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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).
And first to say, the government hatred on freedom of any type has gone too far, and this is a perfect example.
If this keeps Crytek from making games it has become the worst kind of tragedy.
The kind that affects me!
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned. In this particular case, a few are loonies and a few have good sense. Don't assume it's the same few people in each case.
Or a ban on violently bad singers. That could kill off their Hasselhoff hassle.
crappy triceratops
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
Hey we're really hurting on the economy, let's ban the idiots that dare run a successful business and bring needed tax revenue in! That'l fix the situation! How dare you try and run a business that may offend people in some way!
While I admire everyone's knee jerk reaction to defend video games via free speech I think this method of defense is inherently idiotic.
If someone came up to me and accused me of murder I wouldn't base my case on freedom of privacy. I would hope my lawyer could simply disprove the actual charges against me.
Fighting these sorts of things largely on free speech seems to imply that that video games are actually responsible for some sort of mayhem but should be protected anyway. They aren't dangerous. They don't pose a public threat and they shouldn't even be charged as such let alone 'allowed' to exist in spite of these accusations.
People need to educate the voting public that the 12 year old next to them on the laughing and bragging about how he shot a rifle through someone's head yesterday and made it explode isn't a deraged lunatic.
Video games out of context sound insane and dangerous. This is largely an educational problem which needs a good PR campaign. It's easier to defend something which people understand and like than it is to fight an abstract constitutional battle about the conflict between freedom and public well being.
People don't want to believe in bad people. Lets face it, some people are just rotten. It wasn't video games, it wasn't the comic books, or the rock music. Maybe something caused it other then nature, but if that's the case, I'm sure it was exposure to a lot of lead or a head injury that damaged a specific portion of the head during early childhood.
Until we realize that some people are rotten, and everybody is responsible for themselves, we're going to continue to creating stupid laws that make the word a worse place to live in.
Not for the violent tv-shows, movies etc ...
No, I'm not going to go along those lines - that's just adding to the fire of "ban violent [something]", and we haven't seen any good studies showing a link between virtual and real violence.
However, we HAVE seen how effective TV, radio and movie theaters are in turning a population against others, raising support for horrible behaviour, war ... lots of other stuff.
It's actually documented in Germany's own history. Yes, I almost Godwin'ed myself, but in this case it's quite relevant, even though it is slightly trollish.
Really, this is supposed to be the fabled "democracy" ancient greeks thought up? Oh no, wait. We've transformed that into a PR farce that every four years proves how rotten the people at the top are. Your votes don't matter. They are merely a numeral representation of how much you "don't" have to say. Lies, populism and ignorant phrase flinging wherever you look. None of this will matter AFTER the election that's why everything they tried to introduce lately was meant to be established before voters aren't important again. Look at our ministry of family and health. They neglected their resort for 3 1/2 years and all of a sudden when the election goes into the confrontation phase they start tossing around stuff like "DNS filters" and "address filtering" against alleged child pornography. All of which could be removed through application of existing laws but since they chose to balance the budget by cutting funds to investigators and connecting departments they now have to start flapping their arms REAALLY fast.
Politicians are lying pricks that are always a couple of decades behind when it comes to reality. Unfortunately this generalization stands to be disproven for all of the major parties in my country. They can't stop anyone from selling these games to me and if they do I'll personally book a cheap ticket to one of our less ridiculous neighboring countries. Other than that I or someone else will sue at the surpreme court that no government can tell an adult tax payer what to watch or what to play. Not unless they give up all their ludicrous make-belief jobs. This will all die down when these shit elections are finally over. Remember: Vote Pirate!
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!
Control freaks will suffer no other control freaks in their territory.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
German law is full of such bizarre restrictions on freedom.
For example, in addition to the usual laws against slander and libel (which have some justification), Germany has laws and penalties for insulting someone, even in private and even if you don't state anything factually wrong.
Germany also has laws against any speech which might "disturb the public peace" or offend. What's the point of having free speech if you can't offend anybody? Didn't opposition to the monarchy or Hitler offend someone? Didn't Luther's 100 theses nailed to the Catholic church door offend the church?
There is essentially no anonymous speech, since all communications ports need to be registered and all electronic communications are tracked and logged. Registration, tracking, and surveillance of citizens in Germany seems to be so widespread that people don't even care anymore and just think it's the same way everywhere. People have the attitude that "as long as the government does it, it's OK, at least we aren't like the US, where Google tracks everybody", which is a bizarre view given Germany's history.
And it's not just the government that does it: some of Germany's biggest corporations have been illegally listening in on employees and customers and even forged communications.
It has to be said that Germany's government currently appears to be using its powers for benign purposes: policing, anti-terrorism, etc. But if parts of the government were abusing those powers, say to blackmail political opponents, who would know? And you only need to look at the 1930's to see how a progressive and liberal German government can turn into a genocidal regime bent on world conquest.
Somehow, the idea of "free speech" seems to have gotten lost in the translation after the Western allies laid the foundations for German democracy after WWII.
IMHO this is a lax translation. I'll try an exact one: "for games, which major element of the game's plot is the virtual exercise of realistically depicted acts of homicide or other gruesome or otherwise inhuman violences against human beings"
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