Orson Scott Card's sci-fi classic Ender's Game is practically required reading for high-school students these days, and that's probably a good thing. Just like the book's Ender Wiggan, today's young people are being trained to wage war by playing video games.

This past summer Hezbollah, the Lebanese-based Islamist paramilitary group, released Special Force 2, a first-person shooter based on its pointless 34-day war with Israel in 2006. In the game, players are asked to destroy Israeli tanks and launch Katyusha rockets at Israeli towns. Hezbollah even held a launch party in Beirut for the game's release, decorated with disabled tanks and Israeli helmets captured during the conflict.

Hezbollah has gone to great lengths to declare the war a victory for its side. Most estimates put the death toll at 158 Israelis, mainly soldiers. More than 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed in Lebanon.

But that is in the real world. In the game, the more Israeli soldiers you kill, the more weapons and points you get. And whoever gets the most points wins. Evidently, Ender's Game has been translated into Arabic.

If this sounds like a blatant propaganda tool for reaching a new generation of potential militants, it is. And a statement from Hezbollah's media official makes the game's purpose clear. Oh yes, Hezbollah has a media official. In fact, it has an entire Internet division dedicated to getting its message out to the world and attracting supporters. The official, Sheikh Ali Daher, said, "This game presents the culture of the resistance to children: that occupation must be resisted and that land and the nation must be guarded."

The news coverage about Special Force 2 elicits two responses from the American public. The first is something like, "Wow, they can make video games over there?" To which the answer is clearly yes. In fact, they've been doing it for years. (The original Special Force came out in 2003, but no one cared because the graphics were hopelessly unrealistic, even for jihadists.) The second response is, "Whoa, what kind of morally bankrupt society would produce such a product and then sell it to kids?" To which the answer is: a society a lot like ours.

Let me confess here and now, I really like first-person shooters. I remember acquiring a prerelease copy of Doom on floppy disk in 1993, rushing back to my PC, and then blasting away at demons well into the night. I may have lost a step or two since then--I don't tend to last too long in online Halo tournaments-but I can still kill hours playing Medal of Honor or Resistance: Fall of Man. Even so, there comes a time when we should take a hard look at the implicit--and explicit--messages in the games we play.

Besides, it isn't as if we didn't beat Hezbollah to the video-game-as-recruitment-tool party. U.S. taxpayers paid for the development of the U.S. Army's official game, America's Army, a tactical multiplayer first-person shooter. Since it launched in 2002, AA has been downloaded 40 million times, and it now has more than 8.5 million registered users. An Xbox version is launching this fall. Knowing it is under the microscope, the developers of America's Army avoid re-creating specific real-life battles--don't expect to see the Battle for Tora Bora anytime soon. But although the Army takes pains to talk up the team-oriented, values-driven nature of the game, there is still a fair amount of running and gunning. For what it's worth, America's Army kills Special Force 2 when it comes to pure polygons-per-second graphics power.

Of course, the private sector, too, wants to profit from virtual warfare. Kuma Reality Games specializes in re-creating real-world battles drawn from recent news events. The company often uses stories from soldiers and satellite maps handed over by the U.S. military to build its scenarios. From the infamous "last stand" in Mosul of Saddam Hussein's sons Uday and Qusay to a brutal assault on a Baghdad police station that left 17 Iraq officers dead, the game is ultrarealistic. Kuma's Web site urges readers: "Stop watching the news and get in the game!"

Maybe this phenomenon isn't very different from re-creating Omaha Beach in Medal of Honor, or Law & Order's "ripped from the headlines" formula for its weekly episodes. Maybe it is just following too closely on the heels of the events, or is too real, or too unreal. Or maybe it is just in extremely bad taste. We are playing games on virtual battlefields before the blood has dried on the real ones.

Kuma's perspective is pretty straightforward, and its tagline doesn't do anything to obscure it. "In a world being torn apart by international conflict, one thing is on everyone's mind as they finish watching the nightly news: 'Man, this would make a great game.' "

Maybe, but that isn't a game I want to play.