AXIOS (Zachary Basu) - How America gamified its war with Iran
The U.S. government is treating strikes on Iran like a video game, inviting the country to watch as memes and montages subsume the human cost of war. Why it matters: The Trump administration didn't invent the gamification of war, nor did it invent wartime propaganda — a tool of statecraft as old as armed conflict itself. - But packaging live combat as social media content — scoring real kills in real time, and broadcasting it to an audience of millions — is a first in the history of American warfare. Zoom in: Two weeks into Operation Epic Fury, much of the White House's online messaging has been gleefully trollish — a stream of videos splicing real missile strikes with footage from Call of Duty , Wii Sports and Hollywood…