How many people have you killed in your valiant attempt to end World War III? Among all the countless hours of game play worldwide, billions and billions of virtual people have met their ends during various editions of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and other first-person shooter games.

Now, the International Committee of the Red Cross is considering a call to video game designers to build international humanitarian law into their games.

I’ve never played Call of Duty or a similar such game … but I happen to be the Director of the Forsythe Family Program on Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs at the University of Nebraska. So, while I don’t have any authority whatsoever when it comes to first-person shooter games, I do know a little something about humanitarian law.

Undoubtedly, it’s all in good fun to run around a virtual urban battlefield, spraying a hail of bullets at anything that moves or torturing a prisoner to extract information. But one has to wonder whether the enjoyment of the game would be decreased so substantially if players were made to adhere to international law instead.

And, if so, what does that say about the players?