The reasons I love living in Frankfurt and Germany have little to do with computer games (other than the fact that I love my job), which is why I didn’t think it worth going into detail about, not to mention it was just an after work scrawl, not an article I spent any time planning.
Also the aspect of Germany that I wrote about has little real impact on my every day life. I don’t have people spitting at me in the street. All the Germans I have met have been very nice, even if they rate my profession as being on the same level as a drug pusher. I mostly only think about it when someone posts yet another news article about the subject on the internal mailing list at work. There’s just been a lot of those articles recently.
Germany, and especially Frankfurt, are great places to live, for me, because the quality of life is so good. Frankfurt is one of Germany’s most expensive cities, and has its highest crime rate, and yet it is still far cheaper than all but the most foul British cities, and I feel safe walking around pretty much every part of the city, day or night, which is not something I can say about my home country. Frankfurt rates in the top ten quality of life surveys every year, and from my experience it deserves it.
In the 80’s in the US being a pen and paper role-playing game designer was probably equivocated with being a devil worshipper. I think that’s a lot worse than griping about being seen as a drug pusher. You don’t get bombed by fanatics for being a drug pusher.
The U.S. is full of religious lunatics, to be honest. However, their concentration is much lower in urban areas, and most of them are not dangerous.
Then again, I’ve always lived in the U.S. and am perhaps desensitized. It seems normal to me to always be thinking “is this a good part of town? Is it safe after sundown?”
And for their angsty post-WW2 pacifism. Besides, Beckstein himself is a Catholic who has said in an interview that he would never play violent video games because that’s incompatible with his “Christian world view”.
However, Intarweb lore has established that American Christians typically object to sex but not to violence. So I’d say it’s much more puzzling why America would worry about violent videogames (that don’t also worship satan or show boobies).
Actually, one of my ideas for a game involves satanic worship, necromancy
and boobies. Get in line for publishing rights! :)
But I don’t hear the negative things about Germans as much as the negative
things about Americans where I live. I think Europe has gotten over WW2 for
the most part, so it’s US-hatin’ that’s the in-thing now.
Wow… that was an amazing read.
In Honduras we get the usual “videogames make children kill people” stuff, but, our conservatives tend to mimmick the US conservatives (and indeed, they are politically and organically related), so they are mostly worried about any nudity or sex in our games, and not that much on violence.
It’s funny how here in the Middle East area ordinary people don’t see games as dangerous at all. The response when I tell someone that I play games as a hobby is often one of incredulity. “Haven’t you outgrown those yet?”
Of course, this might have to do with the fact that some of those games don’t even make it here. For instance, San Andreas was banned here (I’m not sure if it was before or after the Hot Coffee issue). But it’s funny because they’re so inconsistent - no ban on a game like Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy (we got the Euro version which contains nudity) or other iterations of the GTA franchise. Plus you can always count on finding the original imported version of those banned games in the more out of the way retail shops.
I’d say it’s more that Americans deny they want to see both sex or violence. Until something goes wrong, at which point its all the fault of the pornography, game, or movie, and they flip out for it to be banned. Maybe applies to booze too.
