A good point from the audience during the Q&A that is lost on the panel. Perhaps the issue is with our lack of empathy with the war experience in most games is the transparently robotic nature of the AI adversaries.
How can we be expected to assign human attributes to something that is blatantly artificial?
The ability to personalise elements of games combined with things like permadeath do create the power for a game to create things like a sense of loyalty and loss.
A particular example is naming soldiers in games like X-Com.
Computer game studios want to insist their games are fantasies that do not have any effect on the real world. This means that they deny the power of the products to do good along with absolving themselves of the need to respond to accusations of harm.
However having Oliver North in your trailers is making a certain political statement.
If you want to recreate a particular experience like being in the US military then developers need to license the representation rights to guns and equipment.
Doing so doesn't represent a necessary endorsement of the weapon manufacturer as much as a commitment to immersion.
Few games have complete licensing.
Thermal vision is a great way of making it easy to render larger landscapes.
Seven panelists in 90 minutes is leadership debates levels of awkward
Soldiers have credibility compared to office workers so programmers inevitably lapse into giving them authority and heroic status.
Games about war are big but still a niche in terms of things like Minecraft
FPS are not wargames, simulation games are not exciting in the way that shooters are.