If you ran a country like a video game would you be guilty of war crimes?

I play EVE Online, so yes, I’d be in the Hague for war crimes. There’s nothing quite like using stealth tactics to ambush a helpless victim with your friends.

Is this question for war games or any game in general?

If they managed to catch any of the monster from Silent Hill alvie then yes, I’d be.

It depends of course on the game. There’s Sims & there’s Fast & Furious.

I went to a social justice conference once, and they did an exercise where we split off into groups, each of which was a country, and each group had to come up with a pitch to try to convince others to join it. When it was our turn, I had our group stand up, walk over to the largest group, and sit down with them, declaring that they were now part of our country. The organizers of the exercise said we weren’t allowed to do that. I told them, “So stop us.”

The whole thing turned into an angry argument where they tried to tell me that what I was doing wasn’t what they were trying to demonstrate, and my response was, “Yes, exactly.”

They didn’t get it or appreciate it and I was treated with hostility for the rest of the conference but the fact is that at the end of the day, “Power comes from the barrel of a gun,” to quote Mao Tse Tung.

Video games are actually pretty good at demonstrating the ugly verities of realpolitik. Since computers are used routinely to simulate game theory models, this makes sense. The yearly competition for Prisoner’s Dilemma expert systems shows that having a vicious streak is a very good survival strategy. For many years “tit for tat” was the most successful strategy; then a rival which used “tit for tat” – but occasionally betrayed a too-cooperative partner – proved itself even more successful than “tit for tat.”

Very good answer. It deserves better than a mere GA.