2023-04-23 00:46:51
We learn in a recent PC Gamer article that the Red Cross has launched an awareness campaign entitled Play By The Rules. The objective is both ambitious and terribly clumsy, because it is easy to ridicule. This is to encourage FPS players not to reproduce in multiplayer games what would constitute war crimes in real life. The Red Cross “challenges us to play FPS by the ‘rules of war,’ to show everyone that even wars have laws.” The humanitarian association therefore enjoins players to respect 4 rules:
- We don’t fire on enemies on the ground and unable to retaliate, because in reality it is violence exercised once morest prisoners of war, who have rights. Warzone in PLS.
- We don’t attack non-violent NPCs, who are the equivalent of civilians.
- We do not damage civil infrastructures (houses, schools, hospitals, etc.)
- We use health kits on all those who need them, allies and enemies.
In order to promulgate everything, a handful of FPS streamers have even been recruited by the Red Cross during a live on their Twitch channel.
The idea is of course to make players aware of the existence of rules supposed to govern armed conflicts. The author of the PC Gamer article is however right when he claims to detect a perverse effect behind this proposal. Indeed, following these in-game rules almost inevitably amounts to losing the game. From there to conclude that to give yourself every chance of winning, you have to break these rules, there is only one step, and the Red Cross is shooting itself in the foot.
But the reason why we would lose is simple: it is that, parachuted onto a random server, we would probably be the only ones to submit to rules that drastically reduce our ability to cause harm, when it is precisely that- which allows you to get the high score or the victory, the game having been designed that way. If, on the other hand, all the players were forced, under pain of penalties, to follow these rules, then, with equal skill, the chances of winning would be the same for all. Even if it means being ambitious, it was the gameplay that had to be targeted. Rather than inviting players to apply these rules individually and be gang banged by the entire server, the Red Cross would have been wiser to encourage the implementation by all players in the industry concerned of an alternative game mode. , where adhering to these rules would have been central to the gameplay. Not sure that in the long term such a mode of play supplants in popularity those already existing which ignore the Geneva conventions, but who knows, we are not immune to interesting results.
Then, we are not going to lie to each other, the proposal of the Red Cross, and perhaps especially its formulation, exhale the hints of an old well-known debate: do video games make people violent? Those who lean in favor of the negative will put forward the concept of catharsis, the purging of the passions, which would operate here by channeling our violence. Proponents of this position will also highlight the fact that in a society where murder – unlike other misdemeanors and crimes sadly marked by taboo, such as sexual assault – is unanimously condemned, no sane individual would feel the soul to kill his neighbor because of his video game practice.
However, it is true that culture always has a greater or lesser influence on our representations. In this, and despite a clumsy statement, it is relevant on the part of the Red Cross to recall that Warzone-type executions of soldiers on the ground would constitute war crimes in real life. Personally, although I’m not interested in this title, I’m like you familiar with these games (mostly multiplayer) where incapacitated soldiers crawl to save themselves, and yet I had never seen it from this angle. At least it has that merit.
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