The Red Cross wants to put YOU in jail for warcrimes (stupidity / VG warcrimes thread)

POKÉMON MASTER WT SHERMAN

in fallout 2 i would deal with pickpockets in the den by giving all my stuff to sulik except for some dynamite on a timer, then run around letting them steal those from me

five minutes later the city was filled with the simultaneous echoing booms of exploding orphans

HallowedFaith

That is fucking rad.

Mysst

Mayday wrote:

Yup, it's right in the article

They want to penalise the bad behaviour and reward the good.

holy shit when do I get my four hundred congressional medal of honors?

Mysst

Mysst wrote:

Mayday wrote:

Yup, it's right in the article

They want to penalise the bad behaviour and reward the good.

holy shit when do I get my four hundred congressional medal of honors?

and do I get to paint my kills on my car or just on my controller?

Beasteh

grand theft auto made me into the upstanding citizen i am today

Dichotomy

I've played a lot of mass effect

I don't know what reward a person would get for saving all organic life in the galaxy like a dozen times, but I want it

Tam

I saved all the Little Sisters in BioShock and am a general goody-two-shoes in most games where is my reward please

Mysst

someone needs to give me something for flying under the Eiffel Tower through the explosions of Nazi artillery emplacements

Sarkozy, lookin' at you

Hullis

look, the red cross can go do a non-lethal playthrough of Deus Ex and then blow me because that shit ain't easy

Hobnail

I feel like I should be in someway punished for executing those German POW's in Call of Duty who in the breifing immediately before were explained to be composed of underage boys and old men.

Grey Ghost

When I play war games I am mostly a uniformed combatant shooting other uniformed combatants in a place which I think all could agree was a war zone

I don't see how that even comes close to a violation of those conventions

Grey Ghost

oh and also it's bullshit but I'm trying to look at it from their angle

testsubject23

I'd be amused, if it wasn't for the fact that this bullshit debate is actually taking time/money away from the real work that the RC is supposed to be doing. That the topic was even broached is a clear indication that the Red Cross has more spare time and extra cash than it needs.

Seriously Red Cross - shouldn't you be out there sewing back on an orphan's leg or saving a village from torrential floods instead of bitching about violence in video games? Isn't flogging a dead horse a violation of humanitarian law?

TankHammer

It will be a nice age when every group of people has at least one member who has actually played a video game and knows the whole "murder simulator" thing is bunk.

FirmSkater

POKÉMON MASTER WT SHERMAN wrote:

in perfect dark you could disarm an enemy and then walk around them to shoot them in the back of the head as they cowered in terror

i remember thinking when i was twelve that that was pretty cool

I do this all the time with bows and arrows in Skyrim

I call it Boromiring

Goose!

Hunter wrote:

The only gamers that should be prosecuted are whiny bitches who rage quit at the drop of a hat as soon as things don't go their way.

God damn it is my right as an American to not stand for the injustices brought to me by the AI of this racially biased computer entertainment system!

Arang

whenever they gave you the big .50 caliber machine guns in world at war I would aim exclusively for the enemy's kneecaps in the hopes of shooting their legs off

I would use the flamethrower to its fullest extent whenever it was available

if the enemy ever fled I'd shoot them in the back and if they surrendered I would also shoot them

to be fair, the japanese deserved all the above for their machine gunners with infinite ammunition and bulletproof steel heads

Ubik

they're not even trying to dispel the notion that International law is a big joke

POKÉMON MASTER WT SHERMAN

FirmSkater wrote:

POKÉMON MASTER WT SHERMAN wrote:

in perfect dark you could disarm an enemy and then walk around them to shoot them in the back of the head as they cowered in terror

i remember thinking when i was twelve that that was pretty cool

I do this all the time with bows and arrows in Skyrim

I call it Boromiring

Centipede Damascus

Skull Man wrote:

oh my god if I start getting prosecuted for video game crimes...

well, I hope no one checks the abyssal mass grave behind my house full of imperfect IV pokemon

that's gotta be cruelty to something

if anybody cared about pokemon cruelty, you wouldn't be allowed to make them fight each other in the first place

Chimera

So do virtual and fictional war crimes get virtual and fictional punishments?

Sal

The best part of Rise of Nations was nuking the enemy's cities

see317

Sal wrote:

The best part of Rise of Nations was nuking the enemy's cities

Last time I played MoO2 I callously bombarded entire planets of innocent ant-people and rock people and brainy people and machine people until nothing was left. I used nukes, biological, and chemical weapons, as well as weapons for which we have no easily defined terms, with wild abandon.
These weren't people dying, they were numbers on a page. Mere statistics.

When that got to be boring and the reports too long to read, I started just ordering the planets be blown up.
I still got reports, but instead of billions of deaths, it just listed planets I had ordered removed from existence.
Far more efficient.

Mayday

Did blowing up a planet create an asteroid belt in Moo2?
If so that's awesome because you could rebuild that planet.

takyris

Well, going to a game series I know a fair amount about:

Mass Effect 1, off top of head, things that could piss people off:

Spoiler:

Punching an unarmed civilian. (Manuel)
Killing people fighting against their will due to the effects of a mind-control attack (borderline, but hey!)
Executing Shiala, a nonresisting person who had surrendered.
Ordering an execution on a hostile squad member who had not yet opened fire.
Executing Rana Thanoptis, a non-hostile noncombatant.
Colonist: Ordering a hit on a traumatized victim of slavery under the shaky "She's a danger to others" justification.
Earthborn: Gunning down an attempted blackmailer.
Shooting a scientist who was being held hostage. (Toombs plot)
Committing genocide on an alien species that was not currently hostile (rachni queen).
Talking an enemy combatant into committing suicide (Saren).

Mass Effect 2, off top of head:

Spoiler:

Handing a traumatized civilian over to a known terrorist agency for enhanced interrogation. (Veetor)
Denying treatment to dying man (Mordin Ac)
Gunning down criminals who had agreed to a cease-fire (Batarians, Mordin Ac)
Gunning down looters (Mordin Ac)
Allowing a hostage to get killed (Mordin Ac)
Murdering a hostile noncombatant outside of a combat area ("You're working too hard")
Having to kill what amount to child soldiers (test-bred krogan, Grunt Ac)
Attempting to recruit a war criminal (Grunt Ac)
Gunning down scared woman who is only dubiously threatening you and is not evil based on available evidence (Samara Ac)
Denying treatment to dying man (Thane Ac)
Presentation of sex slavery (although not with player consent/approval) (Jacob Loyalty)
Presentation of eugenics (although not with player consent/approval) (Miranda Loyalty)
Murder of enemy soldier outside of combat (Miranda Loyalty)
Allowing associate to murder unarmed civilian (Miranda Loyalty)
Allowing associate to torture unarmed victim for information (Garrus Loyalty)
Allowing associate to murder unarmed civilian (Garrus Loyalty)
Allowing associate to murder unarmed civilian (Mordin Loyalty)
Condoning genocide by destroying potential sterility plague cure (Mordin Loyalty)
Condoning war crimes by keeping data obtained through torture (Mordin Loyalty)
Condoning torture and experimentation on synthetic life forms (Tali Loyalty)
Condoning brainwashing of entire culture (Legion Loyalty)
Allowing associate to torture unarmed victim for information (Thane Loyalty)
Siding with a serial killer over a law enforcement official (Samara Loyalty)
Ordering associate to murder unarmed civilian (Jack Loyalty)
Allowing associate to cause deaths of innocent civilians (Zaeed Loyalty)

That's... wow, actually.

HallowedFaith

I bet if I whipped up a quick 9/11 game and postdated the website to like 1 year before 9/11 and sent the link to the various media places they would EAT that shit up. My servers would probably crash due to the intense overload of people who "have to see it to believe it."

Mysst

arrest taky NOW

Arang

I don't get why they felt the need to invent Nova-6 for call of duty: black ops

it's slow-moving, slow-acting, apparently easy to recover from, it gets stopped by gas masks and apparently doesn't work by contact at all, and it's a thick, easily spotted fog

they could have just used VX and the game would've been over by the second mission

TheStig

Holy shit guys I'm scared.

I'm going to be in so much trouble when they find out what I've been doing in Civilization 5.

Mayday

Yeah, I feel like it was the first CIV to really encourage playing the bad guy.

"What's that, puny enemy nation that I wouldn't bother with otherwise? You're getting support from my mortal enemy? Here, have this nuke. BAM!".

Platypus Beirut

Mayday wrote:

Did blowing up a planet create an asteroid belt in Moo2?
If so that's awesome because you could rebuild that planet.

Yeah, it did.

Mayday

I wish somebody made a Moo2 without all the dumb hundreds of colony improvements. Like right now I'd rather play MoO1 than MoO2 I guess.

chiasaur11

Oh, man.

X-Com is going to be the death of me, isn't it?

Multiple counts of genocide, killing unarmed combatants, illegal arms deals, drug running, using military force against civilian targets, use of WMDs, creation of unlicensed WMDs, biological warfare, chemical warfare, massive ecological damage, letting civvies die horrible, horrible deaths to avoid risking my own troops, production of biological and chemical weapons, use of chemical and biological weapons on fleeing enemy combatants and non-combatants...

I love X-Com so much you guys.

TheStig

I've killed a couple billion people in Sins of a Solar Empire, most of them civilians.

I better delete my saves.

The Otaku Suppository

Yeah this came up days ago and it's been settled since. The Red Cross isn't going to be going after gamers or any such nonsense. They just want developers to make games that more adhere to the "rules of war". Which in itself is a giant crock of shit, but this is the same organization that can go to a concentration camp and declare everything A -Ok.

Artreus

Yeah has anybody actually read the article?

Also all they have done is said they are going to formally discuss it. It does not mean you are all going to get charged with war crimes by them. They are just like "oh hey this is a new medium, let us see if it is maybe affecting attitudes towards war and the things that happen in it"

chiasaur11

Oh, Taky?

Think there were also some potential war crimes in Bring Down the Sky, if we're counting DLC.

And man, the Arrival...

Grey Ghost

For the last time, chia, they were all batarians in Arrival

The real war crime would have been letting them live

The Otaku Suppository

Besides in all my fighting against Nazis and Russian nationalist extremists, none of them have tried to surrender. In fact they don't even stop firing after I'm dead so I'm pretty sure I well within my right to slaughter half the German Reich/new Soviet Union without violating the Geneva Convention. And if somehow fantasy or scifi universes that don't even exist except in a digital medium are covered as well, I reserve the right to go to Switzerland and attach a car battery to someone's nads until they recognize the difference between real-life and the imaginary.

Warble

uh oh. I played a bunch of pandemic 2 yesterday how much of a war criminal am i from a scale of one to fucked????