Parent of Gamer Asks His Son to Honor the Geneva Conventions

Last week, I had lunch with my friend, Hugh Spencer, a writer and designer of museum and public educational exhibitions. He told me an amazing story about his son and games, and I asked him to write it up for Boing Boing:

“This is a picture of my amazing youngest son Evan. He’s 13, he’s holding a game controller and looking at a glowing screen and he’s doing what he does a lot of–diving into digital realms of adventure.

His latest favourite game is Call of Duty–which he plays online with his friends. Evan’s wanting to play C of D was something of a challenge for us. It’s rated T and he’s only just a teenager, and point-and-shoot first person games worry me some. Evan is relentlessly reasonable sometimes–he outlined why he wanted to play the game and he was pretty upfront why he knew my “parent-sense” would start tingling. So I had to be reasonable too. I looked at the game. I’ve done a lot of research for military museums so I could tell that the content was accurate–but there was lots of shooting and blowing things up. But there was a fair bit of that during World War II. So it was undeniable that Evan was experiencing history and there was this teamwork factor…

So we compromised. Well, sort of.

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