Don't shoot the civilians. This is something military games have been telling us for many years. I remember my first go on Taito's explosive arcade title Operation Wolf – it was the late-80s and this frenzied blast-'em-up, with its jungle environment and hostage rescue missions, was clearly gunning for a generation of Rambo II fanatics. It even let you control the action with an Uzi-style sub-machine gun bolted to the cabinet. But what it wouldn't let you do was kill passing civilians: collateral damage of this sort took a big chunk off your health bar.

Of course, this was really more about mechanics than ethics: players were being tested on their reactions and visual awareness, and failure meant a reduction in game time rather than a few moments' reflection on innocent victims. These days, if you accidentally (or otherwise) shoot a civilian or comrade in a military shooter, you'll probably get a 'mission failed' message and a one-way trip back to the last checkpoint. What you won't get is a military tribunal and a dishonorable discharge.

In a BBC news report earlier this week, however, Francois Senechaud from the International Committee of the Red Cross told a reporter that, due to the increasing verisimilitude between first-person shooters and real-life combat, games should start to abide by the international laws of armed conflict. "Video games that represent contemporary battlefields are very close to reality," he said. "It's difficult to make out the difference between real footage and the footage you get from video games."

What the Red Cross wants to see then is the player being penalised for carrying out such actions as willfully killing civilians or torturing enemy combatants, both of which are punishable under international law. A Q&A document posted on the organisation's website explains:

The ICRC is suggesting that as in real life, these games should include virtual consequences for people's actions and decisions. Gamers should be rewarded for respecting the law of armed conflict and there should be virtual penalties for serious violations of the law of armed conflict, in other words war crimes.

And importantly it adds:

Our intention is not to spoil player's enjoyment by for example, interrupting the game with pop-up messages listing legal provisions or lecturing gamers on the law of armed conflict. We would like to see the law of armed conflict integrated into the games so that players have a realistic experience and deal first-hand with the dilemmas facing real combatants on real battlefields.

The ICRC says it is now working directly with the developers of modern military simulations and the BBC report contains an interview with Marek Spanel of Bohemia Interactive, creator of the Arma series, who claims the studio's games will now be implementing the suggestions.

Arma 2: The Red Cross believes that as video games become ever more realistic, they should also adhere to international rules of warfare.

Feasibility studied

The question is, how feasible are the ICRC's aims and will players really take on board the lessons about humanitarian law? It is difficult to imagine a Call of Duty or Battlefield title in which shooting a civilian leads to a mission where the player is detained in a military prison for several months before being tried and sentenced. But then if the consequences of illegal operations are subsumed into the gameplay mechanics – i.e. shoot civilian, fail mission – the player will usually read these instances in ludic terms. Within the action, civilians are are not people who deserve humane treatment, they're walking fail states to be avoided in the pursuit of success.

We do often see the consequences of player actions being threaded into gameplay, but this tends to be in the adventure genre. Titles like Fable, Heavy Rain, Walking Dead and Dishonored all provide different paths for a player depending on their moral decisions during play – and because the action is combined with a confirming narrative element, the meaning and weight of transgression can come through. The idea of an action adventure that put the player into a series of defining humanitarian situations allowing the story to spin-off in the player's moral direction is interesting – but it's hugely unlikely in the action cinema world of the modern shooter.

Furthermore, the ICRC statement makes clear that it is not interested in other genres – it is concentrating on combat games that depict and concentrate on contemporary battlefields. So how can players be made accountable for their actions beyond simple gameplay devices? How do you move beyond the simple message, "Mission failed, you have broken international law and will spend the next ten years in prison. Re-start mission?"

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2: shootouts often occur in areas where civilians are in the line of fire.

Moral dilemmas

There have been two stand-out examples. In Modern Warfare 2's notorious No Russian mission a US soldier is embedded with a Russian terrorist organisation and must take part in a mass killing at an airport. Success means blending in with the terror squad, and it's up to the player to decide whether that extends as far as shooting civilians. The sequence was brave, but also clumsily handled, exploitative and incongruous; however, it did place the player in a position where many felt they genuinely had to weigh up their moral proclivities with the demands of the gameplay mission.

Much more intriguing, though, is the scene in Yager Development's criminally overlooked shooter, Spec Ops: The Line, where three soldiers are stranded in a wrecked Dubai facing a crowd of angry locals. In a scene reminiscent of the Black Hawk Down incident, they must decide whether to shoot their way out or face death. Although actually, it's more interesting than that, because the first shot fired sends the group fleeing – something the player won't know until they commit to pulling the trigger. And vitally, those who point their gun in the air before firing get the same dispersal effect without casualties. In the heat of the game, facing a furious mob, many players will take the lethal option – but they sure as hell think about it. It is these sorts of split-second decisions that really suggest something about the complexities of combat.

But then, of course, these examples offer more than a mere punishment mechanic – which is what the ICRC seems to be asking for. If all transgressions automatically lead to failure, it's a zero-sum game that invites only functional thinking. Players need to be able to live with the consequences of actions in more subtle ways. In both Heavy Rain and Walking Dead, players face lethal moral decisions that don't end the game, or even have ludic consequences for the player, but yet play on the mind and colour the experience. The game may be over but the choices remain – and by ending chapter of Waking Dead with a guide to the actions of other players, developer Telltale Games cleverly addresses and confronts the process.

Often the most affecting moments are those hidden in momentary or supplementary features. The ability to name characters in titles like Cannon Fodder and XCOM, for example, provided a heightened level of emotional attachment for many players. The way we learn little snippets about the lives of the characters passing through our border gates in Papers, Please. The way that mobile phone hacking lets us see into the personal problems of potential targets in Watch Dogs. In games, moral depth is much more about humanisation than it is about punishment. The latter is too intricately tied in with atavistic gameplay systems for us to extrapolate anything deeper than game over.

We are, though, surely heading into an era where gamers will have to take greater responsibility for their actions – if only because the visual fidelity will be there to splatter our violent failings across the screen in HD detail. In Operation Wolf, accidentally machine gunning a glitching sprite that vaguely resembled a non-military human could be easily divorced from the reality of armed conflict. In Battlefield 5 or Call of Duty 27, it may not be so simple to dismiss the sight of a photo-realistic person lying in the dust, eyes rolling back, limbs spasming.

Battlefield 4 – the siege of Shanghai level

I don't even think that's what the ICRC wants – it doesn't want moral doubt to arise purely through aesthetics, it wants designers to think about international law, and about how warfare should operate. It wants developers to say, in this mission you must fly an armed drone over a school where terrorists are known to be hiding, and you must decide whether to open fire. And it wants players to understand the consequences of such an action, not just in terms of the score or progress, but in terms of the real world of warfare – the one that all military games reflect and fetishise.

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