Games Are "Permitting" Virtual War Crimes

[trinix]

There are plenty of people who need your help. Better yet, the whole western world need you to stop playing video games and start working, because we are being robbed of our freedoms with every second with people claiming that they want to protect us against all kinds of evils.

It's a game, get over it. It's where people do things they can't do in real life. I won't go to war, don't worry, I won't burn down houses. But if I can do it in a game and get points, why not.

But I guess it's a new hobby to just blame everything on games. Someone who owns a computer who has games for it has shot someone. It must be because he played a game once in his life. Next year we will see msg's about people who know people who play games.

 

[mr_tuel]

wow. have they ever studied war history?

 

[mr_tuel]

someone hasn't studied history much apparently.

 

[dupaman]

I haven't played most of the games on their test list. Does anyone know which of their tested games 'allowed "protected objects" such as churches and mosques to be attacked'? I'm wondering if the adjacent houses/buildings were destructible too, and if so, why would they think that a church should be given special treatment?

 

[hundredislandsboy]

I guess you can make a game where gamers can get tried, found guilty, and get virtual jail time... but that would be boring,playing a game where you just sit in jail. The shower scenes might be interesting however...

 

[descendency]

Why not include Postal in their survey?

 

[jwl3]

Somehow, the only countries these "humanitarians" always seem to criticize are the western ones which actually do the most to protect human rights. They always seem to be blind, deaf, and dumb, to countries like Iran, N Korea, (formerly Iraq), Syria, China, Russia, Venezuela, Bolivia, and so on and so forth.

 

[eddieroolz]

So now they want us to kill people humanely in games.

News Flash: PETA recoils at the treatment of chickens in MW2, demands them to be freed from the cages at the market. No comment was received when inquired about the treatment of humans.

 

[swamprat]

The people doing the study should try medieval total war (admittedly that's set before there were defined 'war crimes'), defeat an army, execute the prisoners and then go and exterminate the city they were trying to defend (possibly as part of a wider genocide spree).

I don't think the study is entirely irrelevant though (however daft it is overall) since there is some downside to doing these things generally and that's often quite hard to represent. If the consequences get too divorced from the actions then people may take the actions themselves (still in the view that it's not something they'd do) less seriously. It's not relevant to most of us but in some places where there are active terrorists etc (or people fundraising like the US-IRA link however long ago it was now) having the perception of how wrong the actions are weakened could have quite an adverse effect. Reporting it as news was maybe overkill for the BBC though.

 

[neiroatopelcc]

The solution is strikingly simple! Adept the convention to the currently century! Add a protocol that exempts games from these laws. If they don't, I'd suppose any military training simulation would break em too as well as any future movie with adaptive plot (depending on the audience)

 

[amnotanoobie]

LOL at the aim on Brothers in Arms and MOH:AA. I didn't know that "historic recreations" needed to be "corrected" in order to follow the Geneva convention.

As for the rest, they are fiction, what makes going to a movie or a violent tv show different?

 

[djab]

Do not get me wrong, I like FPS and other types of games.
I have not play MW2 but as a gamer, I sometime feel that some games (particularly military games) are a bit too realistic.
Most people will know how to make the difference between fiction and real life but with very realistic games with story time close to ours, the frontier starts to blur.
It is always better to do bad things (I know “bad” is really subjective) in a video game than in real life because it does not wound real people.
But it feels a bit weird to hear some people say that it is always normal to do things in games that you can not do in real life.
Even in games it is weird to want to torture people or rape women/girls (yes there are games about that).
May be the problem is not the game but the people who program/play them.
I am not talking about censure but may be such mature subject should be handle in a more mature way in some realistic games. And if some sick people are inclined to do bad things in real life, games could help them to cure their obsessions. Very realistic games can show how horrible things like killing someone could be in real life but all gamers will not perceive it like that. (Some will say that it is too much. Other will find that “cool”.) Of course games are not supposed to replace parents for education or psychiatrist.
That’s a big subject that could be applied to other media less interactive like movies… (and could also extend to subject like "what in real life justify to torture/kill people?" "what is acceptable by our society?" but that is a bit too much today ;-) )
My 2 cents …

 

[djab]

wow, I did not realised I wrote that much ;-)

 

[hannibal]

Yeas and little kidds with plastic toy soldiers make war crimes, same as any young fellow with a wood made gun, playing in the near forest with his friends... the list goes on and on...
You only have to arrest all males between 3-12 years old (with their home made "weapons"), all the players of the chess and war and strategy games, all the film makers that destroy homes in their films...

This is a thing that pop ups now and then. Does anyone remember the movement of dissallowing all soldier and gun toys in 70's... Didn't work wery well even then...

 

[dmwright]

How about Multi player??!?!?! Possible International War Crime?

 

[elmos_hardware]

War, real war, should be without limits. Then it would be something even more to avoid. Even in WW2 Allied and Axis air power killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people in their air raids on towns and cities.

 

[Parrdacc]

There just pissed cause they cannot make a dent within countries that are the major offenders of REAL LIFE humanitarian laws. So they do the next thing lets consider video games. Here's an idea stick to the real life causes like your supposed too and leave the fiction games and movies to us.

 

[zak_mckraken]

Why not use popular Hollywood movies as test subjects? Because they don't involve hands-on interaction.

I can think os some movies that involves some hands-on interaction. I know, I need to grow up.

 

[jellico]

So, these humanitarian groups, most of which are funded by various government subsidies, are spending time and tax-payer dollars evaluating the morality of virtualized combatants as they move about through a virtual environment modifying objects and data elements which is displayed on the screen as murder and meyhem.

Ok, there is a solution to this infantile stupidity.

Step 1: Setup a video feed of the raw data manipulation, so all they see is the data in memory being modified (for added benefit, display it Matrix style since they won't know what they hell they're looking at anyway). That will give them the proper perspective.

Step 2: De-fund ALL of these groups and make these parasites get real jobs (or more likely, collect unemployment).

 

[TheLighterHalf]

next time i'm on an actual counter terrorism mission i'll be sure to remember that when i was playing call of duty that morning it is NOT ok to shoot a guy, crouch over his face and yell "TEABAG!!!"

idiots....