Wednesday, June 4, 2014

Gaming at Home, Human Rights Abroad

Human rights games are well-established educational tools.  In fact, current on-line offerings through the UN include games entitled Against All Odds and Darfur is Dying. But as co-editor Lesley Wexler writes, recent advocacy goes farther, urging that commercial video games, reaching a huge number of consumers, comply with human rights norms.  Lesley writes: 

For a long time, the human rights literature regarding video gaming focused on the relationship between of violent video games and unjustified violence. While evidence for the a direct relationship between gaming and violence and its most recent incarnation of the so-called “playstation mentality” in drone warfare is scant at best, interested groups are now turning to video gaming as an educational opportunity to teach and instill respect for international human rights and humanitarian law.  For instance, the ICRC (International Commission of the Red Cross) has called for first person shooter games to include penalties for laws of war and human rights law violations. By way of example, a first person shooter might lose points for violating the Convention against Torture or might lose the support of his allies for violating the Geneva Conventions.

While most of the major video game companies have remained silent on such proposals, others such as Bohemia have already started developing such games as teaching tools for modern militaries. As part of this effort, the ICRC and Bohemia just launched a contest for a virtual military game in which “developers could create a special game module where providing first-aid to a wounded enemy would be rewarded.” While such tools for militaries and the public are still largely in their infancy, I look forward to the empirical assessments of the potentially positive effects of video gaming and whether these differ from the existing conclusions about their negative effects.

 

https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/human_rights/2014/06/gaming-at-home-human-rights-abroad.html

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