This Is War (for a Game Industry’s Soul)

Twenty years later, Mr. Bach commands a high-tech army that is at war all the time. As the creative force behind the Battlefield series of video games, he must make sure that players come back again and again, no matter how often they get whacked. Which, if you are keeping score, is about seven billion times in the last two years.

For months, a development team in Stockholm has been frantically preparing a new version of the game. Played out in desolate cityscapes, on the sea and in the skies, Battlefield 4 is a dream of Armageddon without civilian suffering to make things messy. Already, fans are hailing what one early reviewer called “an insane new level of destructibility.”

Bloody and dramatic as it is, Battlefield 4 is only the opening move of a bigger effort by Mr. Bach and his colleagues at Digital Illusions Creative Entertainment, or DICE, a development studio owned by the Silicon Valley gaming powerhouse Electronic Arts. They are trying to create a new type of military shooting game even as the genre confronts technological, narrative and public relations hurdles. If they fail, video games will be that much closer to extinction.

Like big-budget movies, newspapers, printed books, DVDs and other once-dominant means of conveying information and entertainment, traditional video games like Battlefield — played at home, with a special console or maybe a souped-up PC and the biggest possible screen — are under digital assault. A handful of programmers in a garage can put together a crude but compulsive smartphone game in a few weeks. These games are designed to be played in snippets, anytime and anywhere, making them ideal for a busy modern life.

Mobile games are not exactly complicated. Fruit Ninja involves slicing animated fruit in half. ActionPotato is all about trying to catch potatoes. Candy Crush Saga consists of rearranging pieces of candy — and is played 700 million times a day, its creator says.

Immersive games like Battlefield, on the other hand, require years of intricate work by hundreds of software engineers and artists. They demand an investment by players, too: $60 plus quite a few moments of attention. And they are tied to technology going the way of the rotary phone. PC sales are dropping as users migrate to tablets, while sales of the Microsoft Xbox and Sony PlayStation consoles have wilted 40 percent in the last two years.

Traditional video games will not disappear tomorrow. It is a multibillion-dollar business, with shooters like Battlefield its most enduring category. The visceral thrill that players get from their virtual guns — the ability to reach into an imaginary world and destroy things — cannot be replicated on a smartphone, at least not yet.

Electronic Arts is nevertheless trying to extend franchises like Battlefield to devices, because it must. But at the same time, it has to grapple with the threats undermining traditional gaming. Though the classic consoles are getting reboots this fall, there is no guarantee that new models will permanently revive the format’s fortunes. In 2006, Nintendo introduced the Wii to iPhone-type excitement. The latest version had a tepid response. The new Xbox and PlayStation will get more attention but face an undercurrent of doubt.

“Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony are beyond the point of no return in this industry,” analysts at Asymco warned in a report last month titled “Game Over.”

Even a relentless optimist like Frank Gibeau, a veteran executive at Electronic Arts, acknowledges that the industry has become much more complicated.

“When you take technology and entertainment and slam them together for a highly demanding user base, you’re in the deep end of the deepest pool,” he said. “The movie business is tough, but this is really hard.”

The first-person shooter, which allows a player to be the character instead of just an observer, took off with the demon-slaughterfest Doom in 1993 but had its best run after 2001. The games drew inspiration from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the real-life exploits of the Special Forces. Studios often worked in collaboration with former members of the United States military.

Danger Close, a Los Angeles studio also owned by EA, released last fall the 14th incarnation of Medal of Honor, a shooter that was promoted as the ultimate in realism. But reviewers disparaged it and gamers rejected it. Don’t look for version 15 anytime soon; EA shuttered the studio.

Mr. Gibeau explained EA’s new shooter strategy: “We’re doubling down on the DICE team.”

Which is how it came to pass that a bunch of guys in Sweden whose knowledge of the American military comes from watching “Saving Private Ryan” and “Platoon” is now making EA’s only contemporary military shooter. Being peaceniks might even give them an edge. War is such a foreign concept here that they must reimagine it.

“We understand war is sometimes necessary — nothing that someone chooses, but it happens,” Mr. Bach said. “The drama is how you deal with it.”