The study, “Playing By the Rules” was undertaken by Pro Juventute, a Swiss children’s rights group, and Track Impunity Always (TRIAL), which is concerned with international criminal justice. Their report provides a legal analysis of the conduct enabled by the games.

Rather than play the games themselves, the two groups sent expert observers to watch serious gamers play through and then note the egregious acts they saw. Here’s what they had to say about Battlefield: Bad Company.

In the scenes, there seems to be no assessment of proportionality in the attacks realised in civilian areas and we do not know whether precautionary measures were taken to minimize civilian casualties and damage to civilian objects. However, in a real life situation, one is often confronted with similar circumstances: regular armed forces and irregular armed groups are very unlikely to give any information about the planning of the preparation of military operations to international organisations or human rights bodies. Without such information, it is difficult to establish that a military operation was not proportional, in particular whether the attacker took all the precautionary measures necessary to avoid, and in any event to minimize incidental loss or civilian life, injury to civilians and damage to civilian objects.”

In addition to the extensive destruction, some of the scenes portray the members of “Bad Company” taking gold and “treasures” found in the civilian houses they have just destroyed. Upon obtaining them, the players get points. These actions amount to pillage, which is strictly prohibited under IHL and thus have also been labelled as “strong”. This illegal action is confirmed in one of the scenes where you can hear a member saying that “Pillaging is an old war tradition.” Pillage is considered as a war crime both in international and non- international armed conflicts.

I’m thinking that asking the goons of Bad Company to take precautionary measures for anything would be a little like talking to a cardboard box. It’s also amusing to me that a basic, nonviolent scavenging mechanic rates a “strong” violation of international law (which it would be, if it occurred in real life) and is called out as a war crime.

Anyway, the study had a number of recommendations. Among them is a call for clearly defined rules of engagement.

It would be very useful if developers would incorporate more specific rules on how to conduct an operation in their games, in terms of the weapons allowed, the behaviour allowed, the military targets sought, the degree of collateral damage permitted, etc. The message of the scenes should never be that everything is allowed, or that it is up to the player to decide what is right and what is wrong. In real life, this is not the way it works.

If you want to dive into more killjoy gasbaggery about Modern Warfare, World at War and – Jesus, True Crime Streets of L.A. is in here? Who did they find to play that? Anyway, you can grab your copy of the report here [pdf.]

Fighting Fair: International Humanitarian Law As Applied to Games [Game Politics]

The scramble started when GameStop published a 24-hour promising deal promising access to the PS3 beta beginning Nov. 19. EA DICE’s Twitter shot down the story and the deal was later unpublished.

Then, to Blend Games, EA said: “As for the beta, we’ll have more details later this week.” So, there you go. While those beta invite emails were bogus, it looks like the beta isn’t, and might be coming sooner than we thought.

EA Confirms Bad Company 2 Beta, Details Coming This Week [Blend Games via Blue's News]

Xbox LIVE Marketplace has the game’s manual available for downloading, and, as of time of posting, Xbox LIVE has the game’s PS3 manual available for download. Doh!

Those who have purchased the game on demand, we hope you can work out what the corresponding Triangle, Square, Circle and X buttons.

Xbox LIVE Marketplace | BF: Bad Company [Xbox.com Thanks, John!]

Army of Two, Battlefield: Bad Company, Devil May Cry 4, Gran Turismo 5 Prologue, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots and Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction all get the price drop and new packaging effective June 16.

“Games deemed ‘Greatest Hits’ have reached a significant sales threshold. This latest selection features several critically acclaimed titles, including Gran Turismo 5 Prologue and Metal Gear Solid 4, which represent the high calibre of quality software that is available on the PS3 system,” said Scott A. Steinberg, vice president, product marketing, SCEA. “We’re looking forward to making this group of best sellers even more accessible to consumers, while we continue to deliver more value to the overall PS3 platform.”

Seems EA’s John Riccitiello didn’t get the memo that the “Battlefield Announcement Event” in the UK had been snowed out, because during this afternoon’s Q309 conference call, he went ahead and announced a new Battlefield game.

Sadly for fans of the core series, it’s not one of those games. Instead, it’s a sequel to last year’s Battlefield: Bad Company, is being developed by DICE, will be out on the same engine (so don’t expect any drastic changes) and is scheduled to appear in early 2010.

In addition to that change, the official Bad Company site writes that further tweaks are coming, including technical performance fixes and the availability of bonus weapons, previously only available to those who had pre-ordered or opted in to the newsletter. Boosh! Wait… that’s not right.

September 9th News Update [B Company News]

Coming from a background in film I can tell you being a Foley artist or a sound designer can be two of the most stressful, but creative jobs in the business. This new developer diary from Battlefield Bad Company shows that even in games, these positions still require a ton of work. It’s really fascinating to see what kinds of audio aspects they take into account when creating the game.

Earlier this morning Fahey filled us in on Bad Company’s upcoming conquest mode which you can download later this week. In this video EA Dice Producer Gordon Van Dyke illustrates what you can expect. It marks a return to very a familiar style of gameplay for those who are veterans of the Battlefield series. Best of all it’s coming to you free of charge!

Look for the update this Thursday for both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of the game.

In the words of the greatest literary mind of our time, don’t panic.

My stats were down last night as well, and when I logged into the game just a half hour ago, everything was back to normal. This was an issue that occured on a regular basis with Battlefield 2, and we can probably assume that it will happen on and off with Bad Company as well. The servers go down, and when they come back up it takes time for all of the stats to return. You didn’t really think EA DICE would screw up that big, did you?