On March 5, whoever runs the official X account of the White House went on yet another posting spree—sharing short videos in which footage from the war in Iran was entwined with scenes from sports, movies, television and video games. A now-deleted post spliced a clip from the popular video game series “Call of Duty” with visuals of American missiles being launched at Iranian sites. The video posted on X included small text displaying “+100” points each time a missile made contact with a real-life Iranian target. Subtlety is not the Trump administration’s strong suit.

The post was one of many with references to video games and gamer culture, and the war in Iran is not the first time that the Trump administration has borrowed video game references for its messaging. In October, an image of Master Chief, the protagonist of the “Halo” series, aiming a weapon was posted on the Department of Homeland Security’s X account with the text “Destroy the Flood” over JOIN.ICE.GOV. The Flood, clearly equated here with undocumented migrants, is a parasitic lifeform in the video game.

The administration knows what it is doing. “We’re over here just grinding away on banger memes, dude,” a senior White House official said to Politico. “There’s an entertainment factor to what we do…. No one has ever attempted to communicate with the American public this way before.” But we should ask why no administration has attempted this before. 

In a statement on March 9 that included broader opposition to the Iran war, Cardinal Blase Cupich of the Archdiocese of Chicago noted such memes and said, “A real war with real death and real suffering being treated like it’s a video game—it’s sickening.” (Pope Leo XIV echoed Cardinal Cupich a few days later, urging journalists to cover war “through the eyes of the victims so as not to turn it into a video game.”)

Cardinal Cupich is getting at something more than just another moral panic about video games. Beyond being crude and juvenile internet propaganda, the Trump administration’s posts hint at a deeper connection between video games and the desensitizing features of modern warfare.

That connection works on (at least) three levels: military recruitment, the actual techniques of war and the process of desensitizing the public to violence. It’s easy to see how the Trump administration appeals to potential recruits by tapping into imagery from games like “Grand Theft Auto” that connect violence to excitement and entertainment. But the meme-generating habits of the Trump administration (see this absurd “Wii Sports” edit that equates missile strikes with getting a “hole in one” in a children’s golf game) do not mark the beginning of this phenomenon.

The military has had a cozy relationship with the massive video game industry since the latter’s inception. Video games, as was the case for many consumer electronics of the 20th century, originated from military technology developed during World War II; and from early on, the military saw potential in them not only for combat training but also for recruitment propaganda and for habituating potential recruits to warfare that is increasingly conducted through video screens.

In the early 2000s, the U.S. Army developed a free-to-play tactical shooter game series called “America’s Army” in which players could access goarmy.com and provide contact information to recruiters. The game featured painstaking detail in weaponry but neglected to realistically depict blood and gore, thus sanitizing the violence of war. Today, the Army has an official e-sports team that explicitly serves as a recruitment tool. 

In some ways, warfare actually is coming to mirror video games, bringing us to the second use of video games: training. Virtual reality training simulators allow armies to better prepare soldiers in controlled settings for the shocks of active conflict. But drone technology also allows soldiers to engage enemies from far away, and soldiers sometimes use actual Xbox controllers to pilot them. 

Cheap drones have had an additional gamifying effect on the war in Ukraine. In October, The New York Times reported that Ukrainian officials have devised a contest that rewards soldiers for successful drone kills with points that they can spend on lethal military equipment through an internal online market exchange called Brave1 Market.

Here is Cardinal Pablo Virgilio David, the vice president of the Federation of Asian Bishops’ Conferences, on the state of warfare in 2026: “From distant command centers, military operators stare at screens where maps, radar signals, and algorithm-generated targets move like icons in a computer game. A cursor moves. A coordinate is selected. A click is made. And a missile is launched” (emphasis added).

This brings us to the third function: Familiarity with video games prepares the public to consume media coverage of warfare in a desensitized manner. Cardinal Cupich alluded to this in his recent comments: “We now live in an era when the distance between the battlefield and the living room has been drastically reduced…. The moral crisis we are facing is not just a matter of the war itself, but also how we, the observers, view violence, for war now has become a spectator sport or strategy game.”

Video games frequently depict a highly kinetic version of war: rapid gunfights in which players live out power fantasies, or one-man-army infiltration missions into enemy bases as a stealthy supersoldier. No reasonable person would take these scenarios as an accurate representation of war, but these games encourage us to see war through the lens of entertainment—even when we see graphic war footage on our phones, consumed and scrolled past in seconds.

The resulting desensitization is an asset in an era when war often has no visible end point. Modern warfare has become endemic. Terrorism campaigns can flare up and die down rather than reach a definite conclusion. Great powers mix physical combat operations with nontraditional methods like cyber attacks, bringing warfare closer to civilian life even as it is more mediated by technology. This combination of desensitization and technological mediation makes war easier to ignore, despite our constant awareness of it in the background of daily life.

Pope Francis noted that drone warfare is one of the primary fronts on which we can recognize the desensitizing effects of digital technologies: “The ability to conduct military operations through remote control systems has led to a lessened perception of the devastation caused by those weapon systems and the burden of responsibility for their use, resulting in an even more cold and detached approach to the immense tragedy of war.”

Was the pope saying to throw away your son’s Xbox? Not really. Sometimes it seems that video games have contributed to wars that last longer and are more lethal, but there are many examples of video games that present a more nuanced view of warfare and grow rather than limit our moral imagination. 

In fact, video games hold underappreciated potential as an art form, introducing the sphere of interactivity as another space for creative expression and learning. There are also many beautiful, nonviolent games that explore the human condition and intentionally use gameplay to invite critical reflection from the player.

It may be impossible to tell a true war story, but games like “Spec Ops: The Line”—a third-person shooter game that adapts Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to the context of American intervention in the Middle East, just as “Apocalypse Now” did for the Vietnam War—capitalize on the unique capacity of video games as a medium to deliver powerful reflections on war, empire and violence. “Spec Ops” flips the conventions of war games on their head, revealing at the end that the player character has been “the bad guy” the whole time and slowly drifted into insanity as he became mired in the horrors of an entrenched forever war.

A future president who, unlike Mr. Trump, has fluency with digital entertainment may be able to see through the graphics and perceive war clearly enough to resist it. But when missile strikes are edited like highlight reels, war begins to feel less like a human catastrophe and more like another stream of content. Our political leaders must face the catastrophe of war directly, and not become numb to their own memes.

[Read next: “Cardinals McElroy and Cupich denounce Iran war: ‘War now has become a spectator sport.’”]

Edward Desciak is an O'Hare Fellow at America Media.