Germany lifts Doom sales ban after 17 years | Hacker News Reader

Germany lifts Doom sales ban after 17 years

bbc.co.uk

92 pointsPeroni25 comments

Arstechnica has a pretty good writeup of the censorship thing in germany:

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2009/12/from-australia-to...

Its a bit more complex then outright bans. Complete bans of media are pretty rare in germany - this happens to media are punishable offenses by themselves. One infamous example is a game called "KZ Manager", basically your Football Manager for evil freaks.

What happened to DooM was that it was deemed "dangerous for the youth". That means, you are not allowed to advertise for it or sell it openly. It is perfectly allowed though, to have a few boxes under the table and sell them to persons over 18. There are even special online resellers for those kind of media that demand age verification beforehand. This is pretty harsh punishment, but it does not render said media "illegal". It is also not a sales ban, but a restriction. I know its a fine line, but there is one.

True, movies like Andy Warhols "Frankenstein" and "Dracula" or games like "UT" and "Q3", as well as, until now, "Doom" fall into the first, more common category, that you describe. But titles like "Mortal Combat 1-3" and "Castle Wolfenstein" fall into the more restrictive, where sales are completely forbidden.

If you read my post fully, I also mention the second category. If a court decides that the game, etc. violates laws in itself, they can be fully banned. That happened to Wolfenstein (display of Swastikas) and Mortal Combat as well as some especially brutal movies (prohibitions against excessive display of suffering).

Whether you are okay with those things or not, those are standing laws enforced by courts. There is no institution in Germany that can ban a game without a court decision.

Also, games that got a rating by the BPJM cannot be indexed retrospectively.

How do they ban a game when you can just import it from another EU country?

Well, thats a completely different topic :). I for myself live right next to the french border and most media come in international versions nowadays...

The ban is usually enforced by confiscating all copies that are in stores. Individuals are not prosecuted. Also, the customs take care that for example british sellers are not selling those goods to germans (and yes, they can be fined). So its not like it is a tight knit net, but it usually makes sure that you don't stumble on that stuff accidentally.

I thought the EU was a customs union, so there were no customs checks between countries. Hence, the concept of contraband in one country but not in another doesn't really make sense. It's like when Illinois bans fireworks; people just go to Wisconsin and Indiana to buy them, and everyone has them anyway.

(Oddly enough, I've flown from the US to the EU without ever being able to go through customs. I landed in HEL, had my passport stamped, and was allowed back into the terminal to wait for my flight to CPH. At CPH, there were also no checks, since it was an EU arrival. Very odd.)

In my experience, EU borders are very easy to go thru without declaring anything. If you really want to there is IIRC someplace to go at HEL after the passport stamp to do it.. but it's very easy to miss.

We have full blown censorship here. Some titles like Mortal Kombat 1-3 [1] are still illegal to sell, even to adults.

[1] http://www.bpjm.com/ (§ 131 StGB, bundesweit beschlagnahmt / confiscated nationwide) Requires a lot of click-through in German. Sorry, but I couldn't find an more accessible list.

to add: Of course, there is also print, music and movies [1] that are confiscated and websites that are censored in search engines like 'google.de'. And not all due to violence or pornography but also for more political reasons, mostly holocaust denial.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Department_for_Media_Ha...

Is it just a ban on sale, or also a ban on ownership?

Even though the term 'beschlagnahmt / confiscated' suggests otherwise, only sale is illegal but ownership is legal.

No. Sale and possession of confiscated items is illegal. This happens when a court (!) deems that the item is illegal. This list is often called "list B".

If something is on list A (the infamous "index"), its "only" a restriction on sales, advertisement and whether you are allowed to give minors access to it.

Sorry, but I couldn't find an more accessible list.

Is this accurate:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banned_video_games#Germ...

No, the list from bpjm.com is actually quite complete.

You might notice that the list of full bans is pretty short.

There is no official list, as that would make a great shopping list :). Although all entries on List A and List B are announced in a monthly letter called "Bundesanzeiger" which is where all Laws and Decisions are published. So what you could do is get all of those since 1950 and find the corresponding entries.

> Bethesda argued that the game's crude graphics had been surpassed by many modern titles and, as a result, the violence it depicted had far less of an impact.

Reminded me of Niven's quote, "Ethics change with technology."

Germany's obsession with "If children see dead people, we'll be back to 1933!" is getting a bit old. It was even weirder before the draft was quasi-abolished this year…

"No, Heinz, laser tag will turn you into a killer! Now please turn your head and cough, so we can see whether you're able to join the Bundeswehr…"

Still better than America's obsession with protecting kids from seeing nacked skin, IMO.

I might be wrong, but didn't some games have three versions: One as designed, one with covered boobage for the US and one with less blood & gore for Germany? I think the Conan MMORPG was one example of that…

This is what annoys me the most about the whole "Killerspiele" debate.

I played Counter Strike a lot, and yet pretty much everything I thought I knew about firearms from that game turned out to be completely wrong. How did I find out? I was conscripted into my country's armed forces.

If I remember correctly, there are two main arguments: First, tactics. You learn how to move in a combat situation, you can theoretically recreate your school in your favorite game etc.

Secondly, it (along with violent movies) makes you more callous towards violence, so that you're able to pull the trigger (repeatedly) in the first place.

The latter is actually somewhat based on reality. The military has spent lots of effort in the last few decades to increase and focus the killing instinct of their soldiers. If I remember correctly, soldiers in WW2 (on any side) often shot over the head of their enemies because they couldn't imagine themselves killing another human being. Needless to say, the world's armies have spent a lot of moolah to correct that.

And while Germany apparently thought that once you're 18 it's okay to imprint you in that manner (well, theoretically, it's not like the German Bundeswehr does a good job with this -- or anything at all), adolescents should be "protected" from this at any cost.

It's a slippery slope with civil liberties in Germany. It's somewhat understandable that there were laws being put into place in '49 to prevent a Fourth Reich from rising. The problem is that once you start censorship for one reason, it's getting increasingly easier to extend the principle to other areas.

Meanwhile, I haven't read a single news item that has any problems with the fact that a lot of people on the African continent get killed by German guns. I hear that the G36s are quite popular on both sides of the Libyan conflict.

This reminds me, I've recently read the book Masters of Doom, which is mostly about the two Johns (Romero and Carmack) and it was excellent. I'm sure most people here would also like it.

The 'SS' in the logo of the band Kiss, looks similar to the Nazi SS insignia, the display of which is banned (or somehow restricted, at least) in Germany. Hence Kiss uses a modified logo in Germany. Even though no Nazi reference was intended. (Indeed, Gene Simmons' mother is a Holocaust survivor.)

OT. Is it generally the case that people outside of a system notice censorship in the system more easily? e.g. Americans detect censorship in Germany more readily than Germans. Censorship works well when the people being censored don't notice it.

It just occurred to me that the restrictions on Doom and Doom II officially expired on Aug 31st, and Sep 01st is the anniversary of Germany's invasion of Poland.

Just an interesting coincidental juxtaposition of events.

Related FYI: one of the first computer games to be banned in Germany was "Hitler Diktator", released for the Commodore 64 in 1986. The game was never published commercially, but authorities still placed a ban on possession of the game.

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