The Red Cross makes a better point than Chris Berg

Today's Age brings another installment of the confused ramblings of that shining son of the Institute for Public Affairs, the ever-green wit of Chris Berg.

Today he reckons that the Red Cross has made a serious blunder in denouncing virtual human-rights abuses in video games.  Apparently, they have virtually lost the plot, as some wag in the sub-editorial pool at Fairfax put it.

As with so many of his columns, Berg takes aim at a straw man.  He never really attempts to represent the view of the people he's usually denouncing, so it might be helpful to know exactly what the Red Cross said before have a deeper look at Berg's effort.  This is a quote from the Daily Bulletin of the recent Red Cross International Conference in Geneva, Switzerland:

While the Movement works vigorously to promote international humanitarian law (IHL) worldwide, there is also an audience of approximately 600 million gamers who may be virtually violating IHL. Exactly how video games influence individuals is a hotly debated topic, but for the first time, Movement partners discussed our role and responsibility to take action against violations of IHL in video games. In a side event, participants were asked: “what should we do, and what is the most effective method?” While National Societies shared their experiences and opinions, there is clearly no simple answer.
There is, however, an overall consensus and motivation to take action.

(The bold text is my emphasis.)

Anyone who works with young people from an aspirational or middle-class background will know just how deeply the development of smart technology has permeated their lives, in ways that were unimaginable even five years ago.  This is such an obvious point that it would clearly be churlish for the reasonable reader to expect Berg to take this into account.

Berg's starting point is a gleeful pounce on the apparent inconsistency of a later statement that clarified the previous one, pointing out that violations of humanitarian law happen primarily in real life.  Fair enough.  Real-world law must attend to real-world situations.  But to Berg, "the very fact that the Red Cross decided to investigate video games is deeply, almost incomprehensibly, absurd. It is about as sensible as objecting to slasher movies because murder is against the law."

I find it interesting that Berg takes movies as his primary frame of reference for discussing video games.  I think this demonstrates a fundamental lack of insight into how video games are constructed, and how they are designed to work.  Movies tell us a story, sometimes very compellingly, but the story ends when the credits roll.  Yes, some people might have gone on to commit atrocities following their first or second experience with A Clockwork Orange, but these seem to have mysteriously gone unreported.  (Perhaps people realized that the movie, like the book, was entirely fictional.)  A video game is an immersive experience, where you enter into an open-ended story.  Berg rightly observes that many gamers "will never enter a combat zone," but the question he poses (does it really merit the attention of the Red Cross?) is entirely misguided.  Video games may be fictional, but they enter into the player's consciousness in ways that a movie never could.

And here is where Berg's straw man enters.  Attempts to engage in serious discussion about the way video games normalize abuses of human rights amount to nothing more than a moral hysteria:

It was this sort of moral activism which gave us the famous film codes in the mid-20th century. These insisted married couples could not be seen in the same bed, and no evil could be depicted as ''attractive'' or ''alluring''.
And in our century, the same passion motivates the public health activists trying to ban cigarettes in movies, anti-consumerists denouncing product placement in television shows, and religious groups picketing Harry Potter book launches. Sometimes they want the offending material banned. Other times they just want to ''work with'' the transgressing filmmakers and artists. Either way, moralists believe that society should be engineered to make it more moral, more ethical, more clean. And they appear to have infiltrated the otherwise clear-headed and respected Red Cross.

I think Chris Berg is fortunate to have lived in a world where the worst thing he has to worry about are those pesky 'elfin safety' gremlins.  For myself, having had the experience of working with the children of refugee families, I see absolutely no relationship or equivalence between what the Red Cross was trying to discuss and the sorts of ignorant contortions Mr Berg airs in his column.

The fact is that war-based video games are a world unto themselves in ways that movies are not.  They can be a strong influence in building up a sense of social isolation, and create an atmosphere that normalizes behaviours that go beyond the merely anti-social.  It is well known that war games have become part of the recruitment strategy of the United States military.  In fact they have gone much further: they are now actively part of how America's wars are conducted.  The advent of robotics has brought the techniques of gaming into the very real world of war.  If you doubt me, try reading or listening to a recent presentation by P.W. Singer on The Philosopher's Zone, The Morality of Robo-Wars.  Wikileaks published a video of a drone raid on a village in Afghanistan a couple of years ago.  Many of those who saw it were horrified at the actions in the video, and the commentary of those controlling the drone flight.  What many of us failed to realize at the time was that this is not so much the future of war as its baleful, hollow present.  The people flying these machines learned their skills long before the military recruited them.  Chris Berg would do well to ask how this might be.

The Red Cross rightly points out that there is no clear answer to how video games affect individual behaviour.  The fact that a discussion is there to be had is indicative that video games do have effects on behaviour. Chris Berg is wrong to equate this with attempts to censor passive entertainments, such as movies and television.  These simply don't relate to what goes on in a video game.

To substantiate his point, Berg reels off a list of examples where various aspects of the rules of war are put in conflict with one another, based on a report from one of the Red Cross committees, titled Playing by the Rules?  I think this serves to demonstrate the sheer complexity of how people behave in the battlefield, an aspect of war that is not evident in video games.  Berg, ever the simplifier in search of an easy target, sees things differently:

... the elimination of war crimes will not be furthered one bit by changing video game content. No person has ever believed that Castle Wolfenstein is a guide to just or unjust behaviour. Yet the Red Cross still solemnly claimed that ''600 million gamers'' may be ''virtually violating'' international human rights law. If this is not an attempt to stoke a moral panic, then nothing deserves that title.

What, precisely, does this prove, Mr Berg?

A recent episode of Dexter places a game designer in the Miami homicide unit, where he is seeking to base a new video game on famous serial killer cases.  His purpose in seeking the appointment was to observe Dexter Morgan, and discover more about how he generates his insights into the cases the department deals with.  When he shows Dexter the game he has been designing, the response is instant dismissal: how can you know what it's like to be the killer?  This is totally unrealistic, not to say immoral.  Heavy stuff coming from the person who is secretly the serial killer featured in one of the available narratives of the game.

The Red Cross exists because there is a cost to war, and this cost will only escalate with the increased techologization of war.  This cost is increasingly borne by civilian populations, whether it be through living in the firing line or reaping the consequences of contaminated water supplies, lack of food, and personal crimes such as theft and rape.  War-based video games are part of a potent mixture promoting an attitude that is indifferent to this cost.

So, here the question I would put to Chris Berg: why shouldn't the Red Cross be concerned about the content of video games in light of their concern with humanitarian law?

I do hope to be a fellow of the IPA one day, just so that discussion can be had.