

Parent of gamer asks his son to honor the Geneva Conventions - helveticaman
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/02/22/parent-of-gamer-asks.html

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ja2ke
I think that, while it makes for a fair enough educational springboard to use
Call of Duty or whatever to talk to your kid about the Geneva Conventions, it
also has the slightly off-putting side-effect of teaching your kids to take
the content of a video game at face value.

"Stop playing when one of your squadmates violates the Geneva Conventions" is
about as awesome in this context as saying "Turn off Apocalypse Now the moment
someone violates the Geneva Conventions."

Video games are all about various deliberately designed interactive systems,
and the play that comes out of those systems intersecting with the player and
(in some cases) with each other. Asking your kid to stop playing a game when
it does something it has no control over (or awareness of) like "violating the
Geneva Conventions" seems like its breeding a bit of ignorance into the whole
thing. It's like yelling at someone in a war film for shooting at a child...
it won't change the outcome.

If someone actually used the power of interactivity and systemic NPC AI
present in modern gaming to make a game which was aware of the Geneva
Conventions and was able to reward players for adhering to them either through
their own actions or how they directed their units, and presented notable
moral choices surrounding that stuff, that would be I think a pretty
interesting achievement.

Other than raising awareness of the presence of the Geneva Conventions in his
son's mind (which is worthwhile in and of itself), I don't know what this
lesson will teach other than incorrect side-effects like potentially
misrepresenting how soldiers behave and think in real life (eg: in real life
they have human brains, and are doing things other than creating a cinematic
experience for the player, which is all they're there for in most war video
games), and misrepresenting how interactive systems work and the potential
they hold. It's very noble, and has definite merit and is also a clever idea,
but it does also seem like another case of parents not understanding what
games are, and trying to assign their own values to them which end up missing
at least part of the point.

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ja2ke
Actual link: [http://www.boingboing.net/2009/02/22/parent-of-gamer-
asks.ht...](http://www.boingboing.net/2009/02/22/parent-of-gamer-asks.html)

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jmtulloss
It would be interesting if they could build that into the game and keep it
fun. I think I would enjoy avoiding the Hague, or working to bring in the
violators.

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vaksel
it could definitely be fun. And shouldn't be that hard to implement, add
civilians to a game, allow enemies to surrender etc.

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dimitar
I see FPS games as an opportunity to take my self-righteous bastard alter-ego
for a walk. If I don't take him often enough through art I might actually be
kinda confused in real-life situations.

Violent art has its purpose, deal with it.

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tmilewski
Look at the success of games like GTA. These games allow people the ability to
do things that they otherwise would not be permitted to do in real life, all
without consequences.

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GHFigs
While obviously not a practical agreement (to stop playing if _someone else_
plays the game normally is ridiculous), it is a tactful approach to dealing
with concerns about desensitization to actual violence, and an interesting
exercise in metagaming.

I would suggest that parents do more to familiarize themselves with the actual
nature of the games, though. They only make use of the imagery of reality, and
don't support a range of actions remotely approaching reality, so many of the
rules that make sense in reality make no sense in the world of the game.
Adding arbitrary rules can just as easily strip away the enjoyment of the game
as it can add to it--it depends heavily on the game and the other players.

This kind of lesson would work better if tailored more closely to the set of
interactions available in the game world, so that the player can continue to
play the game effectively, but must be conscious of additional restrictions--
which is really what the Geneva Conventions are about. The ideal is for the
child to both learn something and enjoy the experience.

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theoneill
If he were my son I'd take him for a run.

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mattmaroon
So the teenager is being held to a higher standard, in video games, than the
last President of the United States was in real life. Great.

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gaius
At the danger of swerving offtopic, the Geneva Conventions only apply in the
case that mutual signatories go to war. Regardless of what the LPOTUS did or
didn't do, that is not a factually valid criticism.

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likpok
Actually, (I was looking this up earlier), it applies in the case that a
signatory goes to war and the other side either a) is a signatory, or b)
follow the Geneva conventions.

Not that this changes the nature of the comment. It is a good point that the
Geneva conventions do not protect _nearly_ as much as people seem to think.

