Journal 14, November 29th

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-10404450-17.html?tag=mncol;txt

According to a study by two Swiss human rights organizations, the Trial and Pro Juventute, a number of video games portray acts that in real life would be considered war crimes and violate international human rights laws. The study was interested in discovering if playing these games would make a person more inclined to break international law including International Humanitarian Law, the basics of International Human Rights Law, and International Criminal Law. The study involved allowing a group of young gamers to play twenty different games while supervised by three attorneys to identify if any actions the game players were making would be illegal in a real world setting. The conductors of the study said that it was not their intent to ban the games or alter them in any way but to work with developers in order to insure that future games would take international human rights into consideration before releasing them to the public. The study revealed that shooter games were the most prominent genre to neglect current human rights laws in their representation of realistic scenarios. Without any type of standard for including inhumane acts such as desecrating monuments, harming civilians, and torture gamers are allowed to experience actions that would be severely punished even in times of war. The groups who organized the study recommend that developers take special care to avoid allowing players to violate international human rights even in a game setting and in areas that reflect times of war and battle scenes.

Even though games have a notorious record for exposing players to violent and often criminal situations there is little evidence to support that this exposure correlates to the players' actions outside of the game. It has been cited on multiple occasions that games like movies are a form of creative expression that cannot be stifled due to freedom of expression rights. This however does not mean that a developer is unable to relay its message without the depiction of war crimes. There is more than one way to tell a story and there is often a perfectly acceptable way that does not allow the breaking of international law in a game setting.

Reference:
http://allpsych.com/journal/violentmedia.html