I was just talking to a friend of mine about violent video games, and I suggested perhaps we could temper this trend with some diplomacy-based video game, like one based upon the United Nations. (I think I have written about this idea here before.) But what would make it even better, I think, to get kids into playing it, and getting used to negotiating rather than always relying on violence to solve all of their video game conflicts, would be to make it the mandatory first level of a war game like Call of Duty 3: Modern Warfare.
As we’ve seen this week, the UN Security Council rejected a resolution on the Syrian massacre, and so nobody gets to go invade Syria and shoot all the bad guys. This is how the real world works, people. So for kids who want to play the war fighting part of a combat video game, just to make it more realistic, first they should have to draft and pass an interventional resolution with the UN Security Council. That would be the first level of every war-themed video game from now on. In order to fight, first you need a declaration of war, or a UN resolution permitting military intervention.
So then all players would have to write up their proposed resolutions, have them voted on, get them defeated, make back room deals, rewrite the resolution, get it voted on again, and again, etc., until they finally get it passed that they get to go invade and stuff. And then they get to play the fighting part of the game. This would teach children the valuable lesson that non-violent problem solving is also fun and exciting, right? No?
Okay, so maybe that’s not as exciting as it could be, but to make it more realistic, you could also have lots of scandals and stuff in the UN video game, and each player has to try to investigate and get to the bottom of these scandals. But, naturally, because it’s so accurate, the game would simply tie you up in red tape until it decided to stop your investigation and let all the malefactors get away with it because it’s bad for their image to admit to any wrongdoing: just like in the real UN! And so maybe some players would find it more exciting to find ways to scam and bilk UN funds and smuggle weapons and stuff, and they’d never even get to the fighting part, because the cyber-crime and conspiracy angles were too much fun to want to stop, especially when you’re never allowed to get caught, and you always get away with everything!
