Germany On the Brink of Banning All Violent Video Games

The apocalypse is nigh!

This is a day we’ve all joked about in the past, but now that it’s actually coming true, it’s quite terrifying. Violent video games have been everyone’s favorite scapegoat for years now, explaining everything from teen angst to acts of domestic terrorism, but we never thought we’d see the day where their production was inherently forbidden.

But we are dangerously close to such a reality in Germany, where after a few school shootings the country’s ministries have banded together to “ban the production and distribution of all violent video games.” The only thing stopping it from becoming a full-fledged law is parliament, and I don’t expect many of them will be avid Call of Duty players.

So what qualifies as a “violent video game” that would be banned under the new law? That would be a game “where the main part is to realistically play the killing of people or other cruel or unhuman acts of violence against humans or manlike characters.” So more or less this would be every M-rated game ever made, along with a few Teen titles that depict death at the hands of the player.

Such a law would result in big losses for many game studios who have a big market in Germany, and studios based in the country like Crytek would have to outsource development elsewhere.

I’m not familiar with German law, so I don’t know if they have something similar to our first amendment guaranteeing free speech, but this proposed ban seems like a gross abuse of citizen rights to me. M-rated games are not meant for minors, and many laws have been in place to prevent the games from being sold to them. It is true that many children get their hands on the games anyways, but it should be up to parents to know what their kids are playing, and limiting or preventing them from using such games.

Admittedly not for ten year-olds, but don't tell me I can't play it.

But the German government only knows how to say things like this:

“Violent games lower the inhibition level for real violence and spree killers always played such games before they did the crime.”

Really, always? These kind of statements are presented as fact, when the truth is that a few isolated incidents of shootings in the country have involved teens who happened to play violent games, which most would see as a symptom, not the cause of the problem.

And the evidence to the contrary, that violent games are not the cause of these tragedies? How about 100 million other M-rated game players who have no vicious real-life killing sprees attributed to them? There is no denying how tragic it is when a teen goes on a brutal rampage, and yes, for these kids, playing violent games does little to help them, but with only a handful of the incidents spread across the entire world, it seems reasonable to assumed that there was something else going on with these kids, and video games weren’t the root cause behind their actions.

I’m part of an entire generation of kids who have been raised playing “violent” games like Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty, Halo and Gears of War, but the fact is, 99.9999% of us will become fully functionally members of society who will never shoot up our high schools because we’ve growing up shooting aliens and Nazis with an Xbox controller.

Each of these tragedies should be looked at on a case by case basis. A blanket statement like “spree killers always played such games before they did the crime” is idiotic and downright disrespectful to the players and developers of such games worldwide. I’ll never forget the interview I heard on CNN just hours after the Virginia Tech massacre where a reporter badgered the killer’s two roommates to say that he in fact did play violent video games, a claim they both emphatically denied over and over.

It’s one thing to blame video games to alleviate blame from the true sources to make people feel better, it’s another thing completely to put into place an utterly ridiculous law like this that violates the rights of every gamer in the country. Hopefully Germany will kill this before it becomes a reality, and no other countries, especially this one, will get similar ideas in their heads.

[via Gamezine]