War vet shares insight on Call of Duty, FPS

War tends to take on glorified traits in fiction, and games are no exception. As a nod to November's Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 release, VentureBeat sat down with a veteran formerly deployed in Iraq for his thoughts on the series and other first-person shooters as a whole.

Sergeant Dave Mull, who served a total of 12 years, explained that combat isn't as action-packed as games make it out to be.

"Real combat isn't very exciting from a third-person perspective," Mull said. "You spend long periods of time bored out of your mind, and then, all of the sudden, someone is trying to kill you, and your adrenaline spikes through the roof, but you either can barely identify their postion or have little to no idea where it's coming from. And even up close, it's usually over very quickly without much in the way of struggle."

The interview extends to a number of topics, including how first-person shooters get it wrong, and how gaming can act as "a form of therapy post-deployment."

"It's like a cartoon version of reality," Mull explains. "It lets you work out aggression and build hand-eye coordination at the same time."

Check out the full interview over at Venturebeat.