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 KalashnikovMarine wrote:
My point here is reality doesn't make for much of a game, it's why soldiers and Marines play video games in our off time. It's fun.

Straight up retellings of life aren't very entertaining, yeah. But our games and movies can be made more entertaining, and more important when they include elements of real life in them. That's why we have FPS with highly detailed combat environments and enemy soldiers, instead of just running around a wireframe maze trying to shoot enemies represented by abstract blue squares - because part of the entertainment is about having some level of pretend about being in a real world situation.

The trick then, is to inject that realism so that it improves the game, without ruining it elsewhere. So, as you and others have already pointed out, just having a straight up telling of a soldiers experience would suck (the old line about months of boredome and seconds of sheer terror), but that doesn't mean you can't include some elements of realism in the game, as long as you do it with smart game design. Just changes to the ending would be minor, but could change how players approach the game. As pointed out this has already been done in games, just not in war games.


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 dogma wrote:
Mass Effect 2 springs to mind (Mass Effect 3 didn't end), as do Alpha Protocol and the KoToR games.

Yeah, exactly. It could be potentially interesting to do it with a wargame.