Red vs. Blue reference.
So the International Red Cross (not the same thing as the American Red Cross) is apparently claiming that war crimes in video games can lead to real ones. I am not so stupid as to deny that play influences habit—why the hell do you think you evolved the capacity, you dumb ape?—but this feels bogus to me. First off, what war-crimes? The only one I can think of is that one of those series that used to be a World War II series but then set games in the modern (or next Sunday, AD) era, used to let you kill civilians without a consequence. And apparently some mouth-breathing drool-soaked halfwitted reprobates among their fanbase were mad that a later version made it impossible.
The other things the Red Cross asserts are war-crimes featured in games, are murdering POWs, torturing, and using weapons "that inflict unnecessary injury". Only, uh, what games are they talking about? There aren't a whole lot of games where you even take POWs, and I don't know of a single one where you torture anyone. As for unnecessary injury, there's a defined military standard for that: "Is the opposition neutralized, without excessive damage to civilians or infrastructure?" If the answer is yes, the injury was necessary. Yeah, I wouldn't want my bits blown off by a Bouncing Betty either, but then, I wouldn't want to die instantly and painlessly from a sniper-rifle headshot, either. As Tycho once said, "World War 2 was not some kind of Axis Vs. Allies bake-off."
Second off, though you could probably demonstrate a correlation, though not a strong one, between violent video games and a general callousness toward violence, the fact of the matter is that video game violence is not, generally, very realistic. Some more or less realistic blood splats around, and a ragdoll-physics dummy flops over. Bungie actually considered having the Needler's effects look realistic (guess what happens when seven crystal needles explode in someone's flesh), but decided against it, because it would be grotesque, detracting from the horrificness of the Flood, and would probably give Halo an AO rating. Even the games that do go a more graphic route (Team Fortress 2, for instance, and indeed the whole Half Life series) aren't very realistic. When someone gets blown to bits in TF2, or sliced in half with a giant antigravity-propelled saw blade in Half Life, it just looks like a GI Joe's been taken apart (and then splashed with strawberry Kool Aid). Real dismemberment is a lot messier than that, and many of the parts of the human body don't look quite the same without the other parts attached to them. Plus, most of them have things, and fluids, bundled up inside them: these are not generally depicted as flying out, even by the most violent of games.
Seriously: forget violent video games, even fans of torture-porn and slasher flicks (pretending there's still a distinction between those two) nevertheless lose their lunch at the scene of car accidents. There's a big difference between real life and any simulation, sorry, and between your inborn tendency to empathize with conspecifics and at least two millennia of cultural conditioning, nobody likes seeing that kind of thing. No, the main reason soldiers don't throw up, despite hacking or blasting each other to bits, is adrenaline. Being able to perform unauthorized modification to other life-forms' anatomy is a key part of the fight-or-flight response, and so adrenaline tends to suppress the mirror neurons that play a key role in your ability to empathize, mostly since empathizing with critters who want to kill you results in you getting killed. Thus, it's evolutionarily counter-indicated to remember that Russians love their children too, if a Russian's trying to make your children orphans. I'm sorry if that bothers you; maybe you should find some other planet's biosphere to be a member of.
On the other hand, I actually would be interested in FPS games incorporating a karma-type system, as I mentioned here. Reach has a little bit of one (you die if you kill a civilian in New Alexandria), and all the Halo games will have the computer-controlled characters attack you if you do enough team-killing, but it'd be cool if someone came up with a way to work that more fully into the overall story. A game where you don't just die for violating ROE, but where doing so affects (namely, impedes) your progress would be pretty cool. I don't know how well it'd sell, but it might appeal to the people (apparently a minority, have I told you lately that I hate you all?) who actually play through a game's story mode before hopping online to do some teabagging.
Incidentally, I fully endorse the Red Cross's hesitancy about having their logo on health packs in games, although not for their reasons (hey idiots, since you provide so much medical care on battlefields, you're already inextricably linked to war and violence; put yer big-girl pants on and deal with it). I endorse it because it forces game designers to get creative, that's why Reach and Combat Evolved Anniversary both had what appears to be a "hospital" symbol on theirs. Personally I think they should've put the Optican logo on there, but it doesn't exactly scream "health!".
Speaking of medical symbols, it is not a mistake that American medics use the caduceus of Hermes rather than the rod of Asclepius. The guy who first put the insignia on their uniform was classically educated, he knew what he was about. No, apparently he used the caduceus because it was the flag flown by merchant ships (Hermes being god of merchants), and thus meant "noncombatant!".
Huh, and here I thought it had something to do with Paracelsus, the Hermetic alchemist who invented modern pharmacology.
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