Ready to take on Vietnam.

• Position: Video Games

Three decades after the withdrawal of U.S. troops and the fall of Saigon to the Communist North, the video-game industry is finally ready to confront the Vietnam War. Battlefield Vietnam and Vietcong: Purple Haze are already available; and ShellShock: Nam '67 and two other titles wilt arrive by year's end. For years, the dominant real-world conflict in video games has been World War II. That war proved a natural fit: Nazis could be presented as an unambiguous evil that fit the simplistic morality of most video games. But Vietnam, a controversial war that divided the...