Topic: Germany Banning All Violent Games?

Woah woah woah! Rape simulators? Damn! What is it with the Japanese and making crazy weird s**t!

Hear hear. I don't think ripping peoples' spines out is particularly mentally healthy.

It doesn't matter.

A lot of Germans already import their games and it's no trouble at all.

I guarantee more Americans are going all nuts over this than Germans.

This will never happen - I can practically guarantee that. I know the article says the law is close to being passed, but no government in the western civilised world would take away the right of free artistic expression. In the unlikely event it does get passed, people will be so outraged at a removal of a basic right that they will be forced to reverse the law.

You can't stop violence by banning things. Sure you may even actually find some killers have copied things they've seen on games, but the games didn't make them killers - they were killers before and would have just done it a different way. There will always be evil people and no laws can be passed to change that - you just have to do the best you can in life, be vigilant and look for signs of when these things might happen. That's all that can ever be done - all banning games will do is remove them from being a scapegoat and they'll just have to look for something else to blame when the amount of real life violence goes unchanged.

what would really be sad about this is if their ban didn't actually stop people from doing terrible things, and they chose to ban something else, like violent movies or something. where would it end?

@Adam: haven't you ever visited Something Awful's review section for hentai games? they did 'RapeLay' (warning: NSFW) a while back... that one was actually banned by Amazon.com.

I just meant that Germany seems to be becoming a dictatorship more and more as time goes on. I just used the Nazis as a comparision. It's a censor of free speech,and this is not the right way to stop violence in Germany.

As long as their victims are politicians I don't think I'd mind.

clearly, you have never heard of Godwin's Law. :3

Nazi Country is hugely exaggerated, but there are good reasons to fear an increasing censorship here in germany in terms of computer and internet in the next years. Today, in a few hours, a law will be signed that legitimates the police to block the access to child porn websites. Of course, its good to fight against child porn - but there are voices who are interested to broaden the legitimation on "Violent" or Filesharing-Websites, so there is a huge danger that this law will function as a "key-opener" for following censorship laws. It is very presumably that the conservative CDU party will clearly win the next election in autumn, so it will be very hard to stop their censorship ideas then (it is also the only party who predominantly supports the idea of banning violent games).

Edit:
Additionally, it looks just as bad in the EU after the election some weeks ago, since almost every country tended to elect more conservative/republican parties as in the election before. At least, sweden managed it to elect someone from their liberal "Piratpartiet" into the EU parliament - great job ^^. I supported the smaller german sister party in the last election.

1990th Sonic, Black Dragon has given all the response I need, but I'll clarify: Not everything on the internet needs to be compared to Nazis. It's a completely inaccurate and overblown comparison.

The reason for all these restrictions on violence in Germany are to prevent it from becoming such a place again. Whether you agree with the censorship or not is another story (Watchful Eye points out good reasons to be concerned, actually), but they are clearly not in any way Naziesque.

Germans probably don't appreciate the internet-wide obsession, either.

Wrong !
Very wrong .
Games like manhunt are more likely to cause people to become serial killers just unfortunately most games think playing a game is as psychologically as harmless as reading a book but dont realise that such a interactive medium is actually more harmfull .

Yes, and Black Dragon has named one that has an upcoming sequel that's gotten so much press attention that CERO, the Japanese game rating board has refused to issue it with a certificate. The developers are puzzled at the reaction due to it being a game and really it wasn't that controversial in Japan itself, but I think CERO is aware of the attention this kind of thing is getting overseas. Personally I see nothing good in a game like that. I understand that Manhunt is a pretty crap game outside of the content, but I cannot see the point in that either.