LOS ANGELES -- While many young men and women face the real and serious hazards of the war in Iraq, just as many -- maybe more -- in the United States are blowing up Baghdad on a regular basis from the comfort of their homes.
As the war in the Gulf region moved into its second week and casualties on both sides mounted, a number of video games were emerging online that let players live out the conflict vicariously through their computers.
With names like Blood of Bin Laden and Desert Combat, the games, whether new or underground modifications to existing games, offer players the chance to take part in the kinds of real-life battles seen on American television in the last two weeks.
Anti-bin Laden and anti-Saddam Hussein games have long existed online, though most are crude and simplistic.
But Desert Combat is highly complex, built by a large team of skilled mapmakers and programmers. The game was started by Frank DeLise, a vice president at software design company Rtzen, as a research project. He told Reuters he enjoys playing war games but could not find a good one set in modern times.
"That was always a goal of mine, to have a good modern-day game to play," DeLise said.
A total of 15 people are now working on updating the game, DeLise said, including people from Iraqi war opponents France and Germany and a volunteer from the U.S. Air Force.
People who play Desert Combat, which is a modification or "mod" of the Electronic Arts title "Battlefield 1942," praise it as a balanced game and patriotic sentiment.
"I don't feel that the mod is one-sided at all," said Brian Richardson, 20, a general studies major at Texas A&M University. "I may be a bit biased, being American and all, but I honestly feel that both sides are balanced."
Richardson also said that, compared to TV coverage of the real war, the game was as realistic as it could be.
"If a game were to be 100 percent realistic, it wouldn't be any fun," he said.
DeLise said his team is working with EA on the possibility of a commercial release for Desert Combat, which has been downloaded about 250,000 times since its first release last December and has about 2,000 to 3,000 players at any given time.
"I think within the games industry there'll be a certain sensitivity to what can or should or shouldn't be released," Rob Smith, the editor-in-chief of PC Gamer magazine told Reuters. He saw little parallel between the real war and what gamers are doing at home.
"In Iraq right now there are real bombs being dropped by real people on real people ... they are so far apart that there really is no correlation," Smith said.
Blood of Bin Laden, currently available only for the Macintosh, is relatively crude compared to many of today's top computer games, its creators freely admit.
But the game's website makes it clear that the point of the title is both catharsis for those angry about the Sept. 11 attacks and a historical refresher.
Players are also actively creating new Iraqi scenarios for EA's military game, Command & Conquer: Generals.
An EA representative said players have created more than 1,100 new "maps," or scenes, in the last month, whereas with the last Command & Conquer it took six months to reach that figure.
DeLise, who said, "it stinks that we're in a war," also said games like his help people relieve tension.
"I definitely think it's an avenue to get out frustrations ... you can be with or against the war, you can play either side," he said.
Some anti-war protesters have likened TV's coverage of the war to a video game, but one man took that a step further, sending a video game console and games to the White House.
Mikel Reparaz, 24, of San Francisco, started the campaign last year in hopes of averting a war, and his "Buy Bush a PlayStation 2" effort collected $370, enough to send President Bush a Sony PS2 console, an extra controller and two military-themed games SOCOM: U.S. Navy Seals and Conflict Desert Storm.
