I think that, while it makes for a fair enough educational springboard to use Call of Duty or whatever to talk to your kid about the Geneva Conventions, it also

I think that, while it makes for a fair enough educational springboard to use Call of Duty or whatever to talk to your kid about the Geneva Conventions, it also has the slightly off-putting side-effect of teaching your kids to take the content of a video game at face value. "Stop playing when one of your squadmates violates the Geneva Conventions" is about as awesome in this context as saying "Turn off Apocalypse Now the moment someone violates the Geneva Conventions." Video games are all about various deliberately designed interactive systems, and the play that comes out of those systems intersecting with the player and (in some cases) with each other. Asking your kid to stop playing a game when it does something it has no control over (or awareness of) like "violating the Geneva Conventions" seems like its breeding a bit of ignorance into the whole thing. It's like yelling at someone in a war film for shooting at a child... it won't change the outcome. If someone actually used the power of interactivity and systemic NPC AI present in modern gaming to make a game which was aware of the Geneva Conventions and was able to reward players for adhering to them either through their own actions or how they directed their units, and presented notable moral choices surrounding that stuff, that would be I think a pretty interesting achievement. Other than raising awareness of the presence of the Geneva Conventions in his son's mind (which is worthwhile in and of itself), I don't know what this lesson will teach other than incorrect side-effects like potentially misrepresenting how soldiers behave and think in real life (eg: in real life they have human brains, and are doing things other than creating a cinematic experience for the player, which is all they're there for in most war video games), and misrepresenting how interactive systems work and the potential they hold. It's very noble, and has definite merit and is also a clever idea, but it does also seem like another case of parents not understanding what games are, and trying to assign their own values to them which end up missing at least part of the point.