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Comment by bingidingi | Hacker News Reader

The argument is that diluting the mark can cause confusion, and that confusion can cause death.

"Videogames cause death" feels like a bad-faith oversimplification of the point they're trying to make. It's understandable, as video games are often wrongly attributed as creating violence... but that's not what they're saying.

They don't want video games to stop representing medics, for example... they just don't want the red cross to be synonymous with health, because it's much more specific than that.

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> The argument is that diluting the mark can cause confusion, and that confusion can cause death. "Videogames cause death" feels like a bad-faith oversimplification.

I was being terse, not bad faith. In particular, "videogames cause death" is not a less robust argument than "trademark appropriation can cause confusion which can cause death". Moreover, I'm specifically being charitable and saying "I don't think this is what TFA means because it's so ridiculous, but I can't identify a better likely meaning".

But apparently there are a lot of people who think the "trademark violation => death" (again, brevity, not mockery) argument is serious, so I invite them to support their position with examples.

If I start putting the toilet symbol on doors without toilets behind them, eventually you're going to stop expecting toilets behind the door. You don't need an example to know that.

This also isn't about trademark, the red cross is outlined in the Geneva Conventions as a symbol with a specific meaning. That meaning is specific because it's meant to protect aid workers as neutral parties in conflict.

> If I start putting the toilet symbol on doors without toilets behind them, eventually you're going to stop expecting toilets behind the door. You don't need an example to know that.

Good grief. Can you think of a reason why your analogy about changing how a symbol is used in real life might not apply to a debate about how symbols are used in fiction?

Let me offer up an analogy that isn't completely and obviously broken:

If you watch enough Doctor Who, does it make you believe that real life police boxes are actually camouflaged time machines?

It's about the ubiquity in fiction. If every police box in fiction was a time machine, it stands to reason someone may be confused when encountering a real police box for the first time.

The misuse of the red cross, especially in video games, is rampant to the point that the Red Cross is worried about confusion.

There's additional issue with the fact that video games are very common, but warzones and disaster areas less so. So it's quite possible the fictional association, if overused, could redefine the real-life usage for many people. We already see some of this in the comment section... many people don't understand the difference between "health" as a concept and the red cross as an element protected by international law.

It seems reasonable to try and claw that meaning back.

> It's about the ubiquity in fiction. If every police box in fiction was a time machine, it stands to reason someone may be confused when encountering a real police box for the first time.

This is the silliest thing I've ever heard, and not every fictional red cross symbol is a threat anyway. This whole thing seems at least as ridiculous as the moral panic about violent video games in the early 2000s, except that I kind of expect ridiculous moral panics from conservative parents not so much from the official communications arm of one of the largest NGOs in the world. Absent any actual evidence I think we're just going to have to agree to disagree.

Asking works of fiction to stop using a symbol doesn't seem at all like a moral panic to me. What they're saying is "this symbol has a specific meaning, and it's important to us that it's not diluted."

They're not calling for video games to be banned or even re-labeled, they're just trying to prevent the red cross from losing the intended meaning (which comes with an international treaty intended to protect aid workers)... it seems like the method of applying this mostly consists of asking nicely.

I wasn't clear. I'm not suggesting the RC are engaging in moral panic, but that their reasoning (the absurd proposed causal relationship and complete and utter lack of evidence) resembles a particular phenomenon which happened to be a moral panic.

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