Apparently, military simulator video game "Arma 3" was so realistic that media personnel mistook it for a real war footage, as a Russian TV station accidentally aired a gameplay footage of "Arma 3" for its war report on Syria.
The mistake was made by Channel One, a state-run Russian channel in a report on real-life military action amid the ongoing war in Syria. A split-second footage of "Arma 3" was mixed in-between real-life military footage during the said report. The report was part of a segment celebrating members of the country's armed forces on weekly programme Voskresnoye Vremy.
It seems that the usage of the frame from the video game footage was due to the video editing director mistakenly using the said "Arma 3" video from the archives of the channel. Somehow, the gameplay footage of "Arma 3" made its way into the catalogues of the channel.
The said gameplay footage from "Arma 3" was noticeably short but conspicuous enough for people who play first-person shooter (FPS) games where the frame consists of a crosshairs of a scope with the user scoping out a vehicular explosion with background consisting of low-resolution terrain textures — a common sight in "Arma 3."
This was not the first time Russian media accidentally used a video game footage for a real-world report, however, as last year, the Russian Ministry of Defence publicized an image that was supposed to be a proof of the U.S. military's collaboration with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) but actually turned out to be a screenshot from a video game named "AC-130 Gunship Simulator."
Three years prior to that, Russian government-funded TV network RT also did a similar mistake by airing a screenshot from the trailer for "Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain" regarding a political report on African soldiers. The said game's story takes place partly in Africa and also involved child soldiers in which its trailer was also quite political in nature.
Still, these sort of media errors are not limited to Russia and there's actually a gallery's worth of video game footages being mistaken as real-life footage all over the world.
