Video games reheat the cold war

THIS season’s hottest games are selling geopolitical nostalgia: all the bad guys are Russian. The military pandemonium simulator that is Call of Duty: Modern warfare 2 (Activision, Xbox360/PS3/PC) features one level, already notorious, in which you play a CIA mole in the team of a mad Russian mastermind, accompanying them as they stroll through an airport massacring civilians. You don’t have to kill the civilians yourself – as a protest against global consumerism, I decided to shoot up the duty-free shop instead – but the effect is unsettling. The rest is a Rolls-Royce-quality rehearsal of familiar shooter tropes, with…