Human rights lawyers reviewed computer games with a war setting.

The group chose games, rather than films, because of their interactivity.

“Thus,” said the report, “the line between the virtual and real experience becomes blurred and the game becomes a simulation of real life situations on the battlefield.” BBC

This key assumption, that actions in games are morally equivalent to actions outside the game is laughably untrue. We don’t see people getting post traumatic stress disorder from computer games. Playing games is nothing like being in a war. Other studies show that gamers are not desensitised to actual war violence (stated later in the article). Therefore, the choices are not the same as those posed outside games. Games are more or less works of fiction and the choices posed to the player are almost forced outcome moral choices, since the player is not acting as “himself”, but as the character created by the game’s script writer.

I was recently hearing about the Australian Prime Minister apologising for the treatment of child migrants. This apology was presumably done on behalf of the institution that he represents i.e. the state. But the state does not feel “regret” since it is merely a concept. Even if the people comprising “the state” feel the actions were wrong, it is the individuals themselves that are responsible, not the state itself – which cannot act or think independently! Unless the individuals themselves were responsible, guilt does not even apply. Although it may cheer the victims of injustice, I am concerned that if we shunt the responsibility (and “guilt”) for wrong actions onto institutions, it diminishes the personal responsibility that each individual bears and transfers in onto a mere concept. In the extreme case, it may lead to the bystander effect, were everyone does nothing to correct injustice because it is “the state’s” responsibility. So I distrust all institutional apologies and think of them as political tools.

In agreement with our favourite existential thinkers, a new study has linked suffering with religiosity:

Gray and Wegner created a state-by-state “suffering index” and found a positive correlation between a state’s relative misery (compared to the rest of the country) and its population’s belief in God. Sciam

That’s all the news that’s fit to print.

Anti Citizen One