A new German ban on violent video games may drive Crytek, the company behind Crysis, out of the country! The Conference of Interior Ministers (IMK) voted unanimously on a production and distribution ban for violent video games to begin at the end of May. The ban calls any violence glorifying games, or violence dominated games "Media harmful to young persons" and prohibits advertising or selling them completely. I can't imagine how a modern day government could be so stupid as to limit freedom of expression and freedom of speech for totally bogus reasons such as these. If you look at the history of Germany itself you can see a sharp decline in evil facist violent behavior that pretty much coincides perfectly with the rise of violent video games and movies. What a coincidence?

In Rwanda and Darfur they didn't have a lot of video games, yet genocidal killings have occured in these countries in the last few years. In NYC Mayor Bloomberg is crusading against Grand Theft Auto IV due to NYC being the games setting, but ironically part of his campaign is to constantly refer to the cities recent record low crime rates and to take credit for them. What a strange way to present evidence that violent games cause violence, to point out the fact that the rate of violence has declined sharply in NYC since GTA III came out! How are you going to stand there straight faced and say video games cause violence when all the evidence available points to the exact opposite relationship?

It's a clear cut case in my mind of politicians not caring if what they are saying is helpful or damaging, but simply wanting to get votes. Clearly Bloomberg and other people like him who come out publically against video games are just doing it for the benefit of their less intelligent constituents. They are insulting their own voters intelligence with these type of campaigns, but sadly the IQs of the people lay on a bell curve and a lot of voters are really truely quite dumb.