More like everyone is hopped up on PCP.
Some more than others, but everyone plays like they are a crazed maniac that can survive a hail of bullets and of course run in a few moments even if you shoot them in the knee caps.
I didn't know those kind of drugs were available to both the Germans and Soviets
Maybe so, but as I said, we can't replicate the psychological impact of a battlefield on a player. No matter WHAT happens in the game, we CAN survive the hail of video game bullets and there's no way around that. Players will ALWAYS be less careful with their virtual lives than they would with their actual lives.
So maybe players do run around like they're high on angel dust, but what do you expect? They don't have anything vital at stake -- just their entertainment. Besides, who's to say that the players in those situations WOULDN'T react like that? We can speculate all we want, but it won't do us any good. Even on a "one life to live" server, players would still be more reckless than they would in rea life.
As for the bit about Close Combat, as I recall, that's an RTS game where you're directing the actions of AI troops. That's radically different from an avatar in an FPS game. Moreover, the scenarios described may sound good to me or Karabiner98k, but that's just because it jives with our rough sense of what OUGHT to happen on a battlefield. Again, though, it's all down to psychology there, not physiology.
The problem with imposing psychological limitations on players in an FPS is that they'll sit there and say "That's BS. In real life I'd have done XYZ instead." It's easy to argue back and forth about how you'd psychologically react to a given situation. It's not so easy to argue about, say, how steady your aim would be if you took a flesh wound to the arm. We can argue about how scared we'd be and how we'd react to 81mm mortar shells blowing up around us. Charge forward just to get the hell out of the barrage? Duck down and pray to whatever god(s) we believed in? Piss our pants? All of the above in varying orders? We can't argue about whether we'd still be able to hear afterwards (or at least have a lot less to argue about).
With an RTS or a turn based game (IE: Steel Panthers: World at War models suppression and the effect of rallying by a superior officer), you're not directly in control of the troops. They aren't actually YOU in a sense. With an FPS game, YOU are the soldier. You control every action that he performs, to the extent the engine lets you. Thus, the issue is not how would "the average person" react, but rather how would YOU react. And that's all debatable, and with a fairly wide range of responses, too. Plus, it's HIGHLY contextual.
Consider the example of watching your buddy get blown away in the foxhole next to you. Your options are: (A) crap your pants, (B) run screaming from the foxhole away from the enemy, or (C) fix your bayonet and charge screaming at the enemy, hell bent on killing every last one of them. Which do you do? Well, that depends. How close were you and your buddy? Is the barrage just ending or is it still going non-stop? Has your unit suffered tons of casualties lately? How good is the Lt. in charge of your platoon? Or did he get blown up too, and the only guy left in charge is the screw-up sergeant you wouldn't trust with latrine duty? How long have you been fighting the war? Are you a recent replacement/FNG or a seasoned veteran?
ALL of that can come into play as far as how you react. ALL of it is open to broad debate, and NONE of it can be effectively modeled in the game without having people on either side (or even both sides) of the issue call "BS!!" By contrast, anyone who gets shot in the foot is probably gonna limp or at least hop for a bit. They'll flinch and shut their eyes when a grenade goes off next to them, too. You'll find a LOT more consensus on those kinds of issues than you will on psychological ones.
