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Isn't one of the big 3D shooters Delta vs terrorists and you can play either side?

One of the things people don't understand about gaming is the escapist element. most gaming of the modern era (and I'm talking paper and pencil stuff like RPGs as well as video games) is escapist in nature. You play games to do things you can't do in reality, whether because it's illegal, moral reprehensible, not physically possible, or you just weren't born at the right time depends on the game itself, but the core concept is still there. Nobody is learning behavior from games, at least nobody sane, they are rebelling against learned behavior, and doing the rebellion in a contained and safe way where it can't harm anyone because it's unreal. When a GTA player takes his car up to 100 MPH and hops onto the sidewalk he isn't running over people he's running over pixels, nobody gets hurt, no fossil fuels are burned, no paint scratched, no insurance rates climb.

In a society with fewer and fewer opportunities to live "outside the box" (could anyone live the life of Hemmingway now) we have created a box to get into where people can pretend and escape the larger box of life.