HACKER Q&A
📣 amichail

What haven't war video games replaced actual wars?


Is there a way to make this work that would be acceptable to most countries?


  👤 nonrandomstring Accepted Answer ✓
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Taste_of_Armageddon

IIRC Bones (McCoy) calls it "Monstrous"


👤 krapp
Because the purpose of war is to force political concessions from an opponent through the force of violence against property and life. The suffering and material cost are what makes war an effective means of coercion. Video games don't have the same political impact that the charred corpses of Americans hung from a bridge in Fallujiah do.

👤 tus666
War is a physical struggle for something material (territory), it is not a contest where the winner is awarded a prize.

👤 dragonwriter
> Ask HN: What haven’t war video games replaced actual wars?

Because the loser of the video game would rather resort to actual war rather than accept the consequence of losing a war because they lost the video game. This is also why, more relevantly to serious foreign policy efforts, international systems of peaceful resolution like the International Court of Justice haven’t replaced actual war as a means of resolving disputes.


👤 meiraleal
Wars aren't accepted, they are imposed. Russia didn't ask if it was acceptable to invade Ukraine.

👤 ftxbro
it's like asking why farm simulator hasn't replaced real farm

👤 c420
Military industrial complex lobbyists

👤 tshirttime
A five-year old can tell you the optimal strategy is agreeing to the video game, then showing up in a tank.