Okay, we all know how this goes. Some kid shoots up his school. Everyone is shocked and blames video games, politicians say a load of stupid crap, Germany bans a couple of games and we all move along.
But after the amok run of a teen at a German school last Thursday (link), where gladly nobody got killed, the stupidity reached a new level. (It seems like no big UK news outlet picked the story up. Not interested if there are no deaths, ehh?) A school in Schramberg, Germany has stated plans to make itself “killergame free”. The goal is to keep pupils from playing violent videogames, and thus lower the aggressive potential of pupils and the probability of a killing spree. At least that’s what the people in charge think.
Even if Killergames are not the trigger of a killing spree, Bernd Denning, principal of the Schramberg Second School said yesterday, they still take a major part in turning minors into homicidal maniacs. Even if there isn’t a monocausally relation between excessive playing of games, leading to acts of violence, it still provides a twisted frame of reference of solutions for their problems and hardships, that they learn – and may transfer to the real world under certain circumstances.
Right now they are looking into ways to reach the goal of a “killergame free” school and “how the change to a abandonment of Killergames at the school can be realised as a project.” First ideas rely on the teachers and parents to raise the children’s media competence and to convince them to stop playing “those” games or not even start to play them.
The goal is to raise awareness at the school that “Killergames are corruptive and therefore need to be outlawed.” Furthermore the people behind the campaign seem amazed that some think that “these games need to be accepted like a force of nature, that cannot be stopped.” If the legislative body does not react, principal Bernhard Denning said, it is “morally desperately demanded, to say no to a practice that is elementary linked to killing sprees.”
In the long run it is planned to build a network of schools with “Killergame free zones”.
Just to get this straight, they don’t want to stop children from playing violent games at school, but they want to stop them from playing them altogether. On one hand I like the effort to stop minors from playing games they were never meant to play, but the way all of Bernhard Denning’s statements are verbalized bothers me. Violent videogames = drugs is basically what he is saying. And that they are fundamentally linked to violence in the real world. And all that moral based crap. They don’t understand it and they fear it. So it has to go. Simple as that. I love my country.
via gulli:news (with translation done by myself with the help of the NG editors)
Be this someone trying to score cheap political points? Is there soon to be an election in Germany?
This seems odd. Have the relevant authorities considered that this is akin to stopping kids from, say, watching Hollywood action films? Would they consider such a move? I think not.
Yes there is an election very soon and I’m wondering how big the “killergame” debate gets in the next weeks…
The name is Bernhard Denning, not Bernd.
@TheGyro: The federal parliament of Germany will be elected on Sept 27, i.e. in one week. Denning does not appear to be a prominent member of Germany’s political party notorious for censorship (CDU). But he uses the same superficial generalizations and fearmongering so he is definitely like-minded.