AMP PENDLETON, Calif. -- THE noise level was rising, the body count was mounting and the 13 marines sitting in front of computer screens in a dark room here seemed briefly to have forgotten that the urban combat mission was just a video game.

"Sniper on the roof! Sniper on the roof!" shouted Justin J. Taylor, a corporal leading Fire Team 2, half jumping out of his chair as his eyes stayed glued to the monitor.

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"Where? Where? Where?" demanded a comrade in Fire Team 3.

"I'm shot," came the despairing reply. "I can't see anything."

As the military embraces electronic games as a training tool, a growing number of soldiers are fighting in a virtual Iraq war even as they remain stateside. For many soldiers, the increasingly realistic simulations often seem like the closest thing to being in combat.

"It gives you a sense of reality," Corporal Taylor said. "You get that nervous feeling: do I really want to go around the corner or not? You want to complete the job you've been assigned to do."

Recent recruits who grew up on popular commercial games like Half-Life, Counterstrike and Quake 3 have a natural affinity for the training games, many of which are adapted by the military from the retail versions. Some military officials are enthusiastic about the benefits of running troops through the exercises at minimal expense.

But as video war games gain popularity throughout the armed forces, some military trainers worry that the more the games seem like war, the more war may start to seem like a game. As the technology gets better, they say, it becomes a more powerful tool and a more dangerous one.

The debate over the use of computer simulations large and small was sharpened when Lt. Gen. William S. Wallace, the commander of the Army V Corps based in Kuwait, remarked that the guerrilla-style resistance of Iraqi militia groups made for an enemy that was "different from the one we war-gamed against." The current situation in Iraq, some critics say, may highlight the problem of depending too much on virtual realities for training. They argue that military leaders can become too enmeshed in a gaming scenario to allow for what is actually happening.

General Wallace's forces directed a computerized dress rehearsal for the Iraqi invasion with several hundred Army, Marine and Air Force officers last January in Grafenwöhr, Germany. The command center led by Gen. Tommy R. Franks of the Army conducted its own computer simulation, Operation Internal Look, last December in Qatar.

"You can get so habituated to the gamed reality that the real reality, what's on the ground now, is thought to be artificial," said James Der Derian, principal investigator of the Information Technology War and Peace Project, a nonprofit group that studies the impact of technology on global politics. "If the war doesn't go according to the game, you just keep trying to make it fit."

Computer-simulated war games, like the one hijacked by Matthew Broderick's hacker character in the 1983 film "WarGames," have long been used by high-ranking military officers to test large-scale maneuvers that cannot easily be replicated in the real world.

What is new is both the way the games are filtering down through the ranks to the lowest level of infantry soldiers, and the broader vision that is being contemplated for them at the highest levels of the Pentagon.

"These kids have grown up with this technology from birth," said Dan Gardner, director of readiness and training policy and programs in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. "If there are tools that are less painful than reading through a book and can give them a better sense of what it might be like, we need to use them."

Mr. Gardner stresses that nothing will ever replace "muddy boots" training. But he said the adoption of the technology was accelerating partly for practical reasons: real-life training is expensive, and it is hard to find a place for it. The Millennium Challenge, a three-week real-life war game that took place in 17 locations simultaneously last summer, cost $250 million.

"Back in the cold war, with the threat of a potential adversary coming over the border, the Germans were more amenable to having tanks running through their towns," Mr. Gardner added.

The possibilities of networked computers, combined with an increasingly remote-controlled military like the one Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has vowed to build, has spurred interest in adapting the architecture of multiplayer games like Everquest and Ultima to create a "persistent world" for training and perhaps more.

One notion involves a scenario quite literally torn from the pages of a science fiction novel, in which a virtual training system becomes the actual means of waging war. "Ender's Game," a cult classic by Orson Scott Card, tells the story of a group of young soldiers battling aliens in a video game. In the end, they emerge to find that their victory has saved humankind, and that it was not a game.

" 'Ender's Game' has had a lot of influence on our thinking," said Michael Macedonia, director of the Army's simulation technology center in Orlando, Fla., which plans to build a virtual Afghanistan that could host hundreds of thousands of networked computers. "The intent is to build a simulation that allows people to play in that world for months or years, participate in different types of roles and see consequences of their decisions."

At the root of the high-tech training enthusiasm are some sobering facts about how quickly even the best-trained troops get rusty. A large proportion of casualties always occurs in the first weeks of fighting, military experts say, because soldiers are essentially brushing up on their skills while in combat.

Computer systems like the ones the marines here were training on could be taken on ships or even set up in remote locations so troops could train while waiting to go into battle.

"Anything but war is simulation," says Ralph Chatham, the co-author of a recent Defense Science Board report on training that recommended the adoption of virtual technology. (Mr. Chatham attributes the quote to a retired general, Paul Gorman). "Virtual games won't teach you how to walk through thick grass, but they will teach you what to think about when you walk through thick grass, and you'll be a lot better off when you get to that grass."

Acutely aware of the concerns over blending entertainment with war, some military trainers experimenting with computer technology try to distance their software from the favorite leisure time pursuit of male teenagers.

"We don't use the word 'game,' " said Ken Whitmore, chief executive of Coalescent Technologies, the company that turned the popular commercial game Operation Flashpoint into the more prosaic, if more sophisticated, Virtual Battlefield System 1 used by the Marines. "It's a simulation."

Capt. Donald J. Mathes, who has set up four "virtual distributed training environments," including the one, here over the last year, said the Marine Corps had come a long way from its early forays into games, which included adopting the hyperviolent first-person-shooter game Doom.

"Here it doesn't hurt you to get shot," Captain Mathes told the marines in his standard lecture here after their fourth run-through of an urban combat mission not unlike what they might see in Baghdad. "Here you have to learn by dying. But you have to remember, you can't get desensitized."

The Army, in an alliance with Hollywood, has embraced the idea that virtual training can be fun and effective. Since February, students at the United States Army Infantry School at Fort Benning, Ga., have been using a game called Full Spectrum Command, which is aimed at teaching infantry captains how to make smart decisions fast.

For Maj. Brent Cummings, who made several trips to Marina del Rey, Calif., to work with game designers at the Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California (they wore sandals, he did not), the game has replaced pieces of paper that he used to hand out describing missions for which his students would need to map out plans.

Psychologists at the Army Research Institute are monitoring the game's use and tracking a control group that is not using the game to try to measure its effectiveness, but Major Cummings said the buzz in his classroom made him believe that people were learning.

"They're immersed into the game,'' he said. "You don't command a company with a keyboard and a mouse, but somehow the guy thinks he's in there. When that happens, he's experiencing this different level of learning.''

But Capt. Jason Gentile, who took the course over the last two months, said it was not necessarily so much fun. "I got beat a lot,'' Captain Gentile said. "I had a fratricide incident. But it's good to make those mistakes now so I don't make them six or seven months from now in Baghdad.''