Quote Originally Posted by Alexander the Pretty Good View Post
To the BBC's credit, they had some of the RPS crew defending the industry. It's even better when you know the context that most of RPS thought that the new COD level was offensive for being dumb and out of context and not for killing civilians.
My thoughts exactly. I skimmed through the report myself and some of the games they nit-picked were rather silly imo.

John Walker made this comment at RPS: Our Rentaquote Future: Games As Warcrimes
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.