As a child growing up in the 1970s, the imagery of the Second World War hung around in popular culture in ways that seems extraordinary now. There were Battle comics and war films on the telly, and later on as an adolescent the unbelievably violent novels of Sven Hassell, as well as nasty comics full of the horrors of the Russian Front. It all seems rather sad now, a painful hangover from a dreadful war.

I found my old toy soldiers, howitzers and tanks in the attic. I’d spent hours painting the American jeeps, Japanese officer figures, and German grenadiers. I wondered if a nephew might like them and then I realised that such a gift was a historical embarrassment, and in poor taste. I checked with my brother. He politely declined the gift, quite rightly wrinkling his nose. The toys of war are no longer suitable for small boys.

Yet the long shadow of the Second World War has hit our digital toys in a big way, creating huge video game franchises like Battlefield, Medal of Honour and Call of Duty. These games meet the seemingly inexhaustible demand for ways to experience killing at second hand. I’ve killed soldiers on the beaches at Normandy, I’ve killed soldiers in the battle for Stalingrad, and currently I’m killing modern soldiers in Call of Duty 4. This game pushes the boundaries of video game realism, trying to capture the sweaty terror of the modern battlefield, its dubious moral certainties, its incredible noise, confusion and horror. It gives a generation that will probably never fight a chance to see virtual action.

Why does all this virtual death and destruction seem so unremarkable when my little plastic toy soldiers seem so obviously tasteless and crude? Adolescents play these war games with unbelievable passion. If you go online you’ll find incredibly detailed strategy guides in which teenage players discuss the merits of different squad tactics, battlefield communications, choice and use of weapons. Online forums allow players to swap tips and tactics, rage against ‘campers’ who hole out and snipe from the sidelines, or scorn ‘pray and spray’ players who run around and get killed. The games companies employ real military advisors, experienced soldiers who’ve seen combat, to get all the details right. The military advisor for Call of Duty 4, one Hank Kiersy, (exactly the sort of leather-lunged, silver haired ex-soldier you’d expect), said with pride in a recent interview: “The game has reached that level of intensity that a weak gamer is going to soil himself."

So we have a huge industry designed to scare the hell out of its consumers, as they run around in incredibly rendered and beautifully scored visions of hell, in which soldiers blast away at each other and a second’s hesitation results in instant death. I love playing these games myself. The key word is in Mr Kiersy’s quote: “Intensity.” The experience of the modern video game, with 5.1 surround sound played on a HD Ready television is incredibly intense. You hear the footfall of someone creeping up beside you. Snow falls gently in the distance, making your rifle that much harder to aim. There is a strong sense of discovery, of being in a real place, and players discuss games maps as though they were entirely real: the bus in the middle of Bog, a level in the multiplayer version of Call of Duty 4, is as familiar to me as my own car.

Society is becoming less and less physical and more and more polite. Female virtues triumph. Violent crime and serious assaults are falling. Playground fights are viewed with alarm. I have friends who have been hauled into their child’s nursery because of some minor scuffle that a nursery teacher of my parent’s generation wouldn’t even have noticed, let alone taken formal action about. Yet at the same time, a huge tranche of the entertainment industry provides simulated combat experiences for male adolescents that recreate the horrors of war with incredible, fetishistic realism and violence.

It’s as though as our everyday lives soften, we yearn for ever harder virtual experiences. Some US soldiers in the Green Zone relax by playing video games which depict exactly the sort of violence that they’re exposed to on the streets of Baghdad. This makes sense as a sort of therapy, a working out of the violence they see everyday. What’s the excuse for the rest of us? It’s a truism of anthropology that all you need to do to understand a society’s future is look at the games its children are playing. Perhaps it’s because we are a nation at war, although it’s easy to forget this when conflict seems so far away and removed from our normal lives – so virtual. It seems our children haven’t forgotten.

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Michael Parsons, now editor of CNET.co.uk, spent five years working in Silicon Valley and worrying about technology. He can be reached at michael.parsons@cnet.com