...but for military-based games, it makes sense to be a soldier/aggressor, there's good guys and bad guys, missions, urgency, decisions to make, action and all that jazz, you're a soldier. Or a super-soldier, typically.

I know! How stale. Hasn't it been done to death? Time for something different.

The whole nature of being caught in a conflict as a civilian, however, is that you're subject to the whims, upon threat of death and violence and rape, by so many things outside of your control, so what exactly do you do with the controller? You don't really get to have any agency other than "try not to die or have a number of horrible things happen to you." Like, unless you literally just randomly die or get picked up and accused of being a traitor and tortured/killed, it wouldn't really be accurate.

Well, yes. And the difficulty and absurdity of doing so appears to be the entire point.

Every game has environmental or non-player hazards to promote some sort of conflict. These particular hazards just happen to be something you are personally more comfortable embodying than fleeing. In my opinion that's what makes the idea interesting.

Since they are, in fact, NPC's in relation to the soldiers in a traditional shoot-em-up, I can safely assume that they'll participate in whatever behavior and activities that best suit the game, instead of what would best suit some clairvoyance into the reality of being a citizen in a warzone.

I'm not sure what you're saying here. Sure, the game won't be a perfect representation of war, but then no videogame is, from any perspective. Why does their position with respect to traditional shooters matter? This is not a traditional shooter, so obviously the mechanics of the game will be different, probably something suitable for its purposes.

I would love to see video games propelled to statuses where they are more recognized as art etc etc

If you want to see it as art, that's up to you, there is no gatekeeper to this sort of thing, in fact I consider it impossible for anything manmade to not be art. And the existence of subjectively bad art does not invalidate the medium: 90% of everything is shit.

Honestly, I'd just have to wait and see what they produce, but it just seems ripe for taking someone's terrifying account of living in a warzone, ramp up what they've been through to make it playable or engaging enough to sell, thereby removing the actual terror of living in a war zone, a lot of which is due to how little control you retain over your life and the lives of your loved ones around you.

Yeah, that's likely. Of course you can't experience the true visceral terror of war by playing a videogame (with today's technology) but at least they're trying something different. And this has a better chance for saying something thoughtful than most wargames which essentially amount to jingoist propaganda.