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EU Considering Regulating Sale of Violent Games
Spamicles writes "European Union justice ministers met today in order to discuss the regulation of sales of violent video games to minors. Europeans were riled up last year when a German gunman shot several people before taking his life at a secondary school. A European Union Commissioner is taking advantage of the shootings last year called for stricter regulations in the video game industry. A motion introduced last month calls for legislators to "put in place all necessary measures to ban the sale of particularly violent and cruel video games.""
They should regulate "stupid parents" first.
Because y'know, there never was any violence before video games turned up.
What we have here is a handy emotive issue that can be used to make politicians sound like they are 'in touch' with the needs of the community. The fact that its a loads of nonsense obviously has no relevence.
less gun-friendly policies
Not part of the EU but here in Switzerland the gun lobby made sure the policies are quite friendly to them. No politician wants to touch that with all the foreign currency coming in from weapons exports. Time to time the mandatory assault rifle at home for all service-man policy (with military service mandatory for all males) makes a scandal when some guy goes Rambo but then they hush it with "values of tradition" and other crap and everybody forgets about it. And nobody talks about the use of such rifle involved and way too many suicides.
But yeah, lets blame video games and leave the weapons in the hands of the people... Like we need them! It's bloody Switzerland, not Israel.
"You superiour intellect is no match for our puny weapons" - The Simpsons
This is not a ban on violent video games. This is a limitation on content for minors, and frankly, I don't think it's such a bad idea.
I have loved playing GTA over the last few years, but that doesn't mean that I think it's appropriate for 10 year olds to play. I have no interest in the likes of Manhunt, but I see no reason that it shouldn't be made - only reasons that it shouldn't be sold to the wee ones.
If we had something stronger than volunteer parental ratings for an ignorant parental populous, just maybe we wouldn't have to listen to Jack Thompson's tripe any longer. After all, the generation that up until very recently has been buying games for their kids has had NO way of understanding the medium - it's been foreign to parents, and therefore parents have made dubious purchasing decisions.
Why not make retailers check ID as a liquor store does? Some games are simply inappropriate for little kids and should be limited to adult consumption. They shouldn't be "banned" or limited in the production, but the sales should be limited to those who are old enough to have learned what boundaries are.
Getting diabetes AND salmonella would be a bad weekend.
How dare you attack the parents? Don't you have any pity for them, after all their kids just caused a mass slaughter in their former school! Could anyone here please think of the parents?
Is it me or COULD there be a connection? I mean, when did you ever hear of a teenager going postal in a, say, Starbucks? Why is it always schools?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Especially when it comes to game violence. Have you ever played a "German version" of any kind of game? It's actually a good laugh. A few highlights of Command and Conquer Generals:
... ohwell.
- No soldiers, you're commanding "robots". Which is a bit odd when it comes to the special units, but
- Of course they don't bleed or yell when they die. They just fall over and vanish.
- No Anthrax in the arsenal of the Terrorists, they're using acid. Why that acid only affects "robots" and no tanks is beyond me, but ok.
- Here's the best part: No suicide bombers, instead you have cute little "rolling bombs" which resemble a tea-cart with a comic-style "bomb" on top. Why those teacarts can drive cars or generally behave like humans not really explained.
And so on. I mean, I don't need my games "bloody", but when it crosses the line to ridiculous that's usually where I stop enjoying the games. And the "germanized" versions usually leap over that line by a few miles.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
There is already a perfectly usable pan-European game rating system. It's voluntary, but I haven't seen a single game on sale in the UK that doesn't have it, with occasional mandatory BBFC ratings for more "realistic" games (GTA3 and beyond are all released with an 18 cert). As well as that, you'll find that a lot of stores here will abide by PEGI ratings, which detail exactly why the game has the rating it has (sex, violence, drugs and gambling amongst the reasons) supposedly so parents can make a more informed decision. I don't see how introducing more centralised bureaucracy is going to work any better than the current systems in place in European Union member states. Whatever ratings system you put in, you'll still get 45 year olds coming into the shop with a 12 year old waiting outside and swearing blind that the copy of Bloody Chainsaw Revenge IV they are buying is for their own personal use.
This stuff happens every time some psychopath decides to go on a rampage. Banning violent video games won't work, and is completely bloody stupid when you consider where half of your so-called "traditional" games come from. Chess is a war game. If you think British Bulldog is innocent, try thinking of it as a bunch of people trying to rush a gun platform. "Ring-a-roses" is a warning poem describing the symptoms of bubonic plague. The only difference between these games and video games is the fact that for the first time in history, a war game or zombie horror story can be rendered on a screen in real-time with precise detail.
You can only take a psycho down before they kill too many people. Sometimes you're lucky and someone will spot that a person is acting strangely or getting unstable. Banning violent video games will just mean that the next time someone decides to start dishing out mass lead injections, we'll have slingshots or some other item banned because, well, he started by firing marbles at cats and it progressed from there. Something Must Be Done, Think Of The Children, you catch my drift.
I hope the justice ministers discussing this have a sudden attack of common sense and declare that any mature, sensible adult should be able to engage in as much of an orgy of virtual destruction as they like. Fact is, taking some geek out with a headshot is fun, dammit. It's the old equation of "(fear - danger) == excitement".
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It can get more stupid than that.
E.g., take "No One Lives Forever 2". The original game tweaked the AI a lot, so the enemies would notice a fallen comrade, see if he's dead, etc. Except the German version came and replaced all corpses with backpacks.
So for a start you ended up hiding and/or disposing of backpacks instead of corpses. I mean, wth? Why would someone sound the alarm for seeing a backpack near a bed in the barracks? Don't all soldiers have one of those anyway?
But it gets better. Picture this: A patrol comes by and starts shaking the backpack and saying stuff like "Oh no! Are you still alive? Say something!"
I mean, WTF? Since when was a backpack alive in the first place?
All that clever scripting and trying to make it believable in the original game... just made it look stupid in the censored version.
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