Since John or Jim don’t appear to be going to link to it, I bloody will. BBC News ran a story today about two swiss organizations doing research into war crimes. Which is a serious topic, and to be applauded. Except it’s actually research into war crimes in videogames. And generally, games comes across pretty bad. Blowing up churches and mosques is against international law, of course. “[We] call upon game producers to consequently and creatively incorporate rules of international humanitarian law and human rights into their games.” You can only imagine what RPS may say to this. Except you don’t have to imagine. They asked us, and Jim and John are quoted arguing games’ side. Go read.
Rock, Paper, Shotgun
Our Rentaquote Future: Games As Warcrimes
Posted by Kieron Gillen on November 23rd, 2009 at 11:36 pm.
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“Transcending the absolute. RPS.”
Hey, now *there’s* one to put up in the titlebar.
Addressing some of the points that have been made, especially Teejay’s:
The problem with the report – a report that is thorough and detailed, and clearly written with fine intentions and respectable hopes – is not that those conducting it are foolish, or that they have conducted themselves improperly, lazily, with bias, etc etc. It’s that the core ideas behind the report are, in my opinion, very flawed.
I think it’s absurd to suggest that games – and games alone – should adhere to IHRL when depicting war. Games are under no obligation to reflect real life, and indeed should have the opportunity to violate any real-world laws they choose.
I think it’s even further absurd to begin such a report with the statement that games are uniquely in need of such intervention because they are interactive. It is *because* they are interactive that I believe the purpose behind the report is flawed. If anything it is the passivity of books, films, television (especially documentaries) and so on that underlines their authority in their depiction of reality. Your relationship with such media is one-way, fed to you, and if presented as authoratitive and “realistic”, then carries implications of accuracy. In a game you are often given choice. I can choose to shoot the injured, I can choose to turn my gun on civilians should the game let me (and so very few do).
My comments are born of this report’s peculiar (and I would contend inaccurate) assumptions that gaming is in any way more at risk of mis-educating people about IHR. If such ideas are valid at all, they might want to also begin with the novels of Tom Clancy, or as many have observed, the output of various TV shows, alongside gaming. Hence my statement that games are treated so very strangely.
I don’t think it is gaming’s place to educate. I believe it is education’s place to educate. Then when someone encounters a situation in a game that does not follow IHRL, the player can identify that themselves. Reports like this, while extremely well intentioned, very dangerously divert the responsibility for who should be educating, and where people should be receiving it.
I thought you put what you had to say very well, and I know that the research supports you.
Thanks for being a voice of reason in the wilderness. Hope talking to random deer isn’t too boring.
I don’t think “videogames are unique” is a *core* idea of the report. All their analysis would be identical and stand up (or fall down) just as well if this report was one in a series, covering films, TV, books, newsreporting, documentaries etc.
I also don’t see the core idea (for me) being “games should adhere to IHRL”. I see it as “games should include references to IHRL”.
To use a parallel: The player in GTA games is a criminal but they do get chased by police cars when they visibly do illegal stuff – ie the concept of law and what is illegal is built into the game. In a fauir number of war games it is non-existant. While the report writers do actually criticise player-character war crime behaviour, what I take away from the report more strongy equally is call to at least acknowledge what is and isn’t a war-crime, rather than paint an alternative-reality that is very close to reality but erroneous.
Very few if anyone playing GTA would come away thinking that their actions are ‘legal’, whereas for some war games this is exactly the problem, via the way the game is written.
It might not be gaming’s place to educate, but what if it is miseducating? Also in reality it takes a whole society to ‘educate’ in the broad sense (including journalists etc) and it isn’t something that can simply happen during GCSE history lessons between age 11 and 16 and via BBC documentaries, especially as for many people their exposure to other media will be of a vast order of magnitude higher.
Finally I also agree that writers, movies-makers and game developers should be legally free to do what they want. This however doesn’t mean that there is no room for criticism – for example many people who denounced eg Lola 3D, Postal, [insert your hated game here] slated them but didn’t call for them to be banned or illegal. This report is making its argument as part of “games criticism” aimed at improving games rather than from the Keith Vaz ‘ban ‘em/censor ‘em’ perspective.
I don’t agree with everything in the report and as a gamer I still want *some* games which are amoral, violent and stupid (even set in modern war warfare scenarios). However overall I think it is a fair comment to decry a general abscence of awareness of IHRL in movies, novels, TV and games and to suggest they would be improved, and that it would be socially beneficial, if instead of modern media normalising downwards towards a vacuuous ‘anything goes’ fantasy world which passes itself of as realistic, it flagged up (as does GTA for example) where IHRL is being broken (even if the player is sill doing it).
Art has no moral ersponsibility?
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/11/24/shakes-head-in-sad-disbelief/
Or it has?
Furthermore; games are different, there’s more immersion. And media do have a desensitising effect. You could presume that becuase Lyndie England had seen Jack Bauer torturing wrong ‘uns it was okay for her to do the same – it can’t be wrong if Jack does it, right?
Personally I’d argue that books are more immersive.
I kind of understand where the report is coming from. I know teej is all broken-record about it, but glancing over the report, they just seem to be suggesting in that long-winded term-paper let’s-meet-the-minimum-word-count kind of way that developers should go further to incorporate international law into the games they make.
Think of it like this: GTA is edgy because you know shooting someone in the guts or launching a rocket-propelled chainsaw at them to steal their money, and then use said money to buy hookers, is illegal. However, machinegunning civvies by accident (or on purpose) is treated, in a lot of games, as par for the course, and is either not specifically dealt with, or sort of just “not condoned” in a kind of abstract way. So, it would be interesting to address these issues realistically, as part of the story or whatever. Most of the games they studied were games I haven’t played, so I can’t really take issue with things one way or the other.
It’d be really stupid if they hard-coded these issues into games as auto-fail or whatnot, because games are about entertainment and ultra realism has no place in the discussion. If it does, buy the USB pistol to plug into your desktop so that you only lose digital man-shoots once.
Thing that appalls me is the counter-argument that relies on an absence of scientific proof that games (or any media, for that matter) has a lasting effect on a consumers psyche. God, I hope that one isn’t true.
If medias didn’t have a lasting effect on our psyche, ads wouldn’t exists.
But we’re not just talking about consumerism here, we’re talking about people accepting war crimes.
The zombie apocalypse is when the FPS generation hits 50, goes mad and starts eating people.
I heard about it and had to google it. When I close the BBC tab I’m thrown back here!
How ironic
I could write a large rant how “laws of warfare” are rather pointless and mostly a propaganda tool (since escalation is inevitable, also see Clausewitz’s work on military theory), but the article left me speechless at… What’s next? Human rights for sprites? Deleting your savegames becomes a capital offence?
How about summarising your central argument in a few lines?
Clauswitzs’ outmoded – modern nation-vs-nation warfare is dead.
See:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Utility-Force-Art-Modern-World/dp/014102044X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1259093564&sr=8-1
This’ll continue for the next 20 years till people who have grown up with games and the internet take power. Then it’ll either get better or much, much worse.
Barack Obama adviser is Warcraft gamer
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/3522252/Barack-Obama-adviser-is-Warcraft-gamer.html
I think the games they tested are a bit biased to a certain type of game. They need a few games like Mario, Zelda, TF2, Devil May Cry, Pokemon & stuff like that to balance things out
I found it odd how many games they chose that weren’t set in a war.
Wait… We still try people for war crimes? And still use the Geneva convention? I thought we in the civilised and morally superior West had given up on all that so we could invade Iraq. Is war profiteering still a crime?
Too much attention on gaming and as usual no attention on the actual war crimes that are actually happening right now. If you’re worried about war crimes there are plenty out there for you to carry out studies on.
Instead of focussing on pretend war crimes that we may unwittingly get embroiled in when playing the latest Bulletproof Soldier of Death: Grenade Dodging Simulator game (in case anyone missed that I’m sarcastically opining that anyone who thinks any FPS is a “realistic” simulation of the actuality of being shot at by people who really want to kill you, is a bit of a retard as even supposedly “real world” games are, by necessity, not that realistic) why not try getting some actual war criminals held accountable for their actions?
If people on the real world aren’t held accountable for their actual war crimes I’m not going to get upset that us gamers are comitting pretend ones (in which, and I think this is the key point, no real people actually die).
How would you know the difference?
Trouble is, one makes the other more likely.
Jim said it well, too.
It’s almost sad how amazingly intelligently you guys come across when quoted, which more points to the utter claptrap that falls out of most people’s mouths when they’re asked to give a quote for the paper.
I wonder how many people on RPS think that they could survive a zombie outbreak…
I would survive a zombie outbreak as a zombie, i would run around biting people until the government start spraying the antigen from crop dusters.
I’d break from my stupor covered in blood and surrounded by half eaten lawyers.
I may be being stupid, but the report’s intro says they tested twenty games but only nineteen are listed. Am I missing something obvious?
The report is pretty interesting, and I can see why a human rights organisation would be upset by some of what they see in games, but at the same time I can’t help thinking that people know at some base level that this isn’t real.
Looks like Company of Heroes was dropped for some reason. They do mention ‘problems encountered’ on pages 7,8,9. Maybe CoH can be played in so many ways it makes it hard to analyse?
METAL GEAR?!
Reviewing Metal Gear Solid for it’s realistic depiction of conflict is so absurd that I cannot think of an applicable metaphor.
Wait, don’t all armed conflicts involve giant robots, stock footage, and NANOMACHINES?
Read pages 5 & 6 for their reasons to include them: http://trial-ch.org/fileadmin/user_upload/documents/Evenements_et_manifestations/Playing_by_the_Rule.pdf
“For the average player, the actions performed during a game will most likely have a direct impact on their perception of conflicts and law enforcement operations in general and of conducts allowed in such situations. It will also influence how they evaluate and perceive governments’ and armed groups’ behaviours in reality and the media coverage on these issues.”
Ah, the old, gamers-can’t-distinguish-between-reality-and-fiction argument.
oisomeguy: in a world where Generation Kill is like Fox News is like Modern Warfare 2 is like cool, what is reality?
@ oisomeguy
…having an ‘impact on” or ‘influencing’ perceptions isn’t the same thing as an inability to distinguish.
Movies, TV, games all influence peoples’ perceptions. For some people more than news reporting (which itself may well not be accurate either).
For almost everyone their experience of warfare is mediated by other people – be it writers, directors, developers, journalists, editors, military press liason or islamist youtube-ers. In fact it is worth asking what is the “reality” which people can or can’t distinguish from the ‘non-reality’? It is not clear cut – all reality is ‘invented’ or curated – cobbled together from different sources and everyone will arrive at a slightly different version.
Yeah, what he said. ;-)
I understand your points of view, and they make nice existential justifications. The fact remains though, that when we sit down to play Call of Duty or Metal Gear Solid we knowingly engage ourselves in a work of fiction. We suspend our disbelief for the sake of entertainment. If some information bleeds over into our factual conception of the world, I call that an anomaly. I don’t watch Jurassic Park and come away convinced that there are dinosaurs roaming tropical islands, and, in the same way, I don’t play Modern Warfare 2 and come away convinced that its cool to violate human rights.
You’re assuming a rigorous discipline in suspension of disbelief. If you say that a work of fiction can’t inspire or add to a world view, even through say, metaphor, then you’re flying in the face of common sense.
It’s fine to argue that playing these game won’t lead to more warcrimes being committed, but to say that’s because fiction has no effect on the real world is over-salting the soup.
What about ‘cautionary tales’?
“In particular, it said, few games it studied reflected the fact that those who “violate international humanitarian law end up as war criminals, not as winners”.
HO HO! I’m not a rabid anti-american lefty or anything, but that statement did strike me as particularly jarring. The whole idea of the report is a joke and the generva convention has never been enforced objectively, because it is always interpreted by the winners. The Americans prosecuted waterboarding as a war crime after World War Two, is anyone going to prosecute them for doing the same thing now?
People like Heinrich Boere are being put on trial 65 years after the event.
Who knows if we will ever see a “Tony Blair war crimes trial” at some point in the next 40-odd years? It’s possible (even if unlikely).
Not-so-funny texts on pictures? This isn’t the first time as well. What is this, Destructoid?
Yes, that’s right! Only one site in the world annotates pictures, and by doing it we become exactly like them. You got us!
The radio said “No, Alec. You are the Destructoid”
And then Alec was a Destructoid.
If playing games about war (be it computer, table top battles with rules or throwing pebbles at those cheap green plastic soldiers) will lead to people being unafected by war crimes do to over-exposure. I can only imagine the massive negative impact showing real dead bodies on the TV News must be having.
How about a game where you play as a Dyncorp employee who kidnaps children to be used as sex slaves, then the US government defends the contracts and you change the name, thus eluding further bad press. I wonder if those industrious Swiss would include that in their studies.
Isn’t ‘warcrimes’ an oxymoron? Is war not a crime? What’s so special about a church or mosque, physically and psychologically man-made structures, compared to a living thing?
First, blowing up churches and crap in games is rarely (if ever) the goal of the protagonist, but demonstrated as the actions of the antagonist – just like in movies. Second – ““[We] call upon game producers to consequently and creatively incorporate rules of international humanitarian law and human rights into their games.”” — that sounds an awful lot like “I’m Richard M Stallman and I insist that you call everything with Linux GNU/Linux to promote my project”.
This group can suck it.
Just want to say thank you to TeeJay and many others for the contributions to this discussion, all this has made for a thoroughly insightful read. I’m doing some personal (art practice) research on perceptions of war and its relationship to militarist attitudes so all this proves very interesting for me. Being a gamer, and also living under what is effectively conscript-serfdom (yet as a pacifist), there is a lot I am trying to reconcile here. I think with regards to this article, the real danger lies in the indifferent brushing aside (or an unconscious suppression) of a study like that and the ease at which such reaction occurs. This defensiveness already signals a refusal to approach such serious issues which games (like MW2) and its audience clearly ought to be dealing with – and this in itself is a problem endemic to the gaming community, and consumers of mass cultural media at large. It can be argued that most can tell the difference between ‘reality’ and ‘fiction’, but I am firm in my belief that images, especially the kind we get with an interactive and participatory medium like gaming, go a long way in building perceptions; precisely because it engages decisions, it creates experiences, and these can invariably define a person. Very exciting stuff for me, because I think this is where games and art meet.