... or have been so illegal. As you'll see in this article, pretty much all the cool shit you can do in video games breaks some kind of international law.

The taking of hostages -- even if done for reasons like "not dying" -- violates both the International Convention Against the Taking of Hostages (duh) and the Geneva Conventions. In both, the main argument is that by incapacitating an enemy enough to be able to take him hostage, you've rendered him harmless (or "hors de combat"), yet are still forcing him to participate in hostilities against his will. If you're gonna do that, then you might as well send soldiers into combat with kittens attached to their body armor, and that's a slippery slope we don't want to go down.

"But wait," you might say in the comments section, "both of those examples are from games in which you play as black ops, so they can't be charged with war crimes!" Firstly, in Black Ops, your character is part of MAC-V SOG, a special operations unit created by the government to fuck up the Vietcong, making him (legally speaking) a fully-fledged combatant. Secondly, in Splinter Cell, you work for the NSA, again making you a member of the armed forces involved in combat. Thirdly, *fart noise*. Hope that clears things up.

In Medal Of Honor and Sniper Elite, you're told to don enemy uniforms in order to get close to assassination targets. Likewise, in Modern Warfare, you and your team of hard-nosed professional killers have to take over an enemy outpost, don their clothes, and use their confusion at how their friends miraculously grew mutton chops to slaughter an entire convoy of vehicles.

Activision
"That's what you get for wearing white kicks with a black track suit, asshole."

It gets decidedly more complicated in Black Ops, however. You and your allies have to steal some uniforms to infiltrate a cosmodrome and sabotage a shuttle launch. Which would be, uh, fine ... if the game didn't follow it up with several hundred shootouts and a fuckton of explosions. Although to be fair, it'd be a bit weird if your colleagues downed tools mid-battle and started stripping, so we might let this one slide.

In both Call Of Duty and Battlefield, you're able to shoot and blow up a whole range of scenery, including statues, vacant houses, and religious buildings. In Call Of Duty 4, you even hover above a town pouring bullets into everything that breathes. Just like soldiers do in a real war, right? Yeah, if they're assholes. When towns are occupied by enemy soldiers, that doesn't mean you can indiscriminately fire on whatever building you fancy. Because, surprise, you might kill a whole bunch of civilians if you do so. And the same rules also apply to the aforementioned statues, vacant houses, and religious buildings; if it isn't a military objective, you don't have carte blanche to go all Michael Bay on it.

The weird thing is that Call Of Duty 4 does acknowledge the protection afforded to religious buildings in wartime -- you can straight-up fail one mission by firing on a church. It seems they stopped reading the rulebook there.

Electronic Arts
"Actually, your character is a Highlander and thus can't fight on sacred ground."

That's still not as bad as what you're tasked with destroying in Battlefield 4: a goddamn dam. If you're successful, the dam ruptures and floods the region, which means that the enemies who were coming to kill you drown. In sadder news, however, you're returning home to a war crimes trial, because your explosion-boner also caused the deaths of every civilian living downstream.

If you do this correctly in a game, you get an achievement. If you do it in real life, on the other hand, the only thing you unlock is the ability to get court-martialed.

It's a big no-no to enter a war zone with the intention of murdering everything in your path. On the face of it, that's odd because ... well, guns don't shoot out puppies, do they? Or least, they don't yet (we're still waiting on the patent for the "pup-action shotgun"). Whilst it's a given that one or two or 47 enemies will die, it's expected that soldiers will show mercy to anyone who requires it, whether that's because they're injured, surrendering, or otherwise incapacitated. This is what is referred to in military circles as "not being a total psychopath."

Electronic Arts
"To be fair, by the time we noticed the white flags, they had mostly turned red."

Movies and games have taught us that declaring that you don't give a damn about mercy or giving your enemies "quarter" makes you a badass. In reality, it makes you sound like you're a murdering dick -- the only known cure for which is a long spell in prison.

Gases aren't the only thing proving that these games are full of shit. Remember when we told you about how flamethrowers are totally legal (if a little shitty)? That's true, except for when you use them to set enemies alight. Let's not forget: Flamethrowers were only supposed to be used on the battlefield for clearing out bunkers and trenches through oxygen deprivation. Using one as a weapon falls under the rules outlawing weapons which cause superfluous suffering. So the guy who recorded this sick compilation is basically serving like 5,000 years: