Combat Footage From Gaza And Syria Is Starting To Look Like Video Games

AK-wielding militants run across an open field, firing wildly at an alleged Syrian Arab Army outpost. The frame shakes with each step and crack of a gunfire. If I didn't know any better, I could be watching a video game. But I'm not.

This is first-person footage taken directly from the Syrian war, a conflict increasingly playing out across social media, accessible pretty much the world over like tuning in to some brutal, massive online gaming tournament.

Indeed, whether it's taking a trip to Germany to shoot Nazis in Return to Castle Wolfenstein, or fighting terrorists in the simulated terrains of Iraq and Afghanistan in Call of Duty, first-person shooters give players the added reality of a perspective from the triggerman. And as graphics in games becomes increasingly lifelike, the gap between gaming and war tightens.

But the latest militant videos coming out of Syria and Gaza give viewers the realistic point-of-view shootouts without the controller. The stakes are much higher: As the action unfolds, real people shoot at, and kill, other real people.

Making use of GoPro cameras and consumer DSLRs, two rapidly-proliferating technologies on the modern battlefield, fighters strapped themselves with the same cameras extreme skiers and mountain climbers use on the peaks.

Except in this iteration of user-inspired cinema, Islamic militants are kitted out in such a way that you know exactly how it feels to be in a scrappy firefight with the Syrian Arab Army, or what it's like for Hamas militants to emerge from tunnels in Israel before ambushing unsuspecting IDF soldiers.

In both cases, militant groups and their affiliates created video productions meant to attract supporters. Just as millennials, the first true video game generation, live off of the shared experiences of social media, the viscerally first-person perspectives of an otherwise far off locale is unparalleled. And as we've reported, Canadians and other Westerners are flocking to the battlefields of Sham, largely attracted by online media.

But just like the US Army equipment jihadist groups wield in their various campaigns inside the porous landmass between Iraq and Syria, they owe the POV battlefield video tradition to armies across the West.

Helmet cams during the Iraq and Afghan wars became popular among troops from NATO nations, looking to tout offensives or provide learning opportunities after operations. Either way, watching someone unload an assault rifle at suspected Taliban hiding in grapevines is totally insane.

From whatever combatant, these videos allow supporters from any side to watch their fighters and to allow themselves to imagine they're there. The footage can be that immersive.

Not unlike a growing trend in filmmaking in general, the realistic POV is the next frontier of battle cams. And like the expanding warzones of the Middle East, the jihadists are invited to the party.