Today I got my copy of PC Gamer in the mail. Right inside the cover I found a striking fold-out ad spread; the first two pages show a giant American flag, with the words This is Not a Game etched over the stars. Folding out the panel transforms the flag into the Japanese rising sun, the stripes becoming its rays. Emblazoned over the red sun are the words, This is War.

It's an ad for Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault, the latest offering in EA's popular World War II series. Underneath the logo, the ad punctuates itself thus: You Don't Play. You Volunteer.

This brought to mind Mia Consalvo's Level Up presentation on representations of both Gulf Wars in the popular media. She shared how reporters and military personnel continually insisted, This is not a game! when referring to the conflict. Here we have EA insisting that their game is actually the real thing.

After Mia's talk I asked her if these reporters and military men weren't attempting to work through their own discomfort about how games mediate and control our reactions to war -- even if they didn't realize they were doing so. Were they possibly saying these things, I wondered, not to belittle games as poor shadows of the "real thing," but rather to assert that, yes, games actually may help us deal with our discomfort with war, to control its uncontrollable outcomes and to master its chaos. Were they possibly admitting that they were -- that we all are -- out of control, flying in the face of reason, and that they were uneasy about it.

Gonzalo also tells a story about being at the Tokyo Game Show this year when EA unveiled Pacific Assault. He described the strange discomfort he felt watching Japanese cheer as they fired their virtual American weapons against their virtual kinsmen. Perhaps the Japanese are even more comfortable with the role of games as the opposite of war, as a tool to mediate chaos.

Neuroscientist Jordan Peterson talks about this chaos in his breathtaking book Maps of Meaning. Peterson argues that human experience oscillates between the known and the unknown. Myth, legend, literature, religion -- all these spheres map our motivations in a way that does not focus the boundary between the known and the unknown into a fine line, but rather leaves it intact as a viable realm to explore. Peterson's arguments may help us understand the Japanese reactions to Pacific Assault -- he contends that only Western cultures insist on extracting and disposing of the sphere of the unknown, on relegating all experience to fact.

I think that those reporters and military generals, are all struggling with this issue when they talk about war as not a game. They are uncomfortable with the ambiguity; they want a fine line in which games are games and war is war... but perhaps they leave a measure of space for their discomfort -- perhaps they admit in their hesitation that there is room for this simultaneous fear and comfort.

Maybe EA's advertisement points to their game as a possible map of meaning. It plays with the representations of good and evil, real war and play war, solider and gamer, player and volunteer. Even the visual representations in the ad blur the lines -- the stars and stripes become the rising sun in the casual gesture of a page turn. Does the game provide a safe haven for our discomfort with war, a happy Huizinganian magic circle of determinate boundaries? Or does it also unleash the fire of chaos, the mad partner of human history that leads us in that familiar dance against ourselves.

Challenge Everything, EA says. Maybe they're right.