All image sources at the end of the post
Hello again and welcome to my weekly post, since Christmas I have not been too much pending community (but to share with my family) but I will write a new article before the end of the year, and it is something that I have wondered for several years, I love history and several of its most decisive points are precisely in the wars, so I decided to make this post about the war video games and how (some) help us to understand more deeply the conflict and ourselves, humans. War video games are a popular form of entertainment that has been around for decades and has become very much a part of popular gaming culture. Although they are often criticized for their violence and for promoting militarism I believe they can be very useful for one thing in particular.
They can also be a valuable tool for reflecting on human history.
First of all, war video games are often based on real historical events, which means that they offer a rough representation of what happened in the past. This can be especially useful for those unfamiliar with history, as it allows them to experience firsthand what battles or living conditions were like in a certain time period. In addition, by playing these video games, players can experience first-hand the complexity and difficulty of making decisions in conflict situations, allowing them to better understand how and why certain historical decisions were made, as everything has its flaws, the normalization of violence and the natural gamification of video games can lead to unhealthy habits.
One of the examples that comes to mind at the moment is Call Of Duty, which started as a representation of the first world wars, its historical context and tried to be a representation as close as possible to the player but recent releases are more focused on its unrealistic gameplay and much less on history.
Secondly, war video games can also be useful in fostering empathy and understanding, at least in players with certain perspectives. By playing these games, players can put themselves in the shoes of people who lived in situations very different from those they themselves have experienced. This can help them better understand what other people's lives were like and how history has affected different groups of people in very different ways, there is an example that I love in this section and that is This War Of Mine, which is about a group of survivors in a technically modern war where it shows how critical a situation can be or something as normalized in western countries as access to water or food.
Thirdly, war video games can also be a useful tool to promote critical thinking and reflection, this point is something more general to video games, but when playing these games, players must constantly evaluate their strategy and make important decisions about how to proceed. This can help them to develop critical thinking skills and to reflect on their own decisions and their consequences, this point can also occur with the previous point, where knowing the context and the course of the story can help us to make decisions in our life.
Just a little essay I had planned, my favorite video games involve in one way or another the war and it would be nice to understand a little more that not everything is shooting and riding tanks, there are several games dedicated to explain the war and its consequences even in mainstream titles and surely playing some of them will give you a broader approach on what war means for human history.
I guess I'll leave one of those posts for next year, I'm exhausted from the holidays, I'm not going to lie when I say they haven't been the best, all my energies will be put in the next year and I hope to make more interesting content like this, until then... thanks for participating.
All yours, 
