It's testament to the quality of the hardware and skills of the developers that some video games offer you an experience similar to watching a movie, but ITV has committed one incredible blooper this week - mistaking footage from the first-person shooter, ArmA II, for video filmed by the IRA.

Aired on Monday, the ITV documentary series, Exposure, showed this footage and claimed it was an IRA attack on British Forces in 1988. ArmA II developer, Bohemia Interactive quickly recognised its own cinematic and made a statement, using the opportunity wisely to recommend the game for its "realism."

"It is very weird to see our game used this way, especially considering the journalists were simply unable to tell difference between reality and game footage and described a short film clearly made using our game Arma II with what they call real IRA footage from 1988," he said.

"Our games offer great level of freedom to our users to create all kind of things but in this particular case, it is very misleading. At the moment we are gathering further information about the matter but I already had a chance to see the documentary and so far I am not sure how could they make such an obvious mistake."

"On a somewhat more positive note, we consider this as a bizarre appreciation of the level of realism incorporated into our games."

ITV has now stepped forward to comment and apologise, citing "human error" for the glaring mistake.

"The events featured in Exposure: Gaddafi and the IRA were genuine but it would appear that during the editing process the correct clip of the 1988 incident was not selected and other footage was mistakenly included in the film by producers. This was an unfortunate case of human error for which we apologise," reads the official statement.

We doubt Bohemia will mind too much. There are far worse things that could happen than a major news corporation mistaking your game for real-life combat. What an error though!

Update: The YouTube linked to in the article has since been removed. Someone's obviously very embarrassed.