German Minister Seeks Jail Time For FPS Players

GamePolitics has the somewhat unbelievable news that German Minister of the Interior Gunther Beckstein is seeking jail time for violent game developers, publishers, and players. MSNBC has further coverage of the issue, which has pro gamers in Germany quite worried. From the article: "The draft law, a reaction to a school shooting that shook German public opinion last month, will come before the upper house of parliament next year. But it is already sending shockwaves through the 2m-strong German online gaming community. 'We have among the most drastic censorship rules for games,' said Frank Sliwka, head of the Deutsche E-Sport Bund, an umbrella federation for German online gaming teams. 'Now we are being labelled as a breeding ground for unstable, dysfunctional and violent youngsters.'"

Comments

Re:"Logic"

[Quiet_Desperation]

Pretty females can have a stimulating effect on sex offenders (known and unknown), so will you ban women from walking in public?

Or make them wear burkas. Might as well. That's where the EU will be in 10 years time anyway. The lovely streetwalkers of Paris will become a thing of the past. :-(

An once of prevention

[hey!]

is worth a pound of cure. We all know that.

But what is seldom appreciated is how often that a pound of prevention turns out to be worth only an ounce of cure. Or less.

The reason that the "ounce of prevention" strategy works is that it focuses you on simple, reasonable actions that accurately target the concern and produce few side effects. Like putting a lock on your door to prevent burglary. Now you could sit on your front porch and shoot at everybody who comes near your house that you think "looks shifty". There is no doubt a more vigorous preventive measure than locking your doors and widnows, but it isn't more effective.

It really doesn't matter whether something is done before or after the fact, so much that the action be chosen to produce the results desired, and not much if anything else.

And seeing as we've already triggered Godwin's law, I may as well raise the example of the Final Solution as an instance of the pound of prevention phenomonon. If people thought that the Jews where using their control of money to ruin the country, why didn't they simply pass a few banking regulation laws? Then nobody could ruin the country that way, Jew or otherwise. The answer is that the pound of prevention phenomon, like road rage, is driven by highly emotionally charged thinking. The kind that makes you act so stupidly that the only way not to die from embarassment is to do something even stupider.

If you're so concerned with pathologically violent people, why not simply screen for them at various reasonable points? You provide mental health services at school to disturbed kids and training for teachers on how to recognize and deal with them. You screen people who have violent run-ins with other people before they go onto bigger and badder things. You run a public education campaign so people can recognize when their associates and familiy members need help -- maybe a few people will recognize they need help themselves.

Will this get rid of all violence by disturbed people? No. But it will do a hell of a lot more than banning video games.

Re:"Logic"

[Hektor_Troy]

And just what does banning trans-fat acids in food have to do with banning good tasting food?

Such a ban has been in effect in Denmark since 2004, and I'm yet to see any restaurants close over it or any chefs complain that now they can't make their favorite dishes.

Hell, even McDonalds got on board very quickly. And they've even announced their intentions of extending the restrictions on transfatty acids to all of their European restaurents - all 6,300 of them. Even Kentucky Fried Chicken announced similar goals (they have restaurents in Denmark as well).

And all that without changing the way food tastes.

Oh, wait. You were being obtuse, weren't you?

What next? Going to complain that we don't allow odd things like, say, tar and mercury in your food due to health issues? I mean, people could just steer clear of the foods that contained that kind of stuff, right?