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Ask HN: What haven't war video games replaced actual wars?
Is there a way to make this work that would be acceptable to most countries?
- tus666 3y agoWar is a physical struggle for something material (territory), it is not a contest where the winner is awarded a prize.
- amichail 3y agoBut you can have territory be the prize.
- tus666 3y agoBut if you have a strong enough army, why wait for the outcome of a computer game? Just send in the troops and take it.
- PaulHoule 3y agoOr if the you lose the computer game but can win it by force why abide by the result of the game?
- dragonwriter 3y ago> But you can have territory be the prize. Who is the “you” that can establish and enforce this? If such a party exists, they have the power to defeat either of the nominal parties in war, and the ability to dictate results to them, and obviously they care enough about avoiding war to dedicate the resources to enforcing a resolution, so they have already rendered the war unnecessary: why would they not just decide the result and enforce that decision rather than letting a videogame do the deciding for them?
- dudul 3y agook, I lost your video game. Now make me give you the territory.
- retrocryptid 3y agoWar's not about territory. It's about enforcing your will on some other national entity. But yeah, most often that will is "I want all the benefit of your territory to devolve to whomever I say."
- JumpinJack_Cash 3y ago> > it is not a contest where the winner is awarded a prize It is assuming the characteristics of a contest, especially for wars fought in times of abundance. Roman and Persian generals would scratch their heads at the precision with which we try to avoid collateral damage, and even soldiers on the field nowadays have a band on their arm identifiying which team are they with (it's yellow for Ukraine and Red for Russia). Even going back to the days of Kosovo and Bosnia that was unfathomable.
- nonrandomstring 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Taste_of_Armageddon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Taste_of_Armageddon IIRC Bones (McCoy) calls it "Monstrous"
- krapp 3y agoBecause the purpose of war is to force political concessions from an opponent through the force of violence against property and life. The suffering and material cost are what make war an effective means of coercion. Video games don't have the same political impact that the charred corpses of Americans hung from a bridge in Fallujah do. And that's not even getting into war as a racket, its utility for propaganda and cultural control, boosting the economy and funding the military industrial complex.
- meiraleal 3y agoWars aren't accepted, they are imposed. Russia didn't ask if it was acceptable to invade Ukraine.
- dragonwriter 3y ago> Ask HN: What haven’t war video games replaced actual wars? Because the loser of the video game would rather resort to actual war rather than accept the consequence of losing a war because they lost the video game. This is also why, more relevantly to serious foreign policy efforts, international systems of peaceful resolution like the International Court of Justice haven’t replaced actual war as a means of resolving disputes.
- ftxbro 3y agoit's like asking why farm simulator hasn't replaced real farm
- c420 3y agoMilitary industrial complex lobbyists
- tshirttime 3y agoA five-year old can tell you the optimal strategy is agreeing to the video game, then showing up in a tank.