Saturday 10 December 2011

No, the Red Cross is not trying to arrest you

Sometimes people really make me angry. Like the people intentionally spreading the lie that the Red Cross intends to prosecute everyone who's ever played a video game for "virtual war crimes".

If you people would read the whole bloody article instead of the headlines written by lazy lying journalist scum you would see that there was never any suggestion that the Red Cross was going to go after gamers. The headliners made that up.

What the Red Cross did want to investigate was whether actions taken in games normalise activities that would be war crimes in real life, and whether game developers have a moral responsibility to accurately depict and enforce the real-life rules of conduct.

This is hardly a new issue - there are always debates about whether games that allow players to behave in a blatantly illegal fashion without repercussions are a detriment to society. And really, it's probably even *more* the case in war games. Most people playing Grand Theft Auto are aware that stealing cars is illegal in real life - but your average player probably doesn't actually know what is and isn't considered legal in a warzone. Would we have fewer problems with our troops if these rules were told them as kids playing games?

Naturally, there are many many ways to represent a legal structure in games, and they do NOT all require censorship or arresting players or anything ridiculous like that.

The saddest thing is seeing lots of followup comments on these idiotic lying articles about how people claim they are going to cancel their donations to the Red Cross because of "gamer persecution". Sigh.

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