Red Cross Investigating Virtual War Crimes

[BoTTeNBReKeR]

Man, I played Fallout New Vegas yesterday. I guess I'm going to have to serve some time in jail for warcrimes and crimes against humanity .

 

[Gatx]

So would tea bagging be a war crime?

 

[Roserari]

I'd be completely fine with this if they included Movies, TV shows, books, comics, paintings and any other form of art or entertainment.

 

[Ickorus]

If they actually try enforcing the Geneva Convention in games they're batshit insane but I can see it working if they get developers to add gameplay elements to their games that enforce the conventions in the context of the game.

 

[Baresark]

Hey, you have all been trolled by the red cross, just like you were by PETA!

For real though, who cares what they think in regards to things they have no scope of power over. And, I can't really recall a game where you were playing the bad guys and shooting wounded, downed soldiers.

In Skyrim, whenever someone is severely wounded, they'll take a knee and plea for their lives. With one or two exceptions, after they heal enough they'll go right back to killing you, so it behooves the smart adventurer to leave nothing but corpses in his wake.

EDIT:
I especially like the people who insult me and then I fail at intimidating, who attack me, whom I quickly beat to an inch of their life, and who then proceed to insult me more, and still not be intimidated by me. There ought to be a patch for that. They're barely escaping with their entrails inside them, yet they're still talking smack and I still can't effectively tell them to watch their tongue.

Haha, as I was typing that I thought of that very thing. I even considered mentioning it. But then I figured that I would skip since it's a fantasy setting. But, I would imagine that if they had the power to change it, they would. But, as you said, as soon as they heal they are attacking you again, so you might as well just cut them down when they take a knee.

 

[Vivi22]

I'll say here what I said on the other [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.329038-Serious-Business-Red-Cross-offended-by-videogame-War-Crimes?page=1] thread: When you say something to the tune of "Movement partners discussed our role and responsibility to take action against violations of IHL in video games", you've lost all chances of being taken seriously.

Much bigger fish to fry

I can't agree more with this. Perhaps they should spend more time worrying about the myriad of human rights abuses that actually happen everyday instead of what happens to virtual characters in video games who are about as intelligent as my car.

 

[BOOM headshot65]

No, NO, NOOOOOOOO!

The Geneva convition has already ruined real life war, And I will NOT let it happen in videogames.

 

[Shycte]

And tommorrow they will be looking into your thought and see if they find something they don't like there.

 

[Therumancer]

If the world was at a period of relative peace, I can see discussions coming up like this without any concerns, as it wouldn't be taken seriously and nothing would come up about it except maybe some developers coming up with some ideas for future games oriented around the idea.
But we are not at relative peace. Terrorism and civil unrest is rampant, even in the countries that are usually the most stable. Yet these people feel they need to examine virtual war? I think as of the time that this conference occurred, the legitimacy of the International Committee of the Red Cross is officially gone. There are more pressing issues going on than to be taking time to talk about something that doesn't affect the world in general.

Of course the legitimacy of the ICRC has always been on tenuous ground. If Nazi Germany had won World War 2, there would have been British, French, Russian, and American leaders being held on trial for war crimes. It isn't about who is right or wrong, it is about who wins.

The world is at its most peaceful now, more than ever, if you discount the recent termoils in africa and asia with the rebellions, wich are more or less settling down. So, whats this about relative peace? We are, in relation to the history ofthe world, at its most peaceful.

Part of this got cut from the quoting I received, but to respond:

The world is peaceful right now because the US has chosen to try and pursue things morally as opposed to act purely in it's own best interests. The US is "slipping in power" because we have generally refused to act according to the old maxim "Free Trade Means he with the biggest guns trades freely". and allow nations like China to literally drain US trade and innovation due to our general dislike of war and unwillingness to invade to keep them down. Our "loans" from China largely being an effort to avoid war to maintain our own goverment.

It's a case where the US is slipping largely because of the US and it's principles, and allowing ourselves to be surpassed, due to an insistance we could remain dominant as what
we see as the good guys. The big question is whether the US continues to allow itself to slip or if we decide we want to remain on top, which is fairly differant from what you present.

This is why the world has been likened to a powder keg, yes things ARE peaceful, but there is also a fuse burning down. Things like the economic problems are the fuse getting closer to that big pile of powder that is liable to cause an explosion. Our arrangements with China that have been maintaining the peace are NOT working out as intended, and that means things are increasingly likely to change.

It's like this, if China was to suddenly respect copyright and IP laws and it's economy would die pretty much overnight, so it's not going to do that. If it was to pay the damages it owes from those violations which were not being pursued China's economy would be in a shambles for the next thousand years easily.

In the end China wants it's prosperity, but that comes at the expense of the prosperity and dominance of the US. It's a sad economic reality that there is only so much to go around. It's not going to voluntarily stop what it's doing, and the changes we hoped for within China are not going to happen before the US is drained first and falls. This ultimatly means going into China and forcing them to stop, which is a war with global ramifications, and we're rapidly getting to exactly that point.

Also while it's not popular with the "peace at any price" crowd, you have to understand that China is NOT a progressive country. It's extremely racist, and militant. There have been plenty of things reported about China's plans to invade and colonize other nations for living space, and "avenge the trivialization of the east". Heck there are people down there that still have a hardcn for revenge against Europe for the Opium wars (which is a whole area of discussion unto itself).

The dominant world power is never paticularly popular, and I think we're gradually seeing the cheering for the plight of the US tempered by some slow realizations of what that heir apparent is actually like. If the US did move on China, there are plenty of nations that would wind up backing us for reasons of both business and self preservation, including some that are very critical of us politically right now.

China's navy which gives them the abillity to project their population/military and things like their satellite blinding technology which can slow or prevent the usage of WMD are not going entirely unnoticed even if the mainstream media chooses not to focus on it (but it does mention it in brief). That means China is rapidly getting into a position where it will be able to project it's populatin and force something akin to a conventional war. I also think a lot of Europe is beginning to realize that it's probably going to be hit before the US due to positioning, the relationship between China and Russia and Russia's increasingly belligerant attitude as well not going unnoticed. A lot of people like to overlook the position Russia wanted to hold in Georgia, and what happened with Poland but not everyone is that naive.

 

[SyphonX]

Orwell would be proud.

Obama getting the Nobel Peace Prize, then starting his own little private drone war, Star Wars style. Peace indeed.

Now we're going to consider gamers war criminals. Clearly a step in the right direction. On that note, how do you charge a drone for war crimes? Do you prosecute the operator... or do we have some sort of drone tribunal or something.

 

[SyphonX]

The world is at its most peaceful now, more than ever, if you discount the recent termoils in africa and asia with the rebellions, wich are more or less settling down. So, whats this about relative peace? We are, in relation to the history ofthe world, at its most peaceful.

Did your teacher tell you that, and you just swallowed it whole. Or did you pull it straight out of your ass? How could you even say that, seriously?

"Everything is fine, go back to bed. Nothing is wrong, we are at peace. Human rights violations are not as bad as they once were. -Jedi Mind Trick- Go back to sleep."

 

[maxben]

Snip

Dude... just chill. You've put together so many different ideas that your point is getting lost.
1. There is morality in war, its the just relative. We can usually point to which side wasn't as bad, for example WWII America and Britain weren't the nicest fellows but they didn't run huge deathcamps.
2. In fact, morality IN REALITY is relative. If morality is objective rules, everyone would fail to be moral (hence the Catholic Church) because we necessarily break some rules. Now we come to the big philosophical questions: What is morality? What is the relation between normative rules and morality? If you "should" do something, does that mean it is legitimate to have a law FORCING you to do it?
3. The US was in a "real war" for sure 55 years ago in Korea, and Vietnam was a "real war". If Vietnam wasn't a "real war" (because of guerrilla tactics) for you, than I deny that the Western Front of WWI was a "real war" because it involved a lot of do-nothing attrition. The effects of combatants is the same.
4. Starship Troopers (the book) was meant to promote facsism because the US needed to be STRONG and MIGHTY and MERCILESS to succeed. The movie was great because it inverted that, and showed why fascism is so dangerous. So yes, clearly they show what you said because "Might is Right" is a regular slogan for fascists. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Troopers#Allegations_of_fascism
5. Samurai are an example of conservative Japanese principles, not morality. Its not that they needed to give up their honour, their term for "honour" was far too strict. This is because it was meant to keep the samurai in line. When the samurai eventually took over anyhow, they unified Japan. The new ruler of Japan, Tokugawa, realized he did not really need them and started converting them to bureaucrats and administrators while cutting their size as a group, until the arrival of the USA and modernization of the Japanese army. So no, the Samurai never lost.
5. Your understanding of China is biased. When you say "China is running a robber economy" it is necessarily the Bad Guy because "robber" has a negative moral connotation. The standard of living has went up and up and up in China, it will just take a while more to reach a Western level. It is far better than most post-colonial countries when it comes to standards of living.
6. Cheap knockoffs and sweatshops are produced in China, but they are created by Western companies because of demand from Western consumers. We are using their weak labour laws for OUR gain. If Western companies chose not to do this, and Western consumers chose quality, than this wouldn't happen. You CANNOT blame China for basic economic principles (cheap is good).
7. China won't be the world leader for a variety of factors. For one, no country with heavy internal unrest can control the world. China sees thousands of demonstrations, terrorists attacks, and revolts yearly. This is because the size of the population, and has been a problem for China since ancient times.
8. The "inevitability" of an East-West war was originally supposed to be The West vs Islam, not the West vs. China. It was brought to light in the book The Clash of Civilizations. Here is what poli sci and history students think of it: Its BS. There is no reason for this to be inevitable, but saying that it is inevitable makes it a self-fulfilling prophecy. Think of two countries, if they feel like it is inevitable to go to war they WILL go to war. If they thought there was a chance for co-existing, they would not go to war or, if they do, it wasn't inevitable.
9. I agree with you, the Red Cross is seeing its relevance slipping. However, it is not relevance of morality that is slipping, its us caring about them as an organization that is slipping. Non-governmental agencies have to promote themselves, the Red Cross chose to take the PETA route.

 

[Therumancer]

[I don't think the economics of patent violations are what is keeping the economy as bad as it is or that those same economics are what's going to lead into a global war. While it may be true that China is building up a larger military base (I haven't researched it, so I'll go under that assumption for now) it's simply not true that standards of living in China are not rising due to foreign trade. Trade is what's making China what it is today, and if we're going under the assumption, as we normally are in international affairs, that the country is acting, as a whole, in it's own best interests, it's not going to just sever trading ties with practically its entire consumer base. Yeah, patent violations are a problem here, but unless they're a big enough problem to warrant economic sanctions (and I guarantee you, they are not. Whomever is innovating, they don't have enough sway to outvote both the people who don't want to go to war with China AND Walmart.) everyone's going to stay at peace, because they don't want to fuck up a good thing.

If anyone's QQ'ing, it's the people who's copyrights and patents are being violated in China, because tough luck getting any headway.

Also, you might be a very verbose troll, in which case, this secondary wall of text is both unnecessary and hurtful to our lovely threads. For this I apologize, denizens of the Escapist. I note the possibility of you being a troll because of the mention of the 2012 apocalypse. Come on. Every prediction of an apocalypse before has failed, and I'm pretty sure if the world DOES ever end, no one's going to fucking care who predicted it.

The general populance always wants peace, and a lot of businesses always argue that war is impossible due to the flow of money and international trade. It's never true though. The classic example being the end of Rome and where the old referance to "Barbarians At The Gates" comes from. The Barbarians in question having been surrounding Rome while it refused to acknowlege the threat, insisting they were just there to trade or leverage trade, because everyone needed Rome too much... after all money was dependant on it, and they kept up all the roads and stuff. Needless to say this did not end well... it also summarizes the position of pretty much every nation that has insisted business was going to maintain peace until the very end.

The situation with patents and copyrights is fairly straightforward but not well understood. The issue is this, someone spends billions or trillions of dollars developing a product, and they want a return on that investment. If someone else simply copies their work without that investment and undercuts them they lose all of that money, testing and work that they put in. This is bad for the business. It is also however bad for the goverments playing host to those businesses because they can't tax the sales, not to mention someone producing in an overseas sweatshops means less workers for the goverment to tax, and of course less properties to tax due to there not being as many (or any) factories and manufacturing facilities for those workers to work out of.

What happened with China is that it started to knock off literally millions of differant products which add up to astronomical amounts of money. The US goverment and China cut a deal that the US wouldn't take action to stop them, if China gave us the money to continue operating the goverment as we wanted to (ie what the goverment would be making through taxes). This was diplomatically termed a "loan" for the purposes of not showing the US pretty much allowing itself to be bought off. This was part of an economic strategy in which we hoped that China's average standard of living would increase as that money trickled down into the economy, the workers would demand more money, and in the end as China's culture changed the problems with gradually move away from this.

The US plan failed. China is a nation where you have huge, modern cities, where the elite live, but the majority of the people still live in abject poverty.. almost to the point of The Middle Ages in many cases. Diseases like SARS got started due to the people there living in the same places they keep their livestock. This is the face of China (the situation of the majority) that exists behind "The Bamboo Curtain" and isn't seen by most of the world. China realizes that it has MORE to gain by keeping the majority of people poor and desperate and packing them into sweatshops than it does by increasing it's general standard of living. Rather it's taken this prosperity, put it into the hands of the elite, and into their military. Their basic attitude is why develop into a normal, decently prosperous nation, when it could in theory become the dominant world power and conquer everyone else? Why bother to continue with this population control when it can colonize other nations? It's been working towards those ends pretty steadily, and things are coming to a head.

If you do searches for things like "Chinese Death Vans" or "Chinese Mobile Execution Chambers" you can see how they are keeping the population in line, things like "Chinese Anti-Satellite Lasers" shows you what they have been developing to counter WMD, and of course general searches on the Chinese navy, and "Chinese Offensive Navy" not to mention the "Chinese Yuan Class Submarine" can reveal some interesting stuff that is mentioned in the mainstream media but not followed up on too often due to the general "peace at any price" sentiments of the American left.

I write a lot of text because I'm conveying complicated things from a minority position (on these forums at least). All smart alec comments about me being a troll might be amusing, but understand I've been following this for years in forming these positions. I pretty much thought we should have pre-emptively attacked China during the Clinton administration while we still could have won easily. Right now I think the US and those nations that would come with us could take China and it's allies, but it would be a lot messier. We've pretty much let this situation get far worse than it ever should have and gotten it to the point where the price to solve it is catastrophic, and is only going to get progressively worse.

Oh, and one thing I will point out though... your kind of right on one specific point, even if unintentionally. The US has really screwed over our domestic business interests by dealing with China to get money for itself while they took the hit. This is in part why there is such horrendous relations between the goverment and big business, leading to so many problems within the economy. Basically our businesses have gotten so ridiculously ruthless because they can't rely on the goverment that is supposed to protect them to do it's job... leading to an increasingly adversarial relationship. Media coverage doesn't help things much easier.

As one minor point think of the scandals about US businesses using overseas sweatshops. The idea here being to be able to produce goods cheaply enough to compete with the sweatshops of nations like China on marketplace. It's immoral, but has become sort of nessicary. We portray our businesses as universally being the bad guys, and the goverment has gone after them for legal violations and everything else... but at the same time we wouldn't be in that position if we had been preventing the knock offs that these companies are competing with to begin with. This kind of "screwed all around" mentality has contributed to our economic situation a lot more than people might think. Personally I don't like Sweatshops, I think we should have been protecting our patents and copyrights in a literally militant faction when nessicary and preventing those kinds of knockoffs to protect our business and economy. We didn't do that however and created a situation where our own businesses have gradually had to try and sink more and more into the gutter in order to compete, and their alleged protector has become a bad guy who from their perspective can be bribed by a nation like China to sell them and their interests out.

 

[CapitalistPig]

First of all I would love to see this in a courtroom, "sir is it true that your character InYOA$$420Weed24/7 shot and killed SploogMon$tar69 while he was in last stance, clearly a stance of surrender and then you proceeded to stand above his virtual corpse while crouching and un-crouching to depict obscene behavior? while yelling into the mic that he is a "noob" while asking "are you mad bro?"." because that jury would probably let him off for war crimes and convict him for being a troll.

Secondly if the U.N wants to make a video game about Geneva Convention I say go for it. They could call it "We're here to save the day! but we'll probably f*** it up and leave you to die." then it really would be like real life.

 

[Candidus]

Shitting hell, what a bunch of busybodies. Who'd have thought that with all the famine, drought, war and pestilence going on in the world they'd have time to swing their dicks about looking for something else to fuck with.

Piss off, your uninformed opinion regarding our preferred entertainment medium isn't likely to be sensible, isn't wanted and any directives drawn up based on it almost certainly won't be obeyed. Ass-wipes.

 

[Estocavio]

But wouldnt this be contextual to the game?
We dare no longer have bad guys who are actually bad, if this happens.

Pfft.

 

[Something Amyss]

Orwell would be proud.

Obama getting the Nobel Peace Prize, then starting his own little private drone war, Star Wars style. Peace indeed.

"You mean no-one is dying and mothers don't weep, or it's not in the papers at least."

but hey, it was disparaging the troops and not supporting America when people did it in Iraq and Afghanistan, so maybe it's...Disparaging the drones?

On that note, how do you charge a drone for war crimes? Do you prosecute the operator... or do we have some sort of drone tribunal or something.

"You are to be tried by a jury of your peers. I present to you: ROB, Johnny 5, Sony PSP, an iPad...."

 

[Lord Honk]

God, I get so upset by all these news I'd just rather not read them, but they're just so outrageous. The video in this post especially. There's been enough rationalization in this thread to just say "That's not exactly right or at least unbiased."

I'm gonna go play some Black&White and feed children to supersized tigers, brb.

 

[Arppis]

I wouldn't mind if they would make a "good" game that is using these rules of engagements. I would love to take prisoners instead of shooting a target till it's red cloud of blood. I always found it bit idiotic that everyone fights till the end no matter the cost. I wish the enemy AI would behave more humane, now they act like machines.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

The Geneva Convention was fine for its own time, but it has become and remains horribly outdated until it addresses the current-day issue of ninjas kidnapping the president, and the rights and responsibilities of bad dudes vis-à-vis said ninjas.

...but seriously, "modern war" games are as comparable to actual modern-day warfare as Farmville is to actual farming. (When last I checked, the United States Marine Corps did not train its members in such tactics as bunny-hopping and quickscoping.) I guess the ICRC is concerned that gamers are being conditioned to not value the Geneva Convention? Hey guys, maybe you should take a good look at the news media.