German Social Affairs Minister Wants WoW Rated "Adults Only"

[Zildjin81]

"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!"

 

[3_of_8]

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.

 

[johnthenerd]

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.

 

[3_of_8]

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.

 

[karmapolizei]

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.

 

[anaphysik]

German Social Affairs Minister Wants WoW Rated "Adults Only"

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.

(bolding mine) Seriously? Videogames as weapons of mass destruction?
(I also wonder how they got these data results - my guess is simply by asking how often the kids played videogames.)

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)

game disc shuriken, of course

 

[3_of_8]

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.

 

[karmapolizei]

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.

 

[GyroCaptain]

"The time for excuses is over," he said. "We need web filtering by the ISPs to operate."

You idiots. Way to draw similarities between yourselves and Nazi Germany. "Anything we don't like needs to be banned!"

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.

 

[Pimppeter2]

Wie es sich um Stop Kinder von Spielen

For the record, I dont speak german, that was all translator

 

[oliveira8]

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*

 

[RebornKusabi]

Congrats Europe, You have your "Columbine" now! Let's hope it fizzles out for you guys like ours did...

 

[Labyrinth]

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.

 

[luckshot]

sounds a lot like what was attempted in Australia and something any dictator of any third Reich would be proud of

 

[KDR_11k]

As with all politicians like that I'd like to ask "when will the Reichstag burn again?"

The last time something like this happened the Green party guys seemed to remain the sanest ("Maybe we should look at his social situation first"), I wonder what they have to say this time...

Oh and on another note, try the Welt Online article. You know what that is titled? "Counter Strike does not teach teen violence." The prosecution is investigating the father of the gunman for keeping the gun and 4600 rounds of ammunition in his bedroom instead of a safe. Maybe he did that to deal with burglars American-style but that's illegal here anyway, would net him a manslaughter or murder charge. Oh and the son had a diagnosed depression. Yep, definitely the videogame, not the instable psychological state or the unsafely kept handgun at fault...

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.

Not in Germany, ratings are legally binding here. We don't have an "AO" rating though but we have three degrees of 18 ratings so talking about AO is somewhere between ambiguous and pointless here. The regular "no clearance for minors" (18) rating means almost nothing, every second major game gets that rating and is sold normally. The "rating refused" is more serious, console makers refuse games like that. Then there's "youth endangering" which can only be declared for a game that was found "rating refused" or not rated at all which bans all advertising which includes placement on a shelf outside of an 18-only store. Usually stores won't even sell those because what can't go on the shelves can't sell that well.

 

[FallenRainbows]

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

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.

What I fail to see is how people seem to think gaming is THE reason for it, It just a coincidence, and I just see this as stupidity at it?s finest.