I think that, while it makes for a fair enough educational springboard to use Call of Duty or whatever to talk to your kid about the Geneva Conventions, it also has the slightly off-putting side-effect of teaching your kids to take the content of a video game at face value.
"Stop playing when one of your squadmates violates the Geneva Conventions" is about as awesome in this context as saying "Turn off Apocalypse Now the moment someone violates the Geneva Conventions."
Video games are all about various deliberately designed interactive systems, and the play that comes out of those systems intersecting with the player and (in some cases) with each other. Asking your kid to stop playing a game when it does something it has no control over (or awareness of) like "violating the Geneva Conventions" seems like its breeding a bit of ignorance into the whole thing. It's like yelling at someone in a war film for shooting at a child... it won't change the outcome.
If someone actually used the power of interactivity and systemic NPC AI present in modern gaming to make a game which was aware of the Geneva Conventions and was able to reward players for adhering to them either through their own actions or how they directed their units, and presented notable moral choices surrounding that stuff, that would be I think a pretty interesting achievement.
Other than raising awareness of the presence of the Geneva Conventions in his son's mind (which is worthwhile in and of itself), I don't know what this lesson will teach other than incorrect side-effects like potentially misrepresenting how soldiers behave and think in real life (eg: in real life they have human brains, and are doing things other than creating a cinematic experience for the player, which is all they're there for in most war video games), and misrepresenting how interactive systems work and the potential they hold. It's very noble, and has definite merit and is also a clever idea, but it does also seem like another case of parents not understanding what games are, and trying to assign their own values to them which end up missing at least part of the point.
It would be interesting if they could build that into the game and keep it fun. I think I would enjoy avoiding the Hague, or working to bring in the violators.
I see FPS games as an opportunity to take my self-righteous bastard alter-ego for a walk. If I don't take him often enough through art I might actually be kinda confused in real-life situations.
Look at the success of games like GTA. These games allow people the ability to do things that they otherwise would not be permitted to do in real life, all without consequences.
While obviously not a practical agreement (to stop playing if someone else plays the game normally is ridiculous), it is a tactful approach to dealing with concerns about desensitization to actual violence, and an interesting exercise in metagaming.
I would suggest that parents do more to familiarize themselves with the actual nature of the games, though. They only make use of the imagery of reality, and don't support a range of actions remotely approaching reality, so many of the rules that make sense in reality make no sense in the world of the game. Adding arbitrary rules can just as easily strip away the enjoyment of the game as it can add to it--it depends heavily on the game and the other players.
This kind of lesson would work better if tailored more closely to the set of interactions available in the game world, so that the player can continue to play the game effectively, but must be conscious of additional restrictions--which is really what the Geneva Conventions are about. The ideal is for the child to both learn something and enjoy the experience.
At the danger of swerving offtopic, the Geneva Conventions only apply in the case that mutual signatories go to war. Regardless of what the LPOTUS did or didn't do, that is not a factually valid criticism.
Actually, (I was looking this up earlier), it applies in the case that a signatory goes to war and the other side either a) is a signatory, or b) follow the Geneva conventions.
Not that this changes the nature of the comment. It is a good point that the Geneva conventions do not protect nearly as much as people seem to think.
I don't know if "losing Call of Duty" is comparable to potentially winding up in The Hague.
I'd call this good parenting. Obviously nobody gives a shit about game characters, but here's a dad who clearly cares about how gaming affects his son's perspective. I don't like my (9 year old) son play overtly violent games at all, so this kid is getting more flexibility than many others.
"Stop playing when one of your squadmates violates the Geneva Conventions" is about as awesome in this context as saying "Turn off Apocalypse Now the moment someone violates the Geneva Conventions."
Video games are all about various deliberately designed interactive systems, and the play that comes out of those systems intersecting with the player and (in some cases) with each other. Asking your kid to stop playing a game when it does something it has no control over (or awareness of) like "violating the Geneva Conventions" seems like its breeding a bit of ignorance into the whole thing. It's like yelling at someone in a war film for shooting at a child... it won't change the outcome.
If someone actually used the power of interactivity and systemic NPC AI present in modern gaming to make a game which was aware of the Geneva Conventions and was able to reward players for adhering to them either through their own actions or how they directed their units, and presented notable moral choices surrounding that stuff, that would be I think a pretty interesting achievement.
Other than raising awareness of the presence of the Geneva Conventions in his son's mind (which is worthwhile in and of itself), I don't know what this lesson will teach other than incorrect side-effects like potentially misrepresenting how soldiers behave and think in real life (eg: in real life they have human brains, and are doing things other than creating a cinematic experience for the player, which is all they're there for in most war video games), and misrepresenting how interactive systems work and the potential they hold. It's very noble, and has definite merit and is also a clever idea, but it does also seem like another case of parents not understanding what games are, and trying to assign their own values to them which end up missing at least part of the point.