Games have always prepared young people for war but, asks Pat Kane, should we be concerned about the increasingly explicit links between digital gaming and the military?

As the situation in Iraq gets bloodier and more uncontrollable, who would take on the task of promoting the idea of enlistment to America's youth? Step forward Colonel Casey Wardynski, who is deploying perhaps the most cost-effective recruitment method presently available to the US army - a war game.

Whereas television advertising costs between $5 and $10 per hour to get the US army brand in front of each viewer, the program Colonel Wardnyski is supporting costs an average of 10 cents per hour - based on the $2.5m annual running costs for the website where the game America's Army is available for free download.

And people are playing: 29 million have grabbed a copy, and there are 6.1 million active users.

But that's only the start. The whole purpose of America's Army, a first-person-shooter simulation of army training and combat whose development began in 1999 and which was launched in 2002 (on July 4, Independence Day, of course), is to recruit more soldiers.

"Players can download it free from the internet, and use it to try the role of soldier, virtually, and see if it's something they want to do in real life," said Wardynski, who has a doctorate from Rand and is a professor at West Point Academy, the US's pre-eminent military tuition college, at the first Serious Games Summit in October last year.

In fact, between 20 and 40% of new US army recruits have already played the game. The strapline on the console version, just launched in the US and due to be in the UK by Christmas, gets to the point: "Our game developers don't rely on imagination," it says.

So is the marriage of war and games inevitable? After all, humans play games for wonderful, enriching reasons - and sometimes for no reason at all. But they have always played games to prepare for war. Some of our earliest and most enduring board games, such as chess and Go, began as teaching tools for the children of kings and emperors. Through such games they understood strategy, imagined the battlefield and saw the consequences of attack and defence.

Art of war

It should be no surprise that a walk down the aisles of any computer games retailer can seem like a visit to your local military academy. From Rome: Total War Barbarian Invasion to Battlefield 2: Modern Combat, whether the scenarios are fantastic or grittily realistic, the arts of war are represented and celebrated.

But we should be aware that this link between digital gaming and the military is more than just the latest expression of an enduring human tradition, or the populist instinct of a highly commercial sector. These links are explicit, current and increasingly overt. As Heather Chaplin, co-author of Smart Bomb, a new book on the games industry, says: "I spent four years walking into the offices of upper-echelon games developers, and can't think of one who hadn't accepted an invitation to work for the CIA, the FBI or the Department of Defence. It is amazing how willing the people in the industry are to give their talents and time to military purposes."

Figures detailing the success of America's Army were presented at the summit - sponsored by the US army - in Washington last month, and as one journalist put it, "the army's experiment in serious gaming is starting to look like a franchise".

As industry veterans will readily tell you, games don't get to be a franchise if the gameplay isn't very good. America's Army is the result of an intense embrace between the best talents of the game business and the recruitment and training imperatives of a military superpower. In addition, the Department of Defence has spent $100m creating an entire campus, the Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of California, which turns games intended for soldier training into marketable products: Full Spectrum Warrior is the most notable example. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) - the US government's powerful military laboratory - has a range of projects that blur the line between online gaming, virtual worlds and military performance, employing counter-culture game gurus such as JC Herz, the New York Times' first videogames critic.

Military roots

But this should not be so surprising. Computer games, like any hi-tech industry, have roots in military technology: there is a direct line from the first air force radar screen to today's pixellated hyper-real images. The first videogames were made in the 50s and 60s, by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) funded by the Department of Defence. Until the mid-90s, the department was funding its own, clunky, game tools such as Simnet (for training tank drivers).

But people such as Mike Zyda, a computing pioneer who was a co-creator of America's Army and is now director of the University of Southern California's Viterbi School of Engineering's GamePipe Laboratory, noted some time ago how compelling games were becoming - in terms of realistic graphics, inventive brio and sheer cost-effectiveness. His 1997 paper, Linking Entertainment and Defense, gave the initial rationale. A meeting in 1999 between four-star general Paul Kern and the head of Disney's Imagineering division Bran Ferren lit the policy spark.

The spark has started a fire that has burned through the industry, and few seem untouched by some degree of military service provision. As Chaplin says, younger gamemakers' sanguinity in the face of this is worth some comment. She profiles the designer Will Wright, responsible for seemingly thoughtful and relationship-based games such as SimCity and The Sims, and who is about to launch the new god game Spore. Yet Wright turns up for meetings sporting his CIA-embroidered flight jacket, a thank-you for work he did for the agency.

The chapter closes with Wright accepting the "fun" challenge from Darpa to create a robot car that could drive to Las Vegas by itself. Why did he think it was sponsoring the event? "Well, I think that should be pretty obvious," says Wright. "They want to be able to build land-based cruise missiles."

So why is the US computer games industry, as compared to, say, music, movies or television, so explicitly gung-ho?

Partly it is the lure of "problem-solving" projects for a class of digital expert. They are so compelled by the challenges that they bracket out any distracting context, often involving wider ethical or political questions. Steven Johnson's recent book Everything Bad Is Good For You made a case for the cognitive benefits of computer games. Though the content may be violent, the mental gymnastics involved in negotiating these complex worlds had to be recognised, and not demonised, he argued.

What's intriguing is that this is exactly what senior military games people such as Jeff Wilkinson, a program manager at the US army's Simulation & Training Technology Center, want. In return for their investment, they want a higher level of cognitive performance. "We are frequently looking for 'first-person thinker' environments and not 'first-person shooter' environments," says Wilkinson. "This provides a significant opportunity for gamemakers to focus their resources in new ways." He says the benefits of investment will accrue mostly to education, not entertainment. Science-fiction vision

Chaplin quotes Michael Macedonia, a major mover in army simulation circles, recommending the visions of science-fiction writers such as Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, a novel in which six-year-olds unknowingly fight remote wars through their gaming consoles.

Greg Costikian, a designer who recently left Nokia to start his own company, Manifesto Games, is agnostic about the relationship between games and the military. But unlike many, he has a strong opinion on America's Army. "Given that we have a volunteer military, the military needs to recruit. And if it's legitimate for them to use TV and print advertising, what's wrong with doing so through a game?"

This position is shared by Sheldon Pacotti, the scriptwriter for the forthcoming America's Army console game, Rise of a Soldier. His experience on AA, working closely with special forces soldiers, was that their "nuanced ideas about the role of an outside military force" in foreign interventions was much more subtle than the understanding of either American politicians or citizens. "The truth about terrorism," Pacotti told me, "is that it is much more complex than any plot you could dream up for a game or any other type of entertainment. The virtue of Rise of a Soldier is that it doesn't set out to demonise the enemies, their culture, or their worldview."

The gamemakers have a point: we shouldn't automatically damn each product that bears a military title, given that the actual gameplay may be subtler than the blood'n'guts marketing. And it's not as if there isn't a small counter-movement in the game sector.

The same Washington conference sponsored by the US army featured serious games that were about non-violent conflict resolution in the Middle East, and distribution of food by the United Nations. And the rise of modding and machinima allows a wider and more subtle range of world-view and aesthetics, hopefully similar to independent movies and music.

But Heather Chaplin was inspired to write Smart Bomb from the anthropologists' old saw: show me the games of your children, and I will show you the next hundred years. "Maybe there are people who are not frightened by the idea of an increasingly militarised culture. But I am."

· Pat Kane is the author of The Play Ethic: A Manifesto for a Different Way of Living. For more information, visit www.theplayethic.typepad.com

· If you'd like to comment on any aspect of Technology Guardian, send your emails to tech@theguardian.com