Many gamers, however — no matter their politics — subscribe to a McLuhanesque notion that only the form, and never the content, of this medium is of significance. Video games, in this view, are about problem-solving and game play, the captivating, kinetic interaction between the movements a player makes on a controller and the simultaneous action on-screen. And it’s surely true that Medal of Honor’s game play will determine whether it is a best seller or a bust. “Whether this is set on Afghanistan or set on the moon, it doesn’t really matter,” Geoff Keighley, a video-game journalist who hosts a show on Spike TV, told me. Will Wright, the designer of games like SimCity and The Sims, has seemed to embrace this view, saying that games are about agency (the ability to navigate a virtual world), not empathy (relating emotionally to the particulars of that world). But in many ways, the main project of the past several years among video-game developers has been to try to prove Will Wright wrong. Maybe the agency that games allow can, in the hands of the right storytellers, lead to empathy. Maybe the interactive nature of video games can, when combined with narrative elements like story and character, evoke feelings in players in a way that is unique to the medium.

After all, the video gamers who choose to play military shooters typically take the fictional elements of these games quite seriously. A survey conducted by Joel Penney, a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, found that these gamers viewed their chosen pastime as something more than simple escapism or problem-solving exercises with good sound effects. The players — adults mostly between ages 18 and 29 (though some were in their 50s), largely Americans and almost all men — said playing the World War II versions of Medal of Honor or Call of Duty made them feel empathy for their countrymen. One wrote that, after playing the games, his “feelings have deepened in respect for those who have died.”

Greg Goodrich told me that the “holy grail” of his medium was to get game play and fiction to interact in such a way that the fusion of the two would affect players in ways that movies and books cannot. “I think you have the potential to touch them in a more emotional and engaging way because they took part in it,” he said. Penney’s study suggests that military shooters, by grounding their stories in the lived experiences of American soldiers, have had more success in this realm than their designers are given credit for. Feeling empathy for real soldiers fighting in foreign wars is not the same as feeling it toward fictional characters, but without being moved by the fiction in these games, it’s hard to see how players were subsequently moved to feel more humanely toward their fellow citizens.

At the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century, video games are taken more seriously as a form of entertainment than ever before, even by the priests of high culture. Nicholson Baker recently wrote in The New Yorker that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 might be “truer, realer than almost all war movies.” Junot Diaz cheerfully reviewed Grand Theft Auto IV — the kind of game that once provoked a moral panic with every sequel — in The Wall Street Journal a couple of years ago. And in The London Review of Books last year, John Lanchester called the first Modern Warfare game, published in 2007, “more involving” than the Hollywood movies with which it might be compared. “The next decade or so is going to see the world of video games convulsed by battles between the moneymen and the artists,” Lanchester wrote. “If the good guys win, or win enough of the time, we’re going to have a whole new art form.”

But the feeling among many video-game players is that the artists lost an important skirmish a little more than a year ago. In April 2009, the video game Six Days in Fallujah was canceled by its Japanese publisher, Ko­nami, in the very same month that the game’s development was announced to the public. Six Days in Fallujah had been billed as an “interactive documentary” about the second battle of Fallujah in 2004. In addition to working with actual Marines who fought in Fallujah, the game’s developers said they were talking to Iraqis who lived through the battle — both civilians and insurgents.

Peter Tamte, the president of Atomic Games, the North Carolina-based studio that was developing Six Days in Fallujah for Ko­nami before it was canceled, told me this summer that “the heart of the controversy that caused Konami to pull out of the project” was the combination of “the stereotypes that are associated with the word ‘game’ and the incompatibility of that with the word ‘Iraq.’ ”

Read Omohundro, the captain of a Marine company that fought in Fallujah, served as a consultant on the game. “It’s very important to have the enemy’s perspective of what’s going on,” he told me. “You have to understand the environment, and if you just see it from the American viewpoint, that’s all you know.”