That’s it, we’ve had enough. No more shooting, no more blood, no more swearing and definitely no more insulting other players or their mothers. No more. We’re done with it.
As we all know, playing violent games makes you a killer. Every individual at hecklerspray who has ever played a video game has a kill ratio of three people per game played.
It’s just common sense.
So thank Thor for the Germans and their incredible foresight when it comes to violent games potentially being entirely banned in their great nation.
Where other countries introduced age ratings, controlled advertising to keep things away from kids and generally encouraged parents to take an actual role in the parenting of their kids, the Germans have a long history of censoring everything and generally not allowing it to be released if it’s a bit too naughty for their liking.
Unfortunately, it seems their perfect plan does have some foibles and can still lead to violent psychopaths taking numerous lives, as evidenced earlier this year in Winnenden.
Obviously this is because the country still allows both the sale and production of violent videogames within their borders. It’s a blatant, causal link between things: kid plays violent games, kid kills people. Simple, right?
So in order to stop any violence from ever happening again, 16 Interior Ministers have asked the Bundestag (not an organisation fronted by Ming the Merciless, just their halls of power) to entirely ban not only the sale of, but also the production of violent games within Germany.
Obviously that would screw Crytek and the countless other German development studios, forcing them to either outsource, change tact or leave the country entirely – which, as we all know, is a hit the econony in the country can easily soak up. They don’t need the money of murder-enablers anyway.
While we initially disagreed with anyone directly linking violent acts to violent games, hecklerspray has felt the need to change its opinion on the matter as, well – who wants to argue with 16 pissed-off Germans?
Not us.
As a result, we are now abstaining from violent games in their entirety. No more Gears of War (abhorrent). No more Demon’s Souls (bloody). No more The Sims (people can die in it). No more Barbies Riding School (the horses could be hurt). No more Flower (your petals can be zapped). No more Theme Hospital (too many deaths). No more Tetris (mindless destruction). No more Nintendogs (too much poo).
Basically, it doesn’t leave us much choice. After all, we’re not entirely sure what “violent” means when it comes to gaming. But hey – we can shut our brains off and let the Germans decide what we should do. We hear they’re good at that.
THIS WEEK: We got over the fact that we couldn’t go to E3 and instead got really, really excited about some of the games on show. Then we remembered we shouldn’t be playing most of them as they’ll make us kill people, and we got a bit mad. Then madder. Then we went on a murderous rampage, as a result of the anger caused by the notion that we weren’t allowed to play some games. Wait! An epiphany!
Karla says
No more Sims??? Are you crazy?? lol
Tom J says
I still remember when Carmageddon came out all those years ago. It was way ahead of its time in terms of civilian casualties, being one of the very the first games where you actually scored by killing civs (GTA came out in the same year but was much less graphic). So there was a fair amount of controversy and it even got banned from UK shelves in its original form. In the end they repackaged it with lame green-blooded “zombies”, because what’s wrong with killing zombies? Plenty, according to the Germans, as they still refused to release it, forcing the developers to produce a version in which the pedestrians were all robots (which is odd, because pedestrians wearing skull caps would probably have done just as well).
So when the zombie apocalype comes you better make damn sure you’re not in Germany because even pretending to kill one is too much for them. Of course, if you’re a robot then fuck you.
David says
Cant wait for Perfect Dark XBLA
I played GTA and Carmageddon as a child like many people, ‘never did me any harm’.