From a developer's perspective - and from peacenik Germany to boot - it's not easy to find a good balance between entertainment (I mean, a game has got to be somewhat fun and challenging), and the absence of trivialization. Indeed, that's the biggest danger as far as I can see. Glorifying war is easy to avoid by design and by content, and IMO it would be such a blunt instrument to influence the audience that it'd be next to worthless except for the most naive and uncritical of all people.

I mean, apparently with 17 you're old enough to enlist and pick up a real rifle. I say, before you do, have a faint glimpse of what might await you in the form of movies, games, and above all, talking to other people about the subject. Military simulations that take the simulation aspect seriously don't glorify. They inform about a specific (and limited) aspect of (contemporary, or historical) conflict and technology. Ideally they serve as a starting point for the audience to read up the subject matter and inform themselves more.

Saying that games do not influence the audience at all is IMO propaganda of the video games industry. Apparently some developers (and especially the industry organizations and their lawyers, far more influential in a litigious society than they ought to be) do not really want to take responsibility. They get their rating, and that's it. If video games had no effect at all, we couldn't sell our software as an actual tool for training and education. But I don't think that the effect is much stronger than watching a movie, or reading (powerful) literature. And in none of these cases you can control what the audience will be taking home with it.
Example: Full Metal Jacket.
Critics still aren't sure if it's an anti-war film or a war film. Apparently it is ambiguous enough to confuse the knee-jerkers. Usually that's an indicator for a complex piece of art. If the message is a blunt, one-sided piece, it's usually to the detriment of the work's artistic value.


How can we educate people doing the right thing in video games if there is no meaningful choice to be made?

If the player is never given the freedom to make questionable choices in a frakking game, how can we trust a 20 year-old lieutenant to make the right decision in life or death situations?

It is my impression that most critics of electronic entertainment are simply not at ease with the fact that the player enjoys freedom to make his own decisions, for better or for worse.


Anyway, as far as visuals are concerned, as a developer you can't win. If you don't show guts & gore you can be accused of showing a "clean" war. If you have plenty of it in it, you're glorifying violence. To be honest, I find these recurring debates about new media utterly boring. Since the 1850s it was literature that tainted the youth, followed by cinema, comic books, television, cinema again, VCRs, video games, the internet, video games again, and it seems as if the debate is now shifting to the social media (and I agree, those really are the devil ... a sure sign of age, I guess: Condemning what you don't understand).
The debate is sometimes even literally, down to the words, the same. Malleable young minds are exposed to filth, indecency, and this just inspires young people to disrespect the elderly, to not listen to their parents, and somehow the world is going down the drain soon, very soon! if we don't do something about it. Like, censorship. Rating systems. Access control. Age barriers. Has it ever worked? Aren't the same people who now ask for video games to be banned those who fondly remember when as young kids they snuck into a cinema and watched films way above their age rating?
But of course, that was totally different, cannot be compared, better times ... until you start researching the 1950s and 1960s and you realized that there was bullying at schools back then as much as it is today, that some sick people went to schools back then to shoot children and teachers, that domestic violence and alcoholism was just as bad if not worse than it is today, that the rate of sexual assault has actually dramatically receded over the decades.
"Good old times" never were. They are the result of selective memory and unquestioned gerontocratic propaganda.