Doom No Longer Considered "Harmful To Young Persons" In Germany

[Hungry Donner]

All of those years playing Doom and Doom 2 I might as well have been watching hardcore German pornography? What does that say about all of the Doom editing I did? And working with ZDoom? What about my Dad introducing me to Do- THIS ANALOGY I OVER.

 

[Hero in a half shell]

I like how Doom 3 wasn't on the list, it's so rubbish it can't even be considered a threat to our youth.

 

[The Great JT]

No longer harmful to young people, still badass.

Rock on, Doom. You and your "I Ripped Off Metallica From When They Were Still Good" soundtrack.

 

[Still Life]

Looks like gamers in Germany are all...

*Puts on shades*

DOOMED!



[HEADING=2]YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!![/HEADING]




This is great news. Doom is the shit, even today.

 

[Vern]

Now I just wonder if they'll ever let them sell a version of Doom 2 with the secret levels. Seriously Germany, it's been 70 years, I don't think a swastika in a videogame from 1994 is going to convert people to National Socialism.

 

[Formica Archonis]

All of those years playing Doom and Doom 2 I might as well have been watching hardcore German pornography? What does that say about all of the Doom editing I did? And working with ZDoom? What about my Dad introducing me to Do- THIS ANALOGY I OVER.

Did you just do ZDoom stuff or did you do any vanilla levels?

 

[ImmortalDrifter]

Now I just wonder if they'll ever let them sell a version of Doom 2 with the secret levels. Seriously Germany, it's been 70 years, I don't think a swastika in a videogame from 1994 is going to convert people to National Socialism.

"A thousand years will pass and the guilt of Germany will not be erased" ~Hans Frank.

 

[Shadow-Phoenix]

Now if only the rest of the world would follow then we'd actually see some progress... said the gamer completely void of the fact that some games probably shouldn't ever see the light of day again.

But in Doom's case i doubt we've seen the game 'cause as much violence as parents may have wanted to believe. I like to think that most people who played Doom turned out to be pretty decent folks.

Granted... the game did inspire things like this, but it's merely for shits and giggles so it should be ok.

He has got to be one of the best dad's ever.

 

[llafnwod]

Now I just wonder if they'll ever let them sell a version of Doom 2 with the secret levels. Seriously Germany, it's been 70 years, I don't think a swastika in a videogame from 1994 is going to convert people to National Socialism.

"A thousand years will pass and the guilt of Germany will not be erased" ~Hans Frank.

Yeah. Unless the name after that quote was "the entire German people, for the next 1000 years", I don't think that quote holds a lot of weight.

 

[Metalrocks]

Good for the Germans.
Now if only they wouldn't cut their games so much. Even though I live in Switzerland, we often just get the stores just get the games from Germany, which means that their heavily cut. I once tried to play Quake IV, it seemed like half of the game was missing after I played the uncut version(thank the mighty Newell for Steam).

i also lived in switzerland before i moved away. i had to go to a special store who was selling original US import versions. always pissed me off to spend so much money (over 110 SFr.) on the uncut version because all the stores are selling the damn german crap cut version (half life). but rather spend more money then having a awful cut version plus horribly synchronized on top of it.
does surprise me to hear that doom is off the index. maybe they wake up in some way and realize that games are not as harmful as they think they are. i sure agree with you that they should stop cutting games like crazy. it never made a difference to anyone.

 

[drummond13]

So wait, it USED to harm the minds of German children but now it no longer does?

... Is this organization realizing how ridiculous this is?

 

[ImmortalDrifter]

Yeah. Unless the name after that quote was "the entire German people, for the next 1000 years", I don't think that quote holds a lot of weight.

Well let just say you run a country who had just committed a horrid atrocity but now had a new government. Would you want anyone at all to think that you wanted anything to do with said atrocity or the people who committed it ever again? Can't blame them for it.

 

[duchaked]

yay? so guessing that some violent games that came out in 09 will be playable in Germany in only oh say...20 years? lol

 

[Rad Party God]

I heard Zenimax's entire letter to them just consisted of "IDKFA".

Maybe they wrote "IDCLIP" to get out of that pesky Index?.

OT: Heh, good for germans, even if it's almost 20 years later. Never say never!.

 

[CrystalShadow]

Um... Doom? Didn't ID release the source code for that a really long time ago now?

What does Zenimax hope to gain from this anyway? XD

Ah well. Whatever.

I guess Germany's censorship laws are pretty extreme then...

 

[Avayu]

German policies and countries similar to them are why the gaming community needs to keep pressing forward for the same legitimacy that other forms of media privy to. Here's a country where the Ultra-conservative, fear-mongering, "Bulletstorm makes people rape" crowd actually won.

In a way, games already have the same legitimacy as all other forms of media: The index is for all media (except newspapers, I think). I'm pretty sure there are more books and films on the list than videogames, simply because those have been around longer. So, in a way, your ultraconservative, fear-mongering crowd won this fight before games even existed (some time in the 50s, when a lot of Germans still basically had an old Nazi mindset towards art and media).
Granted, whenever someone does something stupid today, it will be blamed on videogames, though luckily we don't actually get those "game x is a rape simulator" kind of news very often/at all.

 

[Subatomic]

German policies and countries similar to them are why the gaming community needs to keep pressing forward for the same legitimacy that other forms of media privy to. Here's a country where the Ultra-conservative, fear-mongering, "Bulletstorm makes people rape" crowd actually won.

In a way, games already have the same legitimacy as all other forms of media: The index is for all media (except newspapers, I think). I'm pretty sure there are more books and films on the list than videogames, simply because those have been around longer. So, in a way, your ultraconservative, fear-mongering crowd won this fight before games even existed (some time in the 50s, when a lot of Germans still basically had an old Nazi mindset towards art and media).
Granted, whenever someone does something stupid today, it will be blamed on videogames, though luckily we don't actually get those "game x is a rape simulator" kind of news very often/at all.

In fact, the movies, books and audio mediums on the "index" outnumber the games significantly, the most numerous form of media indexed is movies at 2761 (games clock in at 561).
By the way, the news article is completely wrong in linking the existence of the BPjM (Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young Persons) to Germany's thriving porn industry. Media which is "obviously not intended" for minors such as hardcore porn doesn't fall into the responsibility of the BPjM at all, it concerns itself mostly with works that paint war, racism and violence in general in a positive light or even glorify them.
The problem especially in the 80s and 90s was that the BPjM and the general public in Germany saw video games as a form of electronic children's toy, so violent video games like Doom were treated much more harshly than movies, which by that point were accepted as an artistic medium. Ironically, in the 60s and 70s, movies were in turn more harshly treated than books and comics, and in the 50s a lot of works that were put on the "index" were comics.

 

[Hungry Donner]

All of those years playing Doom and Doom 2 I might as well have been watching hardcore German pornography? What does that say about all of the Doom editing I did? And working with ZDoom? What about my Dad introducing me to Do- THIS ANALOGY I OVER.

Did you just do ZDoom stuff or did you do any vanilla levels?

I did a lot of Doom 2 editing but I never released any of it. I do have some ZDoom maps in TeamTNT's Daedalus project.

 

[Kenjitsuka]

Don't they always replace the blood with green goo and call everyone a zombie?
Pretty sure they did that with the German release of Carmageddon etc.

 

[Subatomic]

Don't they always replace the blood with green goo and call everyone a zombie?
Pretty sure they did that with the German release of Carmageddon etc.

Yeah, that was a practice mostly used during the nineties to avoid the dreaded "indiziert" and/or USK18 labels, as those tend to hurt your sales quite a bit. That wasn't done by some censoring board though, but by the developers/publishers hoping to get a USK12 or USK16 rating. This often led to rather jarring and unnecessary self-censorship, like the ridicolous robot infantry in Command & Conquer. The in terms of violent content similar Starcraft on the other hand wasn't changed at all safe for the dubbing and still got an USK12 rating.
Nowadays, the German versions mostly just reduce the violence by removing excessive blood splattering and body parts flying around.