The State of the Union: Gaming 'Round the World

America isn't everything, even though Super Tuesday is tomorrow, but other countries have gaming controversies as well. Some of them have it even worse off, despite the fact there's no Thompson, Clinton, Romney, or Lieberman in their country. I'll quickly summarize the state of gaming in several other countries recently.


China: As GamePolitics reported today on a very old blog post from Henry Jenkins of MIT, China doesn't care so much as the United States about violence in video games so much as "gaming addiction". The notion of gaming addiction is supposed to loosen traditional family and community bonds and decrease productivity, and Jenkins argues that it benefits China to build the concept of an addiction to gaming. This would provide justification for China's increasingly restrictive policies on the internet and video games. China has banned all sorts of things online and modified a few others: China has banned children from internet cafes, imposed time restrictions on visiting those cafes, banned certain games for showing China didn't always belong to the current regime, and forced Google to support the great firewall. As capitalist of a communist country China is, they're still really restrictive about the internet, putting them at about the worst civilized country to be in if you're a gamer.

Germany: Germany has a strange couple of rulings on games as well. First of all, they don't allow any swastikas in their games or anything that's "not art", which is way more trouble than it's worth, but not very important. In a very strange decision, Half-Life was forced to tone the entire game down by a lot, resulting in robots instead of marines, no blood, vanishing enemies, and other nonsense.

Greece: Alright, this is the worst country for a gamer in the world, assuming you're not in a third-world country. In 2002, Greece right-out outlawed gaming. Nothing from solitaire to Brain Age could be played in Greece, even by foreigners just arriving in the nation. There was obviously a tremendous outcry, and the ban was reduced to only apply to internet cafes in December 2003. That was a close one.

Finland: Another recent story from GamePolitics, the Finnish Christian Democrats are asking for an extra screening process on video games to be doubly sure they don't have any hidden bad things. The Finnish Games and Multimedia Association was quick to say that the process is really rather unnecessary and would simply hurt the industry by giving Finnish gamers a reason to buy their games from elsewhere while they face delays and possible censorship, sidestepping the extra process. I wouldn't expect this to go anywhere especially, it's just a party considering the motion, but I'm not exactly up on my Finnish politics, either.

South Korea: Take China's information, and tone it down a lot. South Korea has banned several of the usual violent video games like Grand Theft Auto and Manhunt, but also has a slight issue with games involving the two Koreas. Mercenaries, Ghost Recon, and Splinter Cell have all been banned due to either showing North and South Korea at war or destroying Korean land in the games.