As you might have read, a teenager went on a rampage at his old school in Germany, slaying at least 15 people before turning his gun on himself during a shootout with police.
As usual in my Vaterland, German media are having a field day accusing so called "killergames" of inciting such horrible acts. I won't go into these discourses in detail as that would only bring me to the brink of an heart attack.
But I just couldn't pass up on this one: German tabloid Bild is calling for a ban of violent games (by citing "Germany's most important media analyst") yet runs huge ads for Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X, a game that "promises to revolutionise the way players think about combat in the sky."
Not really that violent you say? Fair enough. We might as well go for the real stuff and buy Counterstrike (the game officials love to blame), GTA IV or Gears of War 2 (officially banned in Germany because of its violence) in the official Bild.de shop!
On a similar note: Another brilliant idea on how to curb youth violence by making the access to videogames more difficult comes from the UK. Reports Destructoid:
A tax on videogames would combat knife crime in UK, claims a government advisor who lost his own son to inner city youth crime. According to the rather outrageous suggestion, videogames are "too cheap" and this makes it easy for children to buy them, which in turn causes them to become violent psychopaths. Typical logic from a man thinking with his heart and not his brain.
And another politician taking a convenient shortcut… Ban instead of educate, prohibit instead of looking into deeper reasons that might result in questioning one's own policies.
-Jens