Video games frequently flaunt international human rights and criminal law without portraying the consequences, a study by Swiss human rights organisation TRIAL and youth rights advocate Pro Juventute Switzerland has unsurprisingly discovered.

Lawyers trained in international humanitarian, criminal and human rights law cast their legal eyes over twenty shooters including Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, 24: The Game, Far Cry 2 and "Metal Gear Soldier 4 [sic]" for the study titled 'Playing by the Rules.'

The study makes for slightly surreal and mildly entertaining reading as one discovers what would be the real-life consequences for fictional video game characters.

Fist-bumping Army of Two stars Salem and Rios, for example, "may be tried for their mere participation in hostilities" as "mercenaries are considered to be civilians and as such, they have no right to participate in the hostilities... Read more

An Iowa State University and National Institute on Media and the Family (NIMF) study has concluded that 8.5% of its 1,178 U.S. participants, aged 8 to 18, met the American Psychiatric Association (APA) criteria for gambling addiction, once again bringing the oft-debated topic of video game addiction into the national spotlight.

Participants were asked eleven questions regarding their gaming habits, including "Do you sometimes skip household chores in order to spend more time playing video games" and "Have you ever lied to family or friend about how much you play."

Per APA standards, exhibiting six or more symptoms constituted addiction. Furthermore, the study found that "pathological status significantly predicted poorer school performance even after controlling for sex, age, and weekly amount of video-game play," with "pathological gamers" twice as likely to have a diagnosed attention problem.

The study claims that the results are "nationally representative within 3%." However, study author and Iowa State researcher Douglas Gentile was quick to point out that the study does not confirm video games lead to "poor school performance... Read more

The founder of the Smith & Jones Centre, a game addiction clinic in Amsterdam, has turned the irony up to 11 by admitting to the BBC that games aren't actually addictive.

"These kids come in showing some kind of symptoms that are similar to other addictions and chemical dependencies," said Bakker to the Beeb. "But the more we work with these kids the less I believe we can call this addiction. What many of these kids need is their parents and their school teachers--this is a social problem."

Bakker opened the Smith & Jones Centre in 2006, and has since treated hundreds of patients who suffer from what appears to be an addiction to gaming. However, Bakker has now found that only 10% of the patients treated at his clinic had traditional drug-related addictions, leading him to believe that "addiction" may not be a relevant term to classify his patients' problems.

"It's a choice," he said. "These kids know exactly what they are doing and they just don't want to change. If no one is there to help them, then nothing will ever happen."

"If I continue to call gaming an addiction it takes away the element of choice these people have. It's a complete shift in my thinking and also a shift in the thinking of my clinic and the way it treats these people."

The American Medial Association last year backed down from classifying videogame addiction as a formal disorder following the publishing of a lengthy report on the subject. The AMA's report concluded: "As with findings on long-term aggression, there is currently insufficient research to definitively conclude that video game overuse is an addiction."

The Entertainment Consumers Association (ECA) today responded to a recent study connecting violent video games to violent behavior, saying that the authors of the report are deliberately focusing on video games in order to sensationalize the issue.

The study, performed by Iowa State University and published in the journal Pediatrics, claims that children became more aggressive after playing violent video games.

ECA president Hal Halpin responded in this release to the media:

For the better part of the past decade we--game consumers, makers, sellers and creators--have been waiting for the results of an unbiased, longitudinal and comprehensive study to be done which will inform us about the potential harmful effects of entertainment products on our children. Unfortunately, with the report published in the latest issue of Pediatrics, we remain wanting.

One of the ways in which our stance is likely very different from others in the discussion on the subject is that the ECA would encourage more and better research on the matter. The problem has been, and apparently continues to be, that the agenda of the researchers supersedes our want and need for inclusiveness of all media--not just games--for the overtly sensationalistic spin that will inevitably be employed--to the exclusion of music and movies. We remain optimistic that longitudinal research that is truly comprehensive, objective and inclusive will be performed and shared, but sadly that day has not yet come.