(Didn’t mind me being under the weather for a couple of days, did you?)

On a previous date and time, I summoned Germany’s inability to cope with its past.  From the country’s post-war history rose a period of Denazification.  It worked.  The country is now so sensitive to its past that it fails to consult it.

Tim Kretschmer’s shooting rampage won’t have the historical merit of a Reichstag fire, but it could be the turning point for civil liberties in Europe.  Germany’s political makeup wasn’t interested in going to blows with the German gun lobby.  So, using Kretschmer a rallying cry, video games have become the country’s new-age Jew.  According to Yahoo! Tech, shit’s about to go down.

Like gamers around the world, Germans love their shoot-’em-ups. Sure, video gaming isn’t quite the industry in Germany that it is in the U.S. (or some other parts of Europe), but it’s still an enormous market for the industry.

Those days are quite likely to come to a screeching halt in a matter of weeks, as Germany is well on its way to banning all “violent video games,” defined (via translation) as games “where the main part is to realistically play the killing of people or other cruel or inhuman acts of violence against humans or manlike characters.”

Hmmmm… sounds like just about every game I play.

Traditionally, the German game controversy involved the extreme (Gears of War) and the Nazis (Wolfenstein).  My German contacts (a.k.a. e-friends) normally react to this political chest-thumping with dismissal.  Not this time. In reacting to a proposed ban on Austrian online game shops (where Germans can purchase banned games), Lukas of Negative Gamer spelled out the worst-case scenario:

But what has that to do with gaming? In the last few days members of the CDU, which is sort of like the German version of the republicans, have been commenting about using the internet locking on more things [sic] then just child pornography. Like violent videogames…

I give them 6 months before they block filesharing sites, non governmental regulated gambling, Wikileaks, government critical news sites. At some point every Website that mentions games that are banned in Germany will be locked out. So, if you don’t hear from me on this site anymore, you know what happened.

We are looking ahead at some fucked up times in good old Germany. And every last one of the fat cats that waved that law through should know that they just lost the votes of a whole generation.

The thing is, I expect this from Americans. And while Germany prepares the ban hammer, Australia and Japan are working on similar fronts.  Maybe we’ll get lucky and this will merely be the backlash from a generation that didn’t grow up with video games.  Or, maybe we’re looking at the beginning of a decline in civil liberties.  For now, I’ll just be fortunate I get to look at this from the other side of the ocean.

Six Days in Fallujah, widely hailed as the worst event in the history of humanity, got the axe.

Faced with criticism from former soldiers, their families and activist groups, Konami Digital Entertainment is scrapping its plans to publish Six Days in Fallujah, a video game that was modeled after some of the most intense fighting during the war in Iraq. Konami planned to release the game in 2010, but once news about Six Days got out, critics in the U.S. and the U.K. slammed the title as insensitive and inappropriate. The roughly month-long conflict in November 2004 left more than 2,000 dead (including Iraqi civilians).

I’m actually rather surprised.  Controversial games usually get to release, endure scathing reviews, and then ride the hate train to financial success.  Based on all accounts, this game had a shot at being pretty good, and then got chopped down by a screaming minority.

It seems so fitting that the same week the fathers of Iraq War veterans shut down one game, one of the week’s key releases is another World War II game.  It’s getting to the point where a Super Smash iteration of the war wouldn’t seem ridiculous.  In a world where people are oblivious to history, FDR’s wheelchair would make him one of the most agile characters in the game.

And now, Velvet Assassin is going to revolutionize the World War II game by claiming the Battle of the Bulge wasn’t fought in seven-on-seven capture the flag.  If it wasn’t for the publisher (SouthPeak Games is English for “avoid like the plague”), I’d bet that it would be a sleeper hit.  The stealth crowd has been waiting some time for a new product, and it may have enough moxy to appeal to gamers who still go for story-driven products.  Imagine if the game hadn’t fallen under the radar, and the anti-Fallujah crowd was still fighting the purported mockery of the Iraq War.  They would say:

- Insensitivity to the Fallen: The game is loosely based on the experiences of Violette Szabo, a British spy was raped, tortured, and left to die in a Nazi concentration camp, and then executed.
- Promotes drug use: It features “morphine mode”, a feature akin to bullet-time that allows the hero to “more clearly remember” the events that transpire.
- Introducing the player to senseless violence: In addition, the hero will employ more than fifty different stealth kills, each brutal enough to reduce World War II™ into a video game that preys on cheap thrills.

And that’s the point: If I were to claim that Velvet Assassin was tasteless, I would be laughed off the internet (with the exception of GameFAQs, where the conversation would be derailed by Tifa hentai).  I don’t care much for the musings of the nutjobs that are trying to stymie the medium, but this one is discouraging.  The chance to bring Saving Private Ryan to video games was just derailed by a small group of people, rather than the sensibilities of the consumer.

The new revolution in vaporware occurred right before my “vacation”, so I’d like to like to jump back a week and talk about it.

OnLive, which launched at the Game Developer Conference, promises to deliver on-demand video games via the cloud to the PC, Mac or TV.

The company said it could provide high quality gaming on low end machines.

…

The innovation behind OnLive rests in its video compression technology which instantly streams video via the internet so that it appears “effectively instantaneously”.

“Perpetually, it appears the game is playing locally.”

The reality is that all the heavy lifting is done by remote data centres that can be up to a thousand miles away while players use a simple PC or TV hooked up to a broadband connection.

This removes the need for paying hundreds of dollars for traditional disc-based consoles made by the likes of Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony.

For this to happen, internet technology would need to progress exponentially versus computer processing power.  “Crappy internet” is a dark horse on the list of insults people use to make fun of the States, and we can barely get a lag-free game with the computer in front of us.  Now, I need a 1.5-megabyte internet connection to achieve an output resolution achievable by the Playstation 2?  Companies sold high-definition graphics as a necessity.  Even with the dominance of the Nintendo Wii, fifty-one percent of the current-gen market share is inhabited by high-definition consoles.  You want the next generation to take a colossal step back?  Not happening.

Even beyond logistics, assume that OnLive becomes the most important gaming tech since Atari popularized the purchasable, interchangeable cartridge.  “A library of games with no installation and no hassle!  Just turn on the television and have a blast!”  You bet your ass that terrifies me.

For all the clamor about digital downloads, I will always buy the physical media if I have the option.  In a world where the internet has wrecked the newspaper business, many people want the news in their hands.  It’s a feeling of comfort.  For me, buying the box is a feeling of ownership.  Technically, I’m only paying to license the product.  But as a gamer, I enjoy having two decades of gaming history on the top of my hutch. You’re now telling me that I need to pay a monthly subscription to play my games, and if you decide to remove a game from the service, there’s a chance I will never see it again.  What an awesome concept to sell to the fascists: They can now pretend certain video games never happened.

I went to school to learn about history, so it’s little surprise I have a soft side for protecting it.  That includes an urge to slap the fuck out of every person who gets butthurt by telling history as it was.  Remember when Osama bin Laden was the obvious choice for Time Magazine’s Person of the Year, and the subscribers threw a hissy fit, and Rudy Giuliani got the nod?  You may not want to tell them Hitler won the honor, and Stalin got it twice.  The award was designed to recognize the person that had the greatest impact on the course of human events in that year.  Hating the outcome of an historical event does not give you the right to pretend it never happened, no matter how many times a star athlete is charged with murder, or how pedo-riffic a politician’s hard drive was.

Every time German parents fail to do their job, and their kid takes it out on a school, the German media has a field day with killerspiele.  (At this point, you can make a drinking game out of the German infatuation with blaming video games for this shit.)  It has nothing to do with a social recluse engrossing himself in a medium that appeals to social recluses, Counter-Strike killed those defenseless children, and it needs to be done away with.  With a centralized outlet whose content can be policed, you can theoretically make that happen.   They could now decide which video games are appropriate, as opposed to a combination of education, moral values, and the economic constructs of capitalism.  In this day and age, it is still a financial deathknell for a game to receive an Adults Only rating.  Should that cease at some point, and shooters are supplanted by tentacle hentai as the dominant game genre, too fucking bad.  In the opinion of this nutjob with a web site, it would be a greater crime for somebody to press the magic button and pretend it never happened.

When freedom-loving Allies converged with baby-punching Soviets in 1945 Berlin, eradicating the Nazi ideology became the essential goal in rebuilding the German social conscience. Denazification was designed to forge a nation “conscious of moral and political responsibility for German policy”. Germany now stands as a pacified European superpower, an example of reconstruction gone right. But for Germany’s gamers, that success pits them against a losing political battle. Today, this country stands as a gaming mecca, comprising a ninth of Europe’s population and accounting for a quarter of the game sales. But it now faces a video game Kulturkampf that makes Joe Liebermann’s Mortal Kombat witch hunt seem farcical.

From 1984 to 2003, 380 games were placed on Germany’s “restricted list”, virtually halting their sale within the country. Mortal Kombat, and Crackdown got this nod for their bloody depictions of below-average gameplay, while Command and Conquer: Generals received a restricted rating for (and you may want to laugh when reading this) portraying war as the only acceptable means of resolving conflict. The first game actually banned by the country was Wolfenstein 3-D; its depiction of Nazi ass-kicking was an easy ban under Section 86a of the Strafgesetzbuch, the portion of the German penal document which prohibits the “Use of Symbols of Unconstitutional Organizations”. In July of 2006, Dead Rising was refused classification by the German software-rating organization Unterhaltungssoftware (USK). While the company’s refusal to classify the game didn’t place it on the German restricted list, Microsoft pledged not to publish any game that was refused classification, effectively making it the first X-Box 360 game banned. Four months later, Gears of War would earn the same fate.

This censorship is not a new issue in Germany, but April 26, 2002 turned it national. 19-year-old Robert Steinhäuser had been expelled months prior for forging doctor’s notes and missing classes. Probably pissed off at his asinine expulsion, he retaliated by moving room to room through the school and gunning down his former teachers. Fourteen of the school’s fifty-two teachers, two students, a policeman, and Steinhäuser were dead by the end of the day. Europeans were shocked that an American epidemic could hoist itself into a country prided on its gun control record. Four years later, another school shooting occurred in Emsdetten, a town of 35,000 near the Dutch border. Over thirty people were injured and the gunman, presumably irate with his inability to actually kill anyone, took his own life. What game drove these children to madness? The German media reported both kids had played Counterstrike, and the notoriety was on.

In January of 2007, a pair of German teens were charged with murder after a couple was stabbed to death in their home. The police reported the two used the names “Reno” and “Sepheroth” [sic] as their aliases, giving Final Fantasy VII cosplayers relief from their role as the fanbase’s biggest scum. Square had little reason to worry, given the game’s ESRB Teen rating and lack of graphic violence. I’m just kidding, the German people went ballistic and the game is now one of the country’s most notorious “killer games”.

The cumulative of these events left anti-censorship supporters reeling. After the Emsdetten incident, a survey found 72 percent of the respondents believes video games were attributable to the violence, and 59 percent were in favor of a ban. In December of 2006, legislators of Bavaria and Lower Saxony proposed a law that would punish gamers who committed acts of “cruel violence on humans or human-looking characters.” That’s right: politicians wanted jail time for the murderers of virtual humans. In February of 2007, Wired Magazine’s Bruce Gain warned of the precedent set by Germany’s censorship of the medium: “Politicians are pushing new legislation that would ban games deemed violent or that incite hatred. Not only that, this decidedly pacifist nation is lobbying the European Union to impose continent-wide censorship of especially inflammatory games.” As he put it, Germany’s past now comes to haunt a generation of gamers.

Note: This is adapted from a piece of research done during my junior year of college. If you want sources, e-mail me and I can help you out.