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There we go. Pandering to the concerned parents is a great way to get ridiculous laws passed. | |
videogames (including WOW) | |
Yeh, Im 15 I play Gears Of War so I'm Obvs Going to go crazy and kill everyone. My god get a grip people we can tell the differnce between real and games | |
You idiots. Way to draw similarities between yourselves and Nazi Germany. "Anything we don't like needs to be banned!" Fantastic job, you fucking imbeciles. Blame the games instead of the obvious mental issues the kid had. EDIT: To be fair, I came in here thinking that it would make some sense that WoW should have a higher rating than "Teen." While the game itself doesn't contain much in the way of questionable content, the people who play it undoubtedly do. I don't think it should be rated AO. As a matter of fact, I disagree with ratings in general. They're just guidelines, not laws. You can't measure the individual maturity of everyone who plays games, so they make a bit of sense in lieu of a better system. Still, this is utterly ridiculous, and I stand by my first statement. | |
All this talk is the dumb answer of incompetent politicians to the crisis after the school shooting in Winnenden... It's easier for them to blame video games than thinking a little bit further, like about this kid's dad (owning 15 guns...) or the things he must have been put through at school! So banning "killer games" is a big issue in Germany. At least for the next few weeks, until everyone (including the hysterical media) calms down! And don't forget: We've got elections this year in Germany, so this is all part of their campaign. | |
I really doubt these kind of law will pass. There are plenty of people who want violent games banned like Jack Thomson. But most of these people just whine while gaining little progress in there efforts to actually get the games banned. I really really doubt germans will be seeing big red adults only stickers on there retail cases any time soon. Just relax a bit before flaming germany for going all nazi with there censorship policy's. | |
Well that might be the case in the US, but in Germany they're binding. Any retailer that is caught selling (AO or NC17) games to underage customers risks a pretty hefty fine. | |
I'm actually wondering, the huge success of Popcap games, online places where you can play scrabble or poker, or the like, the Wii drawing in the older generation to play Bowling, WOW having over 11 million subscribers... How long is it before one or two politicians realises gamers actually make up a reasonable slice of the voting population? If I find out either the Labour or conservative party in the UK want to restrict my choices in what games I play, or think it's their job to decide how long I play WOW for, then it'll be one of the things I factor into how I vote, and they need to realise that, and also realise it's not just for kids any more , and that gamers vote, and more and more voters are playing games every year. | |
Sorry, no. What I meant is, I think of them as guidelines. It's definitely against the law to sell an AO game to a minor, but I don't follow laws in the first place. Especially stupid ones. | |
Hmm, 15 dead, 15 guns ready, I wonder... Anyway, great that people are slowly becoming fascists that will restrict all freedoms. | |
Every time some psycho murders someone we have the same problem. If you ban all violent video games whats next? End to all violent films, no competitive sports at schools? You might as well just paint motherfucking swastikas on all the buildings now. | |
For the love of Sargeras! No, if you're retarded enough to be addicted then plain and simple: What the hell? It's a game! Yes I actively call myself a fanboy and joke that I have no life but honestly I'm only a fanboy because it's a solid game and Blizzard's other creations are aswell. There stupid Germans made me go ruining all my jokes...(no offence) | |
*sigh* another one? All I have to say ha... ha.... ha! | |
Shit, they're on to you Michael Jackson. Get out of there, get out now! hehehehe... On-topic, calling a game addictive is like calling books "mind control devices". Some people are just really, really THICK, and thus cause themselves harm through lack of self control and moderation. That does not mean the game itself is to blame, blame the thickie. There is a difference between addiction and the age old issue of "Boredom vs Entertainment". If you are bored, you will do ANYTHING to not be bored. If you have no cash, friends, or the weather outside is the shits, sitting on a computer playing a game is much better than doing nothing, so that's what people do. If you were to offer that person something of equal or greater entertainment value, and they refused to take you up on that offer, then maybe it might be quasi-addiction, but a choice between gaming and chatting with friends, and homework or chores, doesn't make it addiction. | |
The media here in Germany are just trying to get a lot of attention for their very "objective news coverage" and the politicians are happy to go along with it all. | |
- Herr Montag, Farenheit 451 | |
The problem is that there are some people that can't, but are still allowed to play games. These are the people who shoot up schools and the like after playing Counter-Strike. By bringing the law down upon all video games, they ruin the fun for the rest of us. Rather than ban the games, inform the parents and make sure they can identify troublesome behavior in their children. | |
Funny, I was just thinking of book burners as I read the news post. | |
i wonder if politicians will realize that banning videogames will not end violent crimes, especially crime committed by youth. anyone with a sociology degree can tell you that, or anyone with common sense. | |
"Deadliest and most destructive"? Video games don't kill people last time I checked! Also "The kid played farcry 2........that must have been why he was running amok!" | |
As a German, I have to say that Mechthild Ross-Luttmann (spelt with a double n, by the way) is just being populist, promising laws against everything average people don't like and not realising them anyway and talking about stuff she doesn't know the first bloody thing about. Like all politicians do when there's an election coming up. I'm glad she's not responsible for my state. Well, admittedly, the party ruling my state is even worse. | |
Plenty of people own guns and don't go on killing sprees. Plenty of people play violent video games and don't go on killing sprees. Think for a moment of the Rwandan genocide of 1994. A bunch of people who never played any video games grabbed machetes and murdered hundreds of thousands of people. There are good, responsible people, and there are bad people. Confusing the two isn't going to solve anything. | |
Well, weapons are a different thing, though. I agree that not everyone who owns a gun goes shooting people, in fact, only a very small percentage of them will. But you can kill people with a gun. You can't kill them with a video game. (Well, yes, you could, but it would be somewhat bizarre) Possession of weapons should be regulated and controlled strictly, still, it's pretty obvious that police officers and hunters and so on need them. | |
I think Ross-Luttmann is just hopping onto the bandwagon. Her call for a change in rating schemes and a re-rating of WoW come in response to KFN study that just came out a few days ago and was funded by her Ministry. I think it's a shame that her Ministry and the KFN didn't have the dignity and common sense to withhold it for a few weeks in the given climate, as it's thematically compeletely unrelated to the shooting and the videogames debate following it. I think they're trying to make profit from the debate (and thus, by proxy, from the deaths of the people who died in the shooting), and SHAME ON THEM for doing so. On a slightly different note, a re-rating for Wow is never gonna happen, for all kinds of reasons, most of them legal. Further: The ISP-filtering thing is really bugging me. Right now, the Federal Ministries involved claim unisono that it's just intended for child pornography. But any idiot can see that once a system is in place, the government will soon using it for all kinds of purposes the might come up with. BUT don't take this Petke guy serious. Honestly, I'm a politically conscious German, and until I read that news, I had never even heard of him. Little wonder, vice chairman of the Brandenburg CDU and the state parliament of Brandenburg is.. well, not that big a deal. | |
(bolding mine) Seriously? Videogames as weapons of mass destruction?
game disc shuriken, of course | |
99% of all statistics are just made up by people who can need them to back up whatever statements they make, hoping noone figures it out. | |
KFN has some problems with its methods... they're kind of notorious for neglecting the difference between correlation and causation. And God knows which other cardinal sin of social research they might have up their sleeves. | |
so just because you are addicted to something, that does not mean that it should get taken away from you, i was addicted to wow, but now i am not... | |
The irony is even deeper than that: the current hypersensitivity over there with respect to violence and national conduct is based as much as anything on the guilt/atonement facet of the culture or "Vergangenheitsbewältigung": coming to terms with the past. Any kind of violence is SRS BSNS to an extent to anyone politically correct, far more so than other places. In other words, the effort to distance themselves from any kind of violence, militant nationalism, rabble-rousing, and so on has some ironic side effects. | |
Wie es sich um Stop Kinder von Spielen For the record, I dont speak german, that was all translator | |
Cause World of Warcraft doesnt have parent restriction built in game already.... Way to go silly politician! You just got added to wing of uninformed politicians that dont want to look stupid next to the likes of Jack Thompson! *clap track* | |
In trying to make the world forget what they were, they become what they hate? How...cliche. | |
Congrats Europe, You have your "Columbine" now! Let's hope it fizzles out for you guys like ours did... | |
Wait.. gaming's controlling my mind? Oh fuck, I new there was something fishy about the way that J.C. handled those tranquillisers! Ahem. I don't think it'll work. Reminds me vividly of reading about Lady Chatterly's Lover being banned for erotic content. There will always be a black market, and using games as a scapegoat is just as bad as proposing that because I'm reading Mein Kampf, I'm going to start hunting down Jews and amassing an army of followers. | |
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German Social Affairs Minister Wants WoW Rated "Adults Only"
Mechtchild Ross-Luttman, the Minister for Social Affairs in Lower Saxony, is calling for tougher age restrictions on videogames in Germany, including a reclassification of the hit MMOG World of Warcraft to "Adults Only."
Ross-Luttmann wants the age restriction imposed not only on "killer games" like Counter-Strike and other FPSes but also on games with particularly "addictive" qualities, like World of Warcraft. A recent survey of 44,610 ninth grade students by the KFN, the criminal research institute of Lower Saxony, classified 14,000 of them as addicted to games and another 23,000 more in "serious danger of becoming addicted" - an 83 percent rate of addiction or near-addiction that, at face value, makes videogames among the deadliest and most destructive creations in human history.
Ross-Luttman said she would present her figures and proposals to other youth and social ministers at their next national meeting. "Parents must know what danger potential exists in their children's bedrooms," she said.
But even that irony-laden statement isn't enough for some, including Sven Petke, acting chairman of the Christian Democratic Union party in Brandenberg. He wants all violent games banned outright in Germany along with inappropriate internet content, for which he believes ISPs should be held responsible. "The time for excuses is over," he said. "We need web filtering by the ISPs to operate."
This latest uproar against videogames comes in response to the murders of 15 people in the German town of Winnenden by a 17-year-old teenager who played videogames including Counter-Strike and Far Cry 2. Excited media reports following the killing spree made a point of mentioning his gaming habits and while German authorities appeared eager to place the blame on violent games, there appears to be little concern over the fact that he was a troubled youth who was receiving counseling for depression and apparently had ready access to his father's collection of 15 firearms.
Source: Welt Online, via GameCulture
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