After reading three articles today about the same thing, War in video-games is it becoming to transparent or is it all fun in games? I must wonder whats the answer to that question?  As a video game player for all my life i was raised with mainly nintendo franchises. Donkey Kong, Mario, etc. I would always just run through the game and never question what it is i was doing. Stage after stage i would complete the levels jump on the goombas, or birds.  
 
Flash forward to now im mainly a Sony, or Microsoft console player. After looking into my past the reason may have been maybe i was to young to question what i was doing. But now in games today I constantly question why i am completing the actions i am presented with. In Call of Duty in order to complete the level I have to murder countless soldiers for no other reason to get past the certain checkpoint in question.  This certainly in Real life would not be the situation. But in video games it most certainly is 99% of the time. Why is this? Why can i not sneak past them and complete the level without murdering anybody. If we look at the airport level in COD MW2 we had a choice: Kill or not. Being who i am i choose not to kill a single person. This was a great step to let me choose but it still had the same outcome weather i killed them or not. But the designers did not take it far enough in my opinion. Why could i not stop this situation. Why could i not shoot the terrorist before they even started? This situation could have been stopped there was no other choice either stop the terrorist or do not. Why would the developer not let me decide. This would have resinated more with me and many others if they let us make this choice. They put you in the situation were you need to make a decision on the fly that is either gonna make you become a murderer or a observer of a massacre.  This is what real soldiers have to do everyday. Not kill everybody in the vicinity. 
 
Now lets look at MGS. In Metal Gear Solid Kojima has always given you the choice of either kill or not. Which i enjoy, he is letting the player proceed through the game in any fashion they so choose. For example I always play these games as the espionage type. I never kill anybody unless the game makes the choice weather i am or not going to have to. Being the player i am, i remember one specific situation in MGS:snake eater were I was going through a room and accidentally shot a man with the Tranquilizer gun and he fell onto an electric wire. I was devastated, i literally felt like i just ended this guys life that may have had a family. Call me what you will but this is how i felt. This is how i feel in any game that lets me decide if i want to kill or not. I always choose the option of not killing.  
 
Why is it that developers think us so close minded that they make us kill so many people that it makes war or violence become transparent? Do they think we can not make our own decisions or is it easier for them to just make a game every year that they choose one way and thats it? Trivializing war is not where i want this industry to go. We all saw what happened to 6 Days in Fallujah. It never got the chance to prove itself. Why not? The industry is so tied to games like COD, or Battlefield that when a game that questions these ingrained ways of making games it fails because of what? If you never give something a chance how is it suppose to succeed?  
 
This industry has a lot of growing pains to go through but i have hope that the indie side will make developers see that games do not only have to be about war and violence. Or maybe they will see that we can choose our own way of accomplishing the task at hand without having to murder millions of people.