10 Video Games With Little Hope For Humanity

There's perhaps no more terrifying real-life example of humanity's self-destructive potential than the enormous body counts racked up by war, and the fact that so much of contemporary peace is sustained by the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction.

That is, don't nuke us and we won't nuke you, but if you do nuke us, then we'll go down swinging by firing all our nukes at you. Everybody loses.

This was superbly embodied by the 2006 Cold War RTS game DEFCON, a nuclear war simulator in which the player is tasked with obliterating as much of the enemy nation's landmass as possible for maximum destruction and human casualties, all while minimising their own losses.

A typical game will see millions of deaths incurred on both sides, serving as a brilliantly cynical commentary on how war turns mass death into a statistic, and how fighting wars with button presses and computer screens removes a lot of the basic human empathy from the situation.

In an era where drone strikes can kill hundreds of innocent civilians while piloted from thousands of miles away, it's a telling indictment of technology's ability to turn "conflict" into a glorified video game where emotion is largely a non-factor.

DEFCON highlights the utter Pyrrhic lunacy of "winning" a nuclear war, because in the immortal words of Frankie Goes to Hollywood, "When two tribes go to war, a point is all that you can score."

If humanity's future really rests on the idea that we don't blow the other side up so they don't blow us up, and we need nuclear stockpiles to really hammer the point home, then we truly are an awful, doomed lot. DEFCON captures this with horrifying exactitude.