games that can be quite consistent, however, is the array of weapons, and how they handle both in real life/ the digital space. After all — Oxford dictionary defines war as “a state of armed conflict between different countries or different groups within a country.” What do these groups arm themselves with, exactly?

People are all too eager to focus on the narrative intricacies and character portrayals in war games such as Battlefield 1 and Call of Duty: World at War, when in reality, these games are mostly bought for the multiplayer. Sure, the single player campaigns can be enjoyable experiences, but a vast swathe of the community only really play them as a one-time warm-up mechanics refresher course for multiplayer, something to play when their friends aren’t online to queue with, or a pastime for when the internet goes down. The single player is less of a campaign through parts of the World Wars, and more of a campaign through a firing range to test out all of the new toys. The solo content is certainly culturally significant, and worth great amounts of research, but there simply is a reason why many of these multiplayer-centric war titles have the online content first and foremost in their reviews, requiring a subject such as one of the first World War One video games to shove the single player into higher relevance.

In multiplayer, the guns available are the key. They dictate how you progress through the game world, how you ascend through the experience ranks, and how you win matches. A real-life gun ported into a game means something completely unique — look down with the controller and you won’t often see your character’s feet, nor will you really see any of your avatar until you die and are awaiting a respawn, already oblivious to this as you edit your gun and equipment to better suit the ensuing battle. You’re playing as your gun and gadgets — not a soldier in the Red Army, etc.

These weapons at first appear as they do in other media — they’re a ‘drawn’ version of their real life counterpart, often pretty visually accurate beyond the odd ahistorical attachment or magazine size. Have a quick look at 3:10 of this clip from HBO’s Band of Brothers:

The German soldier fumbles with a MP40 — here, it provides a moment of tension and stress; whether our protagonist will manage to shoot at the soldier before he gets shot himself. The sounds of malfunctioning weapons and frantic cocking of the gun are played to great effect here, and it is clear what is happening — it makes sense, guns sometimes misfire, can be hard to grip in traumatic events, etc, but only when this happens in a medium outside of games. If this exact situation were played out in Call of Duty, it’d be a nightmare — the person who gets the shot off will be disjointed from the immersion of the gameplay: “Why didn’t I just die?” You’d experience a parody of that divine intervention scene from Pulp Fiction, except where God is the bad netcode, the laggy servers, and the holy hitboxes. If you were the player who just got shot, you’d have a much less poetic verdict of “what the actual fuck?” then make a post online to feel better about yourself.

The guns have to work perfectly as intended — something not historically accurate from the core, especially in shooters predating the contemporary war. People playing these franchises learn to know this — you’ll eventually gain the instinct of virtual fight or flight, determining on the fly whether your shotgun holding two shells can take on the bloke around the corner, or if you need to reload and rethink because each shot would only do 33% of his health (at best) from the distance you’re at right now. This is where audiences — especially young people, but not at all limited to them — become armchair experts on the history, power, technicalities, and effectiveness of the various real weapons that they’ve seen represented in their favourite games. It’s a tricky environment, though — the genuine interest in these historical and contemporary firearms is certainly educating people on their uses in reality, and video games are clearly perpetuating this in a positive way, as knowing about and respecting the tools which have orchestrated many of mankind’s atrocities is always an educational merit. The issues arise when people are learning about these weapons in an incorrect fashion — many of the most popular videos of the multi-million subscribed firearms channel Hickock45 are based on guns which have featured in recent war games, and whole eras of YouTube were defined by weapon retrospectives and replications of video game-like feats in reality. The comments on the videos are a breeding ground for historical hearsay, teenagers with 60 days of online experience complaining about the form of a person who has spent 60 years firing the weapon in question, and arguments about statistics inapplicable to reality, where neither side is in any way correct as the human body does not have 100 hit points.

Take the aforementioned MP40 — many people, myself included, hold this subconscious myth of the weapon as the supreme submachine gun of World War Two, because it was simply the best in CoD5’s multiplayer. The guns readily available nature to any player playing as any nation, as well as the incredible accuracy at long range, large magazine, and lack of recoil, is completely unalike the real-world counterpart, which only really shares the look, clip size, and classification. These myths perpetuate other myths within the communities of these shooters — when Call of Duty went back to World War Two, players could take more shots than in Call of Duty 4. Naturally, this was because the guns ‘did less damage back then’ (even though many guns had similar stopping power, and weapons such as the STG44 and M1911 were identical in both games), and not because of specific design choices in terms of gameplay — the communities went full circle when futuristic Call of Duty games still had ‘bullet sponge’ elements, because obviously guns reached their peak when Price and Co had to stop Al-Asad and Zakhaev.

This is why games are a great, but dangerous tool when regarding historical accuracy. They cannot be taken as something that can wholly educate or mislead a player about some moment in history — games need mechanics that work perfectly, that are based upon a world that does not always work perfectly. They can teach a player a lot about the context they take place in, but only so much. Likewise, they cannot be blamed for not teaching all of the context they take place in — they are a great interactive cog in tuition of history, but only if you fully give in to the fun wackiness that can ensue. The industry has developed in a way that makes a new AAA game expensive to develop and sell — multiplayer is the way people get their money’s worth, but war isn’t replayable for long — you can’t have guns breaking down, no regen, etc. Single player can orchestrate this — but I daresay that the two together have a negative impact on the portrayal of history; it’s all well and good having a tank campaign in Battlefield 1 teaching players that landships were unreliable, but it loses all meaning to the player when the same vehicle online can be completely relied upon. Repeatedly respawning in the opening mission at first seems poignant, until you realise that you could be doing the exact same thing online with your mates, and laughing instead of feeling historically engaged. This is why games can be dangerous in regards to accuracy — social online play is comfy, needs to be fun, and attempts at historical portrayal need to cater to the soldiers, unlike reality.