Games are just for fun, right? Wrong. In this two-part feature, we reveal how games are actually being used by the US military to train Marines to kill.
Emma Parkinson

"Take me seriously," you scream. "Why won't you take me seriously? These games that I play, well, they're not just games. They're... they're... Oh, look, they're games, okay? But they're more than that. They're a way of life. They transport me to a new world. They teach me skills that I might otherwise never learn. They give me experiences that I might never have. When else am I going to build a rollercoaster, fly a spaceship, torture barbarians until they scream like babies, kill the best-trained soldiers in the world...?"

Fed up with people not understanding your reasons for playing games? Mortified every time you hear another ill-informed member of the Moral Majority blame the ills of modern society on the "menace of videogames"? Got a local MP who's convinced that Wolfenstein is the cause of every child born out of wedlock for the last 27 years, and that videogames will never become more dangerous than this? Well, it's time to take the detractors of videogames seriously. Forget all the hype about gaming being a part of modern society, a harmless diversion that will soon be part of everyone's life, and face facts. Videogames are being used to train people to kill, and right now in the USA they're being used to train some of the most efficient killers of them all - the United States Marines.

But it's not necessarily the games you might expect. Though the present Marine project arose from a modification of id Software's early blood-fest Doom II, the Leathernecks aren't wasting their days racing around the corridors of Half-Life or the arenas of Quake III, up to their armpits in gore. Instead they're turning to more tactical pursuits and are just as likely to be found engrossed in the latest Sid Meier epic as they are swinging across an assault course, battering imaginary Commies.