Unlike most of the people that you will have heard arguing about Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, I have actually played some of the game. Last night I played through the already notorious ‘airport’ level, in which your protagonist is obliged to take part in a bloody massacre in order to infiltrate a Russian terrorist cell.

I completely understand why that episode has been included. It, for one thing, validates the sustained campaign of violence that you’re about to undertake against ‘Markov’ and his terrorist militia.

I’m not a desensitised teenager who has known no culture but videogames. I was born 15 years after the end of the Second World War, growing up in a London that still bore some scars of bombardment by the Luftwaffe. The world of young boys at the time was filled with stories of derring-do from that war.

Films starring John Mills and Richard Todd, or the seemingly endless series of Commando Picture Library comics presented that war as a particularly fierce game. The prevalent idea was that a sense of fair play prevailed among the Allied forces and even the German adversaries were characterised as essentially decent chaps spoiled by the odd rotten Nazi apple.

Modern Warfare 2: complete news, reviews and comment roundup

First day sales of new video game set to be 40% above previous record, but controversy persists over its use of violence

BACKGROUND

• Violent video games won’t corrupt

• Modern Warfare 2: Brutal and brilliant

• Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 premiere report

• Modern Warfare 2: war is not a game

Times Archive, 1985: Video nasties blamed for violence

Video machines 'leading children to re-enact scenes of violence'

• Four out of ten children 'have seen video nasties'

• Video nasties leave MPs reeling with horror

I don’t believe that war is like that at all. I believe that it’s a vile, brutal business in which people do terrible evils on our behalf, because not to do those evils would be worse.

Countless unarmed non-combatants were killed in World War Two but we still remember it as a ‘just’ war.

When Churchill and Roosevelt posed for smiling photos with Stalin they knew that they were taking tea with a mass murderer. They needed him onside in order to defeat another, worse one.

When the order was given to raze Dresden, or Hiroshima, I don’t doubt that every single person in the chain of command wrestled with his or her conscience. But those operations went ahead. And the war ended in 1945. Were it not for those operations, and for many other morally dubious operations like them, no one can say how much longer the war would have continued, or how many more lives would have been lost.

War is a filthy, violent business in which all notion of morality must be suspended if victory is to be certain. Games and films that depict war should be no less brutal.

In my gaming life I have dropped a nuclear bomb on Korea, led a squadron of bombers over the Rhineland and even destroyed a huge ring-shaped future world with millions of inhabitants. The games in question were all rated 15 and excited no great national debate. Because the killing of non-combatants in these games was all at arm’s length it was seen as more acceptable.

I believe that the grisly imagery of the Modern Warfare 2 level ‘No Russian’ will teach more that it corrupts. I don’t doubt that when the next Columbine or Virginia Tech massacre occurs some commenters will inevitably try to link it with Modern Warfare, but simulated guns don’t kill people, real ones do. The NRA bears more responsibility than Infinity Ward.

Thankfully, the last few generations of young men in the western world have grown to adulthood without the certainty of war in their lives. Nevertheless, the atavistic need to prove oneself in combat persists. I suspect that it may be an essential part of our nature.

Online tournaments such as Counter Strike or Modern Warfare tap that need, but it's right that they should depict the savage realities of conflict as accurately as the technology allows. To pretty it up would tempt us to forget that in order to preserve civilisation, it is often necessary to suspend it.

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