Coincidentally, here is a better piece in a similar vein. Specifically, if you draw from the Tom Clancy well for all your action military games, maybe you should think about the politics involved?
“Techno thriller” is the label given to all this, but I wonder whether a better one is “military procedural”. As with accounts of crime scenes in detective fiction, Clancy’s books are essentially about raising order from chaos, but where detective yarns celebrate the mess and dazzle of human intuition, Clancy’s sleekly choreographed infiltrations, airstrikes and gunfights are homages to something vast and unlovely - the resources and reach of the US war machine, its construction and mobilisation of time and space. Every fleeting second in a Clancy action scene is indexed and paced with recourse to a beefy handbook of acronyms and call-signs, protocol and intelligence data, gadgets and go-words.
Decades after Ubisoft acquired the rights to his name, the publisher and its imitators have buried the author so handily that the views that animate his fictions now slip by uninterrogated. While Clancy the man was outspoken about the political dimensions of his work, Clancy as a brand is terrified of taking a public stand on anything, even as the games themselves deal freely in the policing of rogue states and the trampling of due process in the name of the greater good.
The Tom Clancy games may draw upon the testimony of architects, firearms experts and special forces teams but they are always represented as firmly neutral, as mere entertainment, and the result is not an apolitical experience but politics by stealth. They are games that quietly advocate hawkish attitudes and philosophies while trying to lose the player in their lethal machinery, in the smooth interlocking of components and command structures. Ubisoft’s pretence of inconsequence might be its most detestable quality, as a publisher - you might as well talk about landmines as though they grew from the soil of their own accord - and sadly undervalues the artistry and relevance of the worlds that have flourished under its banner.