Playing video games could make you a war criminal
In the weirdest application of possible cause and effect, I came across an article on The Red Cross applying International human Laws to video games like Call Of Duty and Medal of Honor. No really.
http://kotaku.com/5863817/war-crimes-in-video-games-draw-red-cross-scrutiny?autoplay
One of the world’s largest and most respected humanitarian groups in the world is investigating whether the Geneva and Hague conventions should be applied to the fictional recreation of war in video games.
If they agree those standards should be applied, the International Committee of the Red Cross says they may ask developers to adhere to the rules themselves or “encourage” governments to adopt laws to regulate the video game industry.
That’s right, camping in the corner with a n00b tube is in violation of international law! This is exactly why I think cause and effect arguments should be carefully considered. I highly doubt the 16 year old homophobes playing Modern Warfare 3 will go and ethnically cleanse Tamils in Sri Lanka. Yes, there is a possibility of cause and effect. It is possible that playing Grand Theft Auto could encourage people to commit criminal behaviour, but there is no proof that it does. We need isolated controlled studies to PROVE the cause and effect before we start acting on it. If not, we’re simply ignoring the actual cause and effect.
Do we need the government involved? Do we really have to pass laws on this to protect a bunch of 1′s and 0′s? How far are we willing to go to “protect our children”?
“protect the human dignity of members of particularly vulnerable groups.”
It’s a stupid convention that amounts to international censorship over a long-obsolete, tired, (and never all that effective to begin with) tradition of protecting and advocating international law in some far-flung, pipedreamish hope it will maintain the undeclared “rights” of people worldwide by (in this fucked up example) outlawing games centered around war. If anyone who reads this was alive and cognizant during the early 90s, than you remember the equally ridiculous moral panic that centered around First Person Shooters after the smashing success of the Doom series of games. It amounted to censoring video games because of some wildly irrational belief that violent games turn teens and young adults into violent criminals. I see no difference between that and this latest attempt at censorship. It amounts to a frivolous attack on the financially weakest form of creative expression because video game publishers can’t afford the same fancy attire and topshot lawyers as movies and music can. Yeah, you could say I’m fuming already.
But is this necessarily the best platform for promoting empiricism, Pineapple? I’ll leave you to figure this one out for yourself. It’s worth pointing out that empiricism and policy-making do not readily mix. Governments that socially engineer their citizens are not inherently interested in looking at hard, cold facts and in what manner their laws impact their constituency. They are only interested in getting voted back into office (like all other politicians), and if they promise to decodify or remove one really stupid law or another, they automatically get quite a few votes from single-issue voters. Automatic “vicious circle”, only with more politics.
If anything, this byzantine and self-destructive example of “international law” easily factors as one of many reasons I am proudly opposed to internationalism and “international law”. Foreigners have NO rightful say in how I spend my private time or what laws govern or how I choose to express myself creatively. Period.