The following story is based on real events. That’s the kind of quiet claim that might make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. Mostly it’s something reserved for films, but here it applies to a game, or rather, a real-world event that involved one.

I had just been shopping; getting an overpriced ink cartridge and then, partly out of boredom, a game. The Complete Battlefield: Modern Combat 2 Collection. I’d enjoyed Frontlines: Fuel of War, but my Xbox Live Subscription had ran out, and I fancied finding out how the whole sand ’n’ sandbox shooter sub-genre was popularised. You know the type of game: American Soldiers shoot it out with a vaguely Islamic enemy in open world, class-based gameplay depicting some war-torn Baghdad backlot. Modern Combat 2 was only ten pounds, and included all the Special Forces and European-themed expansion packs, so I knew I was getting my money’s worth. Back at the almost-empty station, waiting for the train to take me home, two rather shabbily-dressed, but still burly old men approached. One went outside, and the other sat in the seat next to me.

“What’s happening?” he asked. I was mentally miles away, and it took me a while to realise that he was talking to me.

Unprepared, and slightly too tired to talk, I replied with a simple “not much.” He mistook my fatigue for disinterest-ness, even impoliteness.

“Nothing at all?” He got up and stood to face me, bending over.

“No, not really.” I became aware of my own presence under his gaze, and I suddenly felt myself being compelled, out of courtesy, to return it with a forced smile. As unnatural as it was, to do anything else would stand out as an obvious target for further scrutiny.

He outstretched his hand, and I shook it half-heartedly out of confusion, not sure if I was part of some joke. Once again, he misinterpreted me, my limp pleasantry of the shaken moment for a more permanent practice or lifestyle choice.

“You’ve got such soft hands. Why’s that?”

“I don’t know.” I felt I was nailed to the metal seat, and should say anything to make him move along out of sheer boredom. I glanced at the other man standing outside, his back to me. The one in front sat down beside me again.

“I was a Royal Marines Commando. Falklands War, Northern Ireland.”

“Oh, really?”

“Uh-huh. Do you know about the Falklands?”

“More or less. I know of it.” The fact was, in the pressure of the moment, I’d totally forgotten everything about it, about pretty much everything. What time was my train again?

“My friend worries about me. I worry about him,” he continued.

“Why’s that?”

“I’m on the drink. He’s on pills. Can you tell which one’s which?”

“Well, judging by the smell…”

Before I could finish, he was up and off. I watched him shamble out of the station, and with his friend, over the bridge to the other platform, then up the road and out of sight. My nervousness subsided, but was replaced by something equally unnerving. Shame? I looked into the plastic, purple-stamped bag containing my game. Battlefield 2. I wonder what he would have made of that? Would he have identified with it? Would he be proud that his actions were remembered in a game, or anger that they had been trivialised for the purposes of entertainment? As a gamer, my experience of modern war is limited in comparison. Just like the twenty-four hour live news coverage of today’s desert conflicts, my experience in Battlefield 2 is quiet and stark: taking cover from the occasional plane by diving into a ruined shack , running down empty streets and being gunned by a seemingly-invisible enemy. While many Battlefield 2 servers are busy and action-packed, it’s the quiet ones which are the most tense and which fit in with our ideas of war from the other media. And that’s the closest I’ll ever get to understanding the mind of a man who has experienced war. For soldiers scarred by conflict trying to adapt to a civilian life which constantly isolates, misunderstands and perhaps misrepresents them, it’s no wonder that they gain the problems and troubles that they do. Games based on modern war can be fun, but when that game joins film and television news as our only point of reference to it, we cannot help but feel disconnected from the returning soldiers who have fought on our behalf overseas.