VICE’s Motherboard ran a spectacularly infantile, desperately ill-informed article yesterday, making the ludicrous claim that Murder in VR Should be Illegal (disclaimer: I have written for Motherboard). I was going to do another deconstruction of the argument, detailing the numerous ways in which the playwright who doesn’t appear to understand video games is entirely wrong, but it got me thinking – which, as we all know, is the most important thing any poorly constructed argument can accomplish. Making murder illegal in virtual reality is as dumb as a box of rocks, but if you think about it, there are aspects of video games that should be cause for police intervention! Here are the five I could think of off the top of my head, along with honorable mentions.

1. The AWP (Arctic Warfare Police), aka the Arctic Warfare Magnum.

It’s hard to believe, but Counter-Strike has been a thing since 1999. I remember watching my fellow Team Fortress Classic players slowly dwindle as this hot new mod came out, and it has been dominating multiplayer gaming ever since. In a multiplayer game where one shot can kill you, tension is ramped up big time. Spending your hard earned Counter-Strike cash on full body armor helps mitigate the damage for the most part, and gives you a chance to strike back even if you are shot first, for the most part. Unless that player is using the infamous AWP. Then you die if you get shot in the toe.

I will admit I have not played much Global Offensive so I’m not operating on the most recent information and this may not be the case anymore, but for years I remember nearly every Counter-Strike game would follow the same formula: after a couple fun rounds once everyone got enough money to afford an AWP, the battle would degenerate into a war of dueling sniper rifles, with people taking turns peeking out from cover to fire off a shot. It didn’t help that I’m the kind of player who loves rushing in with an AK.

It’s kind of crazy when you think about it. In a game adored largely due to its quasi-realistic damage model, the most prized weapon in the war is a bolt action rifle.

Honorable mentions: Camping and Knife Running and Bunny Hopping.

2. The Bubble Hearth

Again I’m operating on older information here as I haven’t played WoW recently, but as a PvP-loving rogue back in my day, there was nothing sadder than flawlessly executing a gank on an unsuspecting Paladin, battling him down to within a sliver of life, and watching him “kek” while invoking his Get Out of Jail Free card, escaping certain death. And there was nothing you could do about it. The worst part about it was the inevitable smugness which accompanied it. “You have totally defeated me and I am running away in shame, so I will now laugh at you!” Damn Paladins.

Honorable mention: Attractive horde races.

3. Questioning Whether Video Games are Art

I’m all for free speech. I’m so pro-free speech that I believe people should be allowed to shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater. But anyone who asks this stupid question, almost invariably invoking the poor ghost of Roger Ebert, should be thrown in jail and never be allowed to write another insipid hot take.

Honorable mention: Writing listicles like this one.

4. The Dream Sequence

There is no more tired (pun kind of intended) and lazy plot device. Writers fall back on the dream sequence when they want to instill a sense of foreboding, artificial drama. “What does it mean?” the player is supposed to ask. “My Commander Shepard is running through the fog, looking for a child I saw die. I can get a sense for Shepard’s agony as I run through this fog so painfully slowly that I want to toss my damn controller across the room.”

Sometimes they’ll rely on the myth that if you die in your dreams you die in real life, and give you an action sequence that you must complete. It’s not true. I’ve died in a dream once. I fell off a cliff and landed and I was dead. I distinctly remember laying there thinking, “welp, I’m dead.” There was nothing left to do at that point in the dream but wake up, slightly freaked out by my own death but oddly satisfied in my newfound mythbusting prowess.

Honorable mention: The player-is-drunk-or-drugged screen shake effect.

5. Not Murdering, or Won’t Someone Think of the Children?!

Child murder is bad, I guess. Therefore, in video games where we murder so many people that they have to code it so that their bodies have to disappear lest we be buried under a million corpses, we are often not allowed to kill children. I do understand why designers don’t allow child murder. Look at all the real life killings that get blamed on video games as it is; who wants to be the developer that gets blamed for child killings? But we have to either accept that video games don’t equate to real life actions (they don’t, despite the current wave of hipster think pieces) or not. If they don’t (and they don’t, Motherboard! Stop it with the articles already!), then let’s accept that and move on. That damn kid in Skyrim deserves it and everyone knows it!

Honorable mention: Escort missions.