When it comes to video games, no game is as addictive or as popular as Activision’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, in my opinion. The first-person shooter game allows players to simulate fictional World War III scenarios with stunningly realistic graphics.
Instead of studying, some student gamers spend countless hours shooting at their friends online. Ask any professor and I’m sure he or she will tell you that the class average dropped significantly when the game was released. When Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 hit store shelves Nov. 8, 2011, it quickly became the fastest selling piece of entertainment in history, making $1 billion just 16 days after its release, according to Gigwise.com. It took James Cameron’s Avatar 15 days. With a game that popular, it was only a matter of time before humanitarian groups started to question the morality of the game.
The Modern Warfare series has always pushed the limit in what is considered acceptable for video games. In 2009, controversy erupted when it was revealed that a level in Modern Warfare 2 had players acting out the role of an undercover CIA agent posing as a Russian terrorist. Players are instructed to follow the terrorist team as they proceed to massacre scores of innocent civilians. The player watches as the unarmed civilians are killed. A few people try to help those who are injured by bringing them to safety, but they are also shot by the terrorists. If you shoot one of your terrorist partners, you lose the game, but there is no penalty for shooting civilians.
The game’s developers knew this level would be controversial and gave players the option of skipping the level entirely. In the German and Japanese versions of the game, players automatically receive a game over for shooting at civilians, and in the Russian version of the game the level is absent entirely.
Modern Warfare 3 also sparked controversy when British Member of Parliament Keith Vaz said the House of Commons should be “deeply concerned about the recently released video game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, in which players engage in gratuitous acts of violence against members of the public; notes in particular the harrowing scenes in which a London Underground train is bombed by terrorists, bearing a remarkable resemblance to the tragic events of 7 July 2005,” according to GameRant.com.
Other video games have tried to push the envelope even further. The game Six Days in Fallujah, which reenacts the second battle for Fallujah that occurred during Operation Iraqi Freedom, caused so much controversy that publisher Konami refused to release the game, according to Gamasutra.com.
Delegates at the 31st International Conference of the Red Cross and Red Crescent raised concerns over the disregard of International Humanitarian Law in video games. During a workshop in Geneva, an ICRC spokesman said, “Serious violations of the laws of war can only be committed in real-life situation,” according to ITworld.com. But the ICRC could potentially put pressure on developers and governments to better regulate video games in the near future.
It is clear these games go too far, and it is completely immoral for video game developers to profit from the tragedies of terrorism by allowing people to simulate those events in their living rooms. The ICRC speaking out against these games is a step in the right direction. Consumers need to be better educated on the controversial nature of these games. Regular shooting games are fine, but there has to be a point when parents, politicians and even college students step up and say this is unacceptable.