I have spent long years beneath the glow of screens that once seemed to me a kind of second sky. From the closing months of the last century until the present hour I have watched the great conflicts of the twentieth century unfold again and again upon the cinema, and I have followed their descendants into the speculative realms of alien invasion. I have sat through the mud and wire of the First World War, the industrial slaughter of the Second, the shadowed manoeuvres of the Cold War, and the fragmented theatres of more recent decades. I have also watched the sky darken with non-human adversaries in films such as Edge of Tomorrow and The Tomorrow War. Parallel to these images I have lived another life entirely, one measured in the hours of Call of Duty, Battlefield, and Counter-Strike. For more than twenty years I moved through those digital landscapes with a sense of belonging that felt almost instinctive. Only lately have I begun to understand how thoroughly those landscapes shaped me, and how little they prepared me for the weight of actual consequence.
The Cinema of Conflict
I remember the first time a war film held me completely. The carefully composed chaos of the battlefield, the sudden silences after explosion, the close attention paid to a single wound—these things registered upon me with an intensity that ordinary life rarely matched. Historical films gave me the grammar of organised violence; speculative films expanded that grammar into the realm of the absolute. When the enemy was no longer merely human but something wholly other, the moral landscape simplified. I felt, while watching, a clean and uncomplicated readiness. The soldier on the screen appeared to me an embodiment of purpose, and I, seated safely in the dark, shared in that purpose without cost.
I did not then ask what the camera chose to omit. The long convalescence, the bureaucratic attrition, the statistical anonymity of the fallen—these remained outside the frame. The films offered me spectacle and a measure of emotional clarity, and I accepted both without suspicion. In the science-fiction war stories the same pattern held, only magnified. The defence of the species against an invasive force conferred upon every action a dignity that ordinary conflict could seldom claim. I absorbed that dignity as though it were my own.
Two Decades in the Digital Trenches
The games completed what the films had begun. From 1999 onward I entered the first-person and tactical shooters with a regularity that eventually became habit. I learned the recoil of virtual rifles, the geometry of cover, the timing of reloads, the language of squads. Call of Duty taught me the rhythm of modern engagements; Battlefield showed me the scale of combined arms; Counter-Strike demanded precision and patience under the pressure of limited resources. I grew skilled within those rule-sets. I took pride in that skill. The virtual barracks became familiar ground. Death was temporary. Injury was cosmetic. Glory was quantifiable and endlessly renewable.
I did not notice, at first, how thoroughly the games cultivated a particular self-conception. The repeated assumption of the role of capable operator, the accumulation of successful engagements, the quiet satisfaction of a clean tactical solution—these experiences layered upon one another until they formed a kind of internal posture. I began to think of myself, without fully articulating the thought, as someone who understood combat. The understanding was, of course, bounded by the screen. Yet the feeling of competence was real enough to shape my waking imagination.
Research I have since encountered suggests that prolonged engagement with such simulations can produce measurable changes in physiological response and in the readiness of aggressive cognition. Other studies note a gradual desensitisation to images of real harm. Still others, examining veterans who continue to play after returning from actual service, describe a more ambiguous relationship in which the games sometimes soothe and sometimes reopen wounds. My own experience aligns most closely with the longer arc of cultivation. Over twenty years the virtual environment did not merely entertain me; it instructed me in a particular vision of capability and consequence.
The Awakening
Then, slowly, the instruction began to reverse itself. I cannot name a single day when the change occurred. I know only that the same images that once quickened my pulse began to produce a different sensation—one closer to dread. The thought of a genuine global conflict, whether framed as a conventional third world war or as the kind of extraterrestrial invasion I had so often watched, no longer arrived as an opportunity for self-realisation. It arrived as a threat I wished, if possible, to avoid.
I found myself confronting a simple and uncomfortable truth. If conscription came, I would likely comply not out of enthusiasm but out of the desire to avoid the penalties of refusal. The earlier romance of the uniform dissolved into a more practical calculation of constraint. At the same time I discovered a physical aversion I had not previously acknowledged. Authentic images of open wounds, of uncontrolled bleeding, of irreversible injury, produced in me a nausea that the stylised violence of games and films had never triggered. The disparity between simulated and actual corporeality became impossible to ignore.
I began to understand that the life of a soldier is not primarily a question of honour or glory. It is a question of survival under conditions that continually undermine individual agency. Even the most skilled combatant remains vulnerable to a single misjudged movement, a moment of fatigue, a random fragment of metal travelling through air. Competence improves the odds; it does not abolish contingency. That realisation stripped away the last of the comfortable fiction I had carried for so long—the quiet belief that I would prove an exceptional soldier should the need arise.
Dreams and the Weight of Depression
The internal landscape that accompanied this recognition proved turbulent. I began to dream repeatedly of dying. Sometimes the death came by gunfire in landscapes that resembled the games I had played. Sometimes I drowned. Sometimes I fell from height. The dreams often carried within them older memories of powerlessness, of childhood bullying, of moments when the body had been made to feel fragile. Sleep ceased to restore me. The boundary between waking apprehension and nocturnal terror grew thin.
I sought medical help. Medication was prescribed to address the persistent low mood, the fatigue, the sense of being ground down by the sheer effort of remaining upright. The treatment dulls certain edges; it does not erase the underlying exhaustion. I move through days that feel longer than they should, carrying a weariness that seems to have settled into the bones.
Reflections on Delusion
I see now that the conviction of my own potential excellence was a form of self-deception, sustained by years of consequence-free practice. Skill within a rule-bound simulation does not confer resilience under conditions of genuine physical threat, incomplete information, and irreversible outcome. The recognition is humbling. It forces me to reassess the enthusiasms of earlier decades and to measure more carefully the distance between the person I imagined myself to be and the person I actually am.
Yet the same capacity for reflection that reveals the delusion also offers a possible redirection. The vivid content of the dreams, the accumulated imagery of two decades of mediated warfare, the private cinema of fear and competence—these things constitute a reservoir of material. I have begun to consider whether they might be shaped into narrative form, whether the internal dramas might be externalised and offered to others. The prospect of writing a serial story drawn from these sources is not primarily commercial, though any small return would be welcome. It is, more simply, an attempt to impose sequence and coherence upon experiences that have until now remained chaotic. The act of writing itself may provide a different kind of mastery from the one I once sought in virtual combat.
I came close, at one point, to entering an military institutional path that would have imposed its own rigid constraints upon my days. Fortune, or inertia, kept me outside that structure. I remain, by many ordinary measures, unsuccessful and without steady employment. That status once felt chiefly like failure. I am beginning to read it also as the preservation of a self that has not yet been fully absorbed into systems of command and obedience. The latitude is precarious, but it is still mine.
Toward Another Kind of Narrative
I do not reject entirely the long apprenticeship. The technical familiarity with tactics, the visual literacy of conflict imagery, the intimate acquaintance with the emotional grammar of fear and competence—these retain potential value when turned toward different ends. My task is no longer to prepare for an imaginary mobilisation. It is to examine, with as much honesty as I can muster, the ways in which media shape expectation and the subsequent collision of those expectations with the unyielding facts of mortality and vulnerability.
The screens that once promised empowerment have, after twenty years, delivered a more exacting education in human limitation. That education arrived late and at a cost I continue to pay in restless nights and medicated days. Yet it is not without its own austere clarity. Survival, I have learned, is never guaranteed by skill alone. The true measure of any engagement—virtual or actual—lies less in the glory it confers than in the honesty it eventually forces upon the one who has participated. I am still learning how to live with that honesty.
Tags
Military