Blogs On 1378 KM

Videogames rarely shy away from the bleaker moments of human history. From the horrors of the Crusades to the grim, cut throat frontier of the old West, some of the greatest gaming moments of recent years have been firmly rooted in the bloodiest episodes of the past...

http://www.bit-tech.net/blog/gaming/2011/01/15/on-1378-km/

 

From what I understand, they couldn't ban it anyway since it's a mod and mods aren't official commercial products that need to be passed through PEGI (or whatever they have). I mean, Alien Swarm didn't get banned, because it wasn't being given away at retail. And Alien Swarm has giant walking testicles.

 

I love it when this sort of thing is reported in the mass media and public figures speak out about it in an attempt to highlight how terrible something is.

It just makes me want to play it to see what all the fuss is about.

 

jesus i thought people had moved on from trying to ban things. i remember when they used to ban songs because they had swearing in them hahaha!

 

Its just a piece of history? Surely you could say the same thing for bits of other war games? Am I missing the point?

 

yeah sure, how about actually giving a crap about children like let's say...
ban near-sexual content in music videos/movies that are broadcasted at normal hours...

might aswell also start banning every single WW2 game that slightly hints at the holocaust...

oh wait, but they already censor all that stuff in Germany...

 

Protection of minors (from ???) sort of flies over here at the moment...it's just that any time some ominous looking game reaches goes into the open, politicians freak out over over it, using that as topic, trying to make a point for themselves. Same for counterstrike and lots of others, though that has already been a while. Goes way overboard though -.-
Funny to watch the futile attempt to ban something from the net, nonetheless.

 

One might do well to wonder, had there been such interactive means of simulating the choices soldiers have to make prior to world war 2 (etc), would there have been more soldiers willing to defy orders to kill innocent civilians?

I certainly think that my gaming past has made me realise that I have a choice - I don't have to follow blindly where my 'superiors' lead.

 

who's going to play that mod and then "choose" not to shoot the escapees? all you'd do is stand there and watch with no repercussions

 

Nobody would know or care about games like this if politicians and newspapers didn't decide to be outraged on the publics behalf. Same goes for Wikileaks.

 

They should ban Civilization V as well. A few days ago I played as Bismark and steamrolled over the entire world. How gruesome and inhumane these games are!

 

"The game's creator, Jens M. Stober, defends the game as a work of art" - Sounds like a reason not to download it, apart from any other possible concerns.

 

Probably not. Look up the Milgram experiment and the Stanford Prison Experiment. Ordinary people are capable of incredible cruelty when it is required for social conformity.

 

Ah, but interactive entertainment has the potential to allow us to experiment with disregarding authority and following our own conscience, thus undermining the effects of conformity.

 

I can see why you'd think that but it's dangerous to think a game like this would prepare you for the reality of a similar situation.

Read about those experiments that Cthippo posted. You would not have expected any of the people in those experiments to be capable of the things they did but the reality of it is that, no matter how strong you may think your morals are, most of us are unprepared for the emotional stress of actually being in that kind of situation.

The ONLY way to know how you would react is to actually experience it. Not some shallow imitation. You think Call of Duty prepares you to face actual gun fire? To actually see a someone die? Not even close.

 

Getting away from the politics and moral issues for awhile...

I played it, and it is a pretty weak MP game, even taking into account it's a user made modification.

 

I can haz delete?

 

As someone living in Germany AND interested in videogames....this is the first mention of it.

Germans love history...when it's more than a hundred years past. Everything that's younger is just a big nono.
There's no official Berlin Wall or Iron Curtain museum. They've done their utmost best to remove every trace of it.
There's a private guy that saved a couple of hundred meters of Iron Curtain, and he's not really getting support for his "Museum".
It's only been 20 years and already it's getting difficult to convince youth's that this has actually happened.

I'd have kept a kilometre or so of iron curtain, put a "Museum" sign on it one day after it came down.
The same for the Berlin wall. A fence* around checkpoint charly and 100m of wall to the left and right.
But no, they tore it down.

*A fence around a fence, that would have been ironical.

 

The young are already forgetting the deeds of the germans here in holland and in parts of germany right extremists are gaining support again.

so that these sorts of games are popping up is no surprice, may of these pro NAZI germany games are made in germany its scary somewere but fun to play any ways.

But look at it like this how would you feel if you were a german and thousends of games have as theme shooting germans, if i was a german i would like to play a german and win for ones.

 

....yah

I'll not even start this arguement