The first sight that greets you at War Games, a new exhibition at London’s Imperial War Museum that bills itself as the UK’s first to examine the relationship between videogames and real-life conflict, doesn’t have anything to do with games. Rather, it’s a quick-cut montage of war films and television: flashes of Dunkirk, of The Hurt Locker, of Dad’s Army. “We wanted to set the scene by placing videogames within our broader cultural consumption of war,” curator Chris Cooper explains. “Why does war fascinate us so much? Why do we tell stories about war?”
That it starts this way is indicative of an introductory tone that
