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German Interior Ministers Seek Ban On Violent Games
GamePolitics reports that "Germany's 16 Interior Ministers have banded together to ask the Bundestag (Germany's equivalent of Parliament) to ban the production and distribution of violent video games. Moreover, the ministers hope to see this accomplished before Germany's new elections take place on September 27th." Violent games became a national issue in Germany earlier this year after Far Cry 2 was scapegoated for a shooting. Germany-based game developer Crytek could be forced to move or outsource if the ban goes through. Spiegel Online has the original story (Google translation).
Hopefully they do leave Germany one of the things that annoyed me about Crysis is that the Koreans didn't respond to dead bodies. In Crysis you can't move dead bodies because it is against the law or some foolishness in Germany. Instead the bodies just disappeared after a little while
They can't control the production and sales of games OUTSIDE of Germany. People who want them will just order them from elsewhere. What are they going to do, make it ILLEGAL to own games like that? Stupid and pointless. They should spend their time and energy solving REAL problems.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
It's interesting how much of a cultural inversion Germany is from the United States. Here in the U.S. we practically cherish violence in our culture, while the Germans seem opposed to most violence we'd often consider "tame" by our standards. Yet, it's exactly opposite when it comes to sexually "explicit" content. We fear it so much, we actually fight among ourselves over whether or not we can safely discuss sex with our children outside of telling them "don't do it." In the meanwhile, you could practically go up to any magazine rack in Germany and find magazines for children featuring pictures of topless women that would only pass as pornography here in the U.S.
An interesting case in how differently we view violence as acceptable would be some past games like "Carmageddon", a title that was loosely based on the 70's movie "Death Race 2000". In the U.S., you could kill regular people in the streets with your car in the game. In the U.K., this was switched to zombies with green "blood". In Germany, this was replaced with robots.
8==8 Bones 8==8