I'm going to propose a rather odd idea to you, and it's one I've been thinking deeply about since I realised the last person to actually shoot a Nazi officer was probably my grandfather.
With videogames, as with every industry, inspiration for an original idea is something that's fairly hard to come by, when you consider that everything that could be done, has already indeed been done. We have everything from elves to spaceships to Italian plumbers chasing turtles through a kingdom of omnipresent fungi, and there is no real inspiration anymore bar what has come before.
However, with games based on real events, there doesn't need to be. You can take a small battle that lasted a few weeks in WWII, and turn it into a ten to fifteen hour campaign for someone to run, jump and shoot through until they're satisfied at the 1000 G mark. But is that really escapism? Surely one of the main reasons we play videogames is to escape, as it were, the monotony of everyday existence, to become orcs, and superheroes. But to apply an inherent aspect of verisimilitude to a videogame's narrative events and the logic in the game-world itself is a bizarre concept for a Friday night experience with a curry and a controller.
The Call of Duty titles do what they say on the back of the box - it's a war game, you're a soldier, and you're fighting the good fight against various historical antagonists from a variety of viewpoints. This all checks out, but where it stumbles is the concept that people will actually want to sit down and have a war played out for them that, in reality, cost around fifty-six million people their lives. But we don't see the concentration camps, the slavery; all the true horrors of war are gone, and we banish the reminders of the Nazi regime with a gentle squeeze of the right trigger.
It could feasibly be argued that these are wars we should draw attention to, that the developer is by no means glamorising war any more than George Lucas glamorises leather and lightsaber violence. But this is besides the point: regardless of whether or not the violence itself is presented as inherently glamorised, are the massed narrative events breaking the fourth wall? I think about history and how all of this could have been avoided while playing Call of Duty and charging into the Normandy beach landing, but at the same time, I simply enjoy the narrative based around guerilla warfare and the anti-government subtext so present throughout Final Fantasy VII. Why are they different? Because Normandy is a short EasyJet trip away, and Midgar isn't.
Sometimes it's feasible to wonder that if war is not an escapist topic, what about games like GTA IV, that glamorise the concept of theft and homicide by placing the player in the position of a protagonist who happens to be the perpetrator of said crimes? Personally, I don't feel that this works in the same way, simply because Liberty City, for all its references to New York, isn't a real place, and Niko Bellic isn't a real person.
Arguably, neither are the protagonists in COD 4: Modern Warfare. But the events are real, and for me that breaks a lot of the boundaries I need to have in place in order to immerse myself in a universe that needs to feel created and not simply copied from historical blueprints. Imagine Oblivion as a reworked Cantebury Tales, with you as Chaucer. No swords, no magic, no lizard-people. Just you, Middle England, and the world's most confusing dialogue. Certainly an engaging experience for the brilliant narratives inherent in the various poems in the Cantebury Tales themselves, but still too realistic to drag your soul out of reality and deposit it in a world where fire is something that can be shot out of the hand, not from flamethrowers.
To summarise, I don't believe in escapism in videogames when it comes to something based around an existing historical event. Sure, you could work in some narrative based around fictional characters designed to make the wheels turn and progress the story between one historical event and another, but the main bulk of the story and the key plot events are still real. I think the only historically based game you're ever going to find some degree of escapist experience in is one based in North Korea, and that's simply because developers with cameras, sketchbooks and mo-cap isn't something that'll happen there anytime soon.
