Parent of Gamer Asks his Son to Honour the Geneva Conventions

Amber Robinson

Hugh Spencer, dad to 13 year old son Evan, was concerned about his son playing the shoot’em up WWII video game Call of Duty online with his friends. So he came up with an innovative solution.

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… 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.

How to encourage an interest in history and an appreciation of  teamwork, while minimising potential violent tendancies? They came to a compromise.

I asked Evan to google the Geneva Convention. Then he had to read it and then we had to discuss it. This we did. So the deal is that Evan has to fight according to the rules of the Geneva Convention. If his team-mates violate the Convention then play stops and Call of Duty goes away for a while.

Clever dad. How do you control computer game use in your home?