While recent years have seen the options for enemy locales broadened, vaguely Middle Eastern settings have been a mainstay in combat-oriented video games for decades. Iraq alone features in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Battlefield 3, and Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Blacklist, among others. Clearly, it’s not much of a stretch to suggest that games may have played an ideological role in promoting the war on terror. However, the connection is much deeper than it may first appear.

As detailed by Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter in Games of Empire, the very first video games were created by workers in America’s vast military-industrial complex. During the 1950s, instead of spending their time using computer hardware to plot missile trajectories, workers found ways to reprogram them to play games. This started early — a primitive blackjack game was developed in 1954 at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, home to the Manhattan Project, on an IBM 701 weighing in at more than ten tons.

It wasn’t long before the top brass spotted the potential. In the 1960s, games were developed to simulate nuclear war, particularly after the Cuban Missile Crisis. The role of war gaming itself, of course, dates to the nineteenth century. But digital games provide a way to achieve the same ends at scale and at a much lower cost. Unlike other forms of military training, simulations and video games work as a powerful ideological tool that can be used to promote militarism more widely. Look no further than America’s Army — financed by the Pentagon and developed using the popular Unreal Engine, it was distributed for free on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, specifically as a recruiting tool.