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the german video game laws seem like way over kill to me... :\
i mean, i can get where they came from, but still. I can't. Censorship just doesn't work unless done at a family level. ie. parents controlling what their children read, watch, listen to or play.
Governments doing such was an epic fail back in the days when comic books were banned in the states, or video nasties in England. Now there's this thing called the internet. Remember when I was at school in the 90s and a friend was involved in a student exchange. German kid would have been something like 14. We were playing around and decided to fire up Doom to show it to him. He immediately entered cheat codes and zoomed off to find all the secrets.
Gave us all a good giggle. (this turned into a bit of a ramble, sorry)
Comics were never banned in the US, but I think you're thinking of the Comics Code. The Comics Code Authority was a self regulating body of publishers self censoring to avoid government censoring/banning of comics. Also, much like video game ratings, it's also done to appease distributors, who are the actual customers of publishers, and many of which do not want to sell things which the public may have deemed lewd. There was never any law stating that comics couldn't be sold (or video games nowadays for that matter) without being approved, it was just part of the realities of the market that it had to be done, and it took a long time for comics to finally do away with the Comics Code Stamp. I think as far as games go, eventually ratings will someday become less important (at least, in the US), especially with digital distribution and future consoles relying less on physical media and brick and mortar shops. I remember when working on the Wolverine game and there was much early fighting on if the game would be rated T or M, and how that would affect sales, because it's a huge factor when it comes to traditional advertising and sales to larger distributors when you have to factor in physical copies and how many will actually be sold (Walmart stocks fewer M rated games, but more E or T rated games, simply because of sales numbers and their demographic). I believe this becomes much less of an issue when you don't need to concern with stock, and instead only bandwidth, to reach customers. Some form of rating will likely always exist mainly because I still think it's a valued and important sales tool to be able to identify to potential customers that 'this game has people getting their heads ripped off' from 'this game is about unicorns and rainbows', since I think most can agree that there are plenty of things in games which are decidedly not for children. What I mean is that I think there will be less emphasis placed on developers to shoot for certain ratings, and rather simply make the game they're going to make. Hopefully this, combined with the fact that it's quite difficult to prevent, say, a German citizen from acquiring a game from America over the internet (even if it's banned for sale), will hopefully lend to less censorship in the future. Thanks for the clarification - it was something I read on a blog, I think.
Generally agree as well. I'm a parent and there's some games I wouldn't want my daughter playing, so giving me the tools to know what the general content is at a glance is something I completely agree with. They just tend to go overboard in some countries. The ones that spring to mind are Germany and Australia. There's China as well, but that's more of a complete media lockdown. The German censorship is driven by different motives than the Chinese one, I think. It's also not a blanket style censorship.
Maybe if more of a games industry existed in Germany, things would change. As it is, video games have no lobby and thus currently are lowest in the food chain, so everything bad is pinned on them. That's how it works in a nutshell. Is pretty base for the most part, and forms of entertainment not understood by the main voting block (over 40's) make an easy target.
Oh Ricky, if you were a 16 year old girl that would have been a cute thing to say.
Gimp is _fundamentally_ different from PS; it is open source software and doesn't cost a thing. It only requires users to code their shit themselves. Is that asking too much? ;-)
Apples and oranges. Heh - I know what you mean. Sometimes I wish I was a sixteen year old girl. And nobody would be able to afford me either.
This is for you Spirit: http://rickyt23.com/assets/images/rickye2m2rq_1.jpg sorry, i guess you just did not know that there was a gimp plugin to do this since 2005. http://www.logarithmic.net/pfh/thesis
I used it to remove those brushes: http://i.imgur.com/Buprs.jpg (seriously! great huh?) better example: http://i.imgur.com/4RyXM.jpg But yeah, only money and patents make sure there is an incentive for progress and there definitely was not a GIMP plugin to do this 5 years ago. i'm talking about that kid on the bike! fucker just disappeared. he was looking on his right... maybe there was a bear there or something.
one at the edge of the road where the boy was, and one a little to the left of there, under the branch.
Same in the photoshop vid, you could see some of the bricks were the same, or very similar.
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