Interesting video but it seemed a bit one-sided. There is so much generality that it seems like he’s trying to paint most games that include any sort of soldiers and warfare as recruitment paths completely hand waving huge swaths of games and communities that focus on milsim for its complex tactics and strategies.

I realize that’s what you’re pointing out in your comment here, that it’s not all under one umbrella but I watched that entire vid waiting for him to add actual context instead of correlating any attempt at realistic simulation as an attempt to build a vehicle that paints real life war as if it were a video game. He specifically says this in the video, about how modern day games try to paint real war as if it were just like a video game when in reality the chasing of simulating reality as accurately as possible to increase the complexity and difficulty to create harder challenges is essentially the exact opposite. Maintaining a gun and ammo is one thing, but what about managing hunger, hydration, bleeding, etc.

There is a bias in his position, you can see it when he mentions how playing a game that puts you in a gunship made him sick. This theme persists throughout the examples given for modern games with war/fighting. The framing here somewhat places these games in a sort of taboo, and thus those that play them.

I too have bias of course, but we aren’t being trained as monsters either. My friend and I play a lot of milsim games because to us it feels like the ultimate challenge, but neither of us have any interest in joining a military or even hurting anybody. Warfare is a part of life on earth, it’s not all a mil psyop.

Lastly, propaganda is everywhere and it always has been, this idea of promoting the image of The Soldier and a Just Fight is as old as time itself, I don’t know why in that video the framing is such that the modern era is so far divorced and more insidious feels out of sync with history