Brazil Bans Doom, Duke Nukem and 4 Other Games

CaptainCarrot writes "This story at Yahoo has the details. Apparently the police there think that some nutcase who went on a shooting spree in Sao Paulo last month was copying a scene from Duke Nukem. That he was also a coke fiend seems to be besides the point. "

Comments

Other factors

[jhughes]

> However, this is only a version of the >prosecution, which also stated that Meira had >traces of cocaine in his blood and had in the > >past been treated for stress-related problems.

When I was in high school, some kid in a nearby town slammed his car into building, killing himself. There was a note about how all his hard work had been for naught and all that sort of stuff and that's why he decieded to take his own life. When the police interviewed his friends they learned that in a recent game of Dungeons and Dragons, his character who he had worked on for nearly a year had fallen victim to a fatal curse or something like that.

When they interviewed other people they learned a injury was forcing him to miss out on his Senior year of high school football, and his girlfriend had just left him.

Guess which one that Media picked up on and blamed? Being in a town just a short ways away, we felt the impact a lot. I play RPGs a lot and during this time I was insulted a few times and even talked to by teachers at school, didn't like being called a satanist much either.

Almost all of the people who spoke to me had read the original news report which stated that D&D possibly caused this sucide run, very very few people read the later articles which started to point towards his other, real world problems.

Point I'm trying to make (in a long round about way and what is probably beaten to the ground by now:)) is this: how many of these cases where Video games have been blamed initially have actually turned out to be "not the whole story"?

I think there's just a whole idea of media and people as a whole who just run to the first thing they see and say "That's the reason!!"

Sorry for the ramble :) 3am on 4 hours of sleep :)

Killings like this are usual in Brazil

[jquiroga]

From The Economist, 'Gun Law in Brazil' (19-Jun-1999):

When gunmen attacked a bar on the southern outskirts of Sao Paulo last weekend, killing four women and three men in a hail of bullets, perhaps the most terrifying feature of the incident was its sheer normality. It was Sao Paulo's 28th multiple shooting so far this year, and such carnage is a familiar weekend event in several other Brazilian cities.

[...]

The Justice Ministry estimates that the country's 160m people hold perhaps 20m guns, of which only 1.5m are registered. According to a recent United Nations report, 88% of murders in Brazil are committed with firearms, a higher figure than in any other country.

Duke Nukem is virtual. If you live in Brazil, you play the game for real.

insert foot into mouth...

[LocalYokel]

Robin, would you like something to wash down that foot? The Brazilian government chose to make violent video games the scapegoat -- you made it cocaine.

People like to draw conclusions that match their personal convictions and blame the problem on something else. If you like violent games, you blame cocaine, and vice versa. Personally, I think it's got everything to do with boredom, watching overdubbed American sitcoms on Brazilian TV. We'll never REALLY know why it happened -- trying to find the WHY and pointing the finger elsewhere isn't going to do any good.

Speaking of futile quests to find meaning in things that have none, I feel another JonKatz article coming on...

Re:insert foot into mouth...

[Roblimo]

Excuse me. Slashdot reader "Captain Carrot" wrote that. The words you see in a Slashdot article in italics, surrounded by quotation marks, are verbatim from the reader who submitted the story.

Sometimes I agree with what a reader says in a submission, sometimes I don't. In this case, I think Captain Carrot made a valid point: that the Brazilian government was blaming video games for violence done by a person who had other influences in his life that were at least as likely to have caused him to start shooting strangers as game playing. Like cocaine use, for example. Or perhaps it was bad American sitcoms, as you suggested. ;\)

If our friend Captain Carrot had chosen to say, "It's about time some government had the guts to ban some of the violence-spawning computer games that Satan has unleashed on society. Too bad it was Brazil, not the U.S., that took this courageous moral stand," I probably would have run that verbatim, just as I ran the comments he did make - and I would have taken plenty of heat for letting someone express an unpopular opinion. (Or at least an opinion that is unpopular among Slashdot readers, who are not exactly a representative sample of the world's population.)

Please try to remember, when you read Slashdot, that many/most of the opinions you see are those of other readers, that the Slashdot editor who posted them may not agree with them, and that any words written by a Slashdot author or editor are always clearly separated from those of the reader who submitted a given story.

As far as Katz, his take on this *would* be interesting, wouldn't it? But he chooses his own topics, so we'll just have to wait and see if he decides to pick up on this one.

- Robin

On Fear And Understanding

[Effugas]

It is not so much that we fear what we do not understand, as that we scapegoat what we do not enjoy. That which may be scapegoated may be suppressed; that which we enjoy ourselves we refuse to live without.

A recent poster mentioned a case in which, faced with the choice of blaming a suicide upon either a high school breakup, a sudden injury ending a football career, or a loss of a Dungeons and Dragons character, the media placed blame firmly upon the latter.

One can complain about the unfairness, or one can analyze it to determine the source of its absurdity in utterly plain terms.

Suppose, for a moment, that the media had chosen to scapegoat the breakup as the cause of the suicide. Immediate result--teen relationships deemed dangerous, parents advised to keep close watch on their out-of-control youth...but it doesn't work, because parents both remember their own, non-suicidal relationships and directly experience the estrangement caused if they meddle in teen relationships. Similarly, the many teens that had survived and moved on after a breakup realize the inaccuracy of blaming all breakups for the results of one breakup, and wouldn't care what their parents said anyway.

What's interesting, is while all parties involved in this scenario could *understand* the suicide in terms of a breakup, it's an ineffective scapegoat, and is thus curiously unsatisfying. If you can't suppress anything, the theory goes, you haven't done anything. It Could Happen Again.

What's really sad is that it's a direct consequence of being unable to put a dollar value on life! After all, if you absolutely *have* to do something, and you're not willing to take "acceptable losses" on the life side, you have to do something: Find non-life "acceptable losses" that are, of course, as little of a loss to you as possible. Teen dating is just too familiar to eliminate, so it's unsatisfying to blame.

And what of the two remaining options--football and D&D? Football's an American tradition. Only satanic freaks play D&D(note the distinct lack of understanding). Guess which makes the better Acceptable Loss.

And the real tragedy? Isolation is the real killer, but nobody wants to be forced to incur the "acceptable loss" of being friends with the isolated.

Yours Truly,

Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com

Brazil is a funny place.

[Captain Zion]

I live in Brazil, and this is just another case of authorities doing something stupid just to calm down the media. It happens all the time.

The "theatre massacre" had an enormous repercussion in Brazilian media. The first move from the ministry was to restrict "The Fight Club" to sessions after 10PM and to adults only. Not a good deal IMHO -- the shooter is an adult, and it happened after 10PM anyway! Besides, the shooter declared that he didn't watch the movie before acting. What if it happened in Disney's "Tarzan", and if the guy was addicted to Civ or Tetris? Would they ban that too?

Last month a bank inside my school was robbed. The day after, they checked everyone's badges to enter the school. What's the idea? Would the bank robbers return using bad badges or something?

There's a clear difference between a guy that is already a psycho and happen to have certain (very popular) games in his computer, and all the rest of game players. How many of you slashdot readers have played Doom or DN and went to the streets exploding barrels and shooting people?

Brazil is a funny place indeed.

Re:Sao Paulo is the murder capital of the world

[jquiroga]

Here you can find a human rights report from the Department of State. It's not pretty at all.

This excerpt is downright scaring:

The shooting of two suspected bank robbers by a police officer in Rio de Janeiro, recorded on video tape and broadcast in its entirety on the national evening news, graphically illustrated the commonplace use of lethal force by the police and the public's tolerant attitude toward such practices. On August 5, a uniformed police officer on duty in a busy public square in the Ipanema neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro, alerted by a bystander, approached two men on a parked motorcycle who were suspected of just having robbed a local bank. The uniformed policeman drew his gun and approached the two men. As he came close enough to question them, he also attempted to take a gun from one suspect who then attempted to draw the gun himself. Without further warning, the policeman shot both suspects in the head at point blank range in succession and fired four more times as the suspects lay on the ground. The initial intense media coverage of the incident focused mostly on the positive public response to the policeman's actions. His superiors decorated him for bravery. Some media and human rights observers questioned the appropriateness of the officer's action, his lack of training and preparation to deal with such an incident, and his use of lethal force in a crowded public area.

http://www.usis.usemb.se/human /human1998/brazil.html

Maybe they *know* these are old.

[urkidnme]

Maybe they just banned these to quiet down the folks who must have something "external" to blame. Forcing retailers to remove these from the shelves probably didn't make many retailers too upset. They didn't make them do anything with Quake II, Quake III, Rainbow Six, Unreal, etc... This way, the gov't was able to do what gov'ts are good at. Satisfy the whining ignorant masses without upsetting the people with the bucks.

Some clarification

[KGBear]

I live in Sao Paulo - Brasil; I see some of my countrymen have already replied to this but I wish to clarify a few things:

1. The version of Carmageddon sold in Brazil is called "Armagedon", because the pun makes no sense in Portuguese. "Carmageddon" means absolutely nothing while Armagedon is a perfectly valid Portuguese word. Also, this game is from the times when companies still tried to translate game titles - nowadays they don't bother anymore partly because time time to market is everything and partly because when the games are officialy released here people have been playing them for a while, either downloading from the 'net or ordering a copy from some American Internet shop. Some game fans don't wait for the 2-3 monthes it takes to translate all the dialogs, user manual, etc.
   
2. Some kinds of shooting are indeed (and sadly) common in the streets of Sao Paulo, but they're usually related to gang fights, "vigilantes" and organized crime. This case caught everyone's attention because the perpetrator is a med student with no involvement with those underworlds.
   
3. Coke is not Brasil's #1 cash crop. Although we are an important part of the route drug follows to reach the US and Europe, it's actually grown in the bordering countries of Bolivia and Colombia. I also wish to remind you that the only reason the drug is grown and follows this route is because people at its destination will buy it.
   
4. The weapon used is actually illegal here, which doesn't make it impossible to buy from black markets. Just like cocaine is illegal in the US, by the way.
   
5. Yes, this ruling was made just to show the government is doing something, it's just a media stunt. Yes, it will probably be overruled by a superior court.
   
6. Meira was not immobilized by guards while reloading, he was overtaken by the moviegoers when he ran out of amo. This is causing some protests against the mall administration.
   
7. Finally, and more to the subject: all kinds of explanations were ventured by the media. One of the more stupid I've seen is he did it to emulate so many similar cases happening in the US, a kind of "wish to be in the 1st world". Games, drugs, everything is to blame. The fact the he had just interrupted drug treatment for his mental condition - against medical advice - was barely reported.
   

Whew. Sorry for the long post...

Re:More Info, an error...

[Molina the Bofh]

>Is Brazil's game market just behind the times and these games are the new ones there,
> or are they just banning the violent games that this man had in his possession?

I live in Brazil, and we are not so behind the times. Games and movies usually arrive here about one or two monthes after being released in US.

What I believe is that these may be the only games some judge or other bureaucrat may have heard of.

And frankly speaking, I think it's ridiculous to ban these games!! First of all there are much more realistic and violent games (such as Half-life), where you kill persons, not only monsters, wich, I guess, makes a huge difference from the psychological point of view. In Duken Nuken you kill monsters, instead of people !

Another thing: I read here in Slashdot they said the sicko was being treated for stress. That's not true. He was being treated for schizophrenia, and his doctor told his family he should not live unattended. But they left him living alone.

And this case had so much repercussion in the press because it was the first time in Brazil a psycho goes to a public place and starts shooting people without having a reason.