Powerful is easy, to make a Player feel powerful in a game is easy. Give him enough extra Hit points or Armour or Attack or strategic bonuses and you have him taking down enemies five times his size. Agreed balancing the whole environment to make it just challenging, enough to be exiting, requires skill. Yet on the whole, making a player feel powerful is, by far, easier than making him feel courageous.
Sniping rules, in almost all games sniping / guerrilla warfare will win you the day. This is because you are able to take away a percentage of the enemies with little risk to your own self. Therefore telescopic rifles, silenced guns and other long ranged or stealth weapons are popular. Even in RTS games the race is to get your enemy at a disadvantage like getting at him early before he has resources, technologies and troops often is enough to win you the match.
We (Game Designers) tend to overlook the moral aspect of what we are doing. It is complicated to incorporate things like honor and courage into a game and therefore we simply set them aside with the explanation: who wants to be educated while playing games.
Courage and honor, Stuff that heroes are made of, are mostly ignored in the video game world for a quick design fix. Players like to win and to make them win we make them strong and make them act ruthlessly.
Few games like Sega’s Virtua Cop actually incorporate the justice shot (shooting in the wrist or knee to disable rather than kill) that police forces around the world use in real life. In war games we have to utterly destroy our opponent and that means wiping out entire towns and killing off all his villagers, a far cry from reality we are striving towards where despite Fidayeen attacks American soldiers maintaining peace in Iraq do not open fire on civilians.
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