Law in Video Games

Video Games are filled with legal imagery. 

Since the release of the first-ever commercial arcade game, Computer Space, in 1971 , the video game industry has taken the world by storm and grown exponentially. It is one of the most popular and most lucrative entertainment medium in the world notably because of the variety of genres and themes that it encompasses. From e-sport games to shooter games, passing by survival horror role play games, there’s a video game for everybody. Stories and images about the law are regularly included within these games and, in turn, influence their audience’s legal consciousness.

Legal Personhood

In Detroit: Become Human, the player is immersed in a futuristic Detroit, United States, in 2038 in which technology has evolved to a point where human-like androids are everywhere. They speak, move, and behave like human beings but are only machines whose main purpose is to serve humans. The player gets to play three distinct androids and see a world at the brink of chaos throught their eyes. Although not phrased in legal terms, the main interrogation of the game centers around the concept of personhood, and by extension legal personhood. It encourages players to think about what makes us human and thus worthy of having rights and being protected by the legal system.

International Humanitarian Law (IHL) / The Law of War

International humanitarian law (IHL) is “a set of rules which seek, for humanitarian reasons, to limit the effects of armed conflict”. It is a legal framework applicable to situations of armed conflict and occupation. At the heart of IHL, there are the following two main principles: protection of those who are not, or no longer, taking part in fighting; restriction on the means of warfare (weapons and methods). These two principles give rise to several rules which must be respected during the conduct of hostilities such as the obligation to limit harms to civilians, to treat humanly all persons who are no longer taking part in hostilities, to not attack protected places and objects identified through clearly recognized symbols like the red cross or the red crescent, etc. 

In 2009, Swiss NGOs first examined IHL in video games, followed by a 2012 ICRC study that deepened the discussion. Both reports conducted an analysis of several first-person shooter video games portraying combat situations like Call of Duty, Arma and Battlefield and tried to spot instances of violation of IHL rules in the games as well as the eventual consequences of these violations on the players. They both made similar findings: most of the games analysed contained massive violations of IHL norms, which were either awarded or ignored in the course of the game play. The most common imagery of the law of war depicted in video games is its total absence, thus vehiculating the image that war is a law-free zone where everything is permitted for the sake of victory. 

This portrayal has been deemed, by the International Committee of the Red Cross, to be particularly dangerous and worrying because of the interconnections between the video game industry and military apparatus in countries like the United States of America, for example, in which video games are sometimes used as a recruitment tool for the army and where the video game industry regularly receives input from ex-military personnel who served on contemporary battlefields to craft their games and make them increasingly realistic.

This demonstrates quite well the influence that popular culture can have on the law and vice versa, as the absence of IHL norms in virtual battlefields has been conceived by a part of the legal community as a danger to the very application and respect for IHL norms on real battlefields.