According to this story found on Reuters, Franco Frattini (the EU Justice and Security Commissioner) has decided that Germany has the right idea about violent games. Apparently the rest of the EU has been too lenient regarding the sale of games to minors in the past, so Frattini (whose name could only be more Italian if it was “Earnesto Spaghetti-Os”) believes the entireity of the EU should create a uniform set of rules regarding violent games. Of course, Europeans still routinely give copious amounts of alcohol to minors, but alcohol has never been proven to cause erratic driving or violent behavior, right?
It goes without saying that the new, uniform rules wouldn’t be less stringent than what is currently in place. In Germany, to buy a game considered “too violent”, you have to offer sexual favors to a leper and pray that he doesn’t steal your skin to replace his rotting carapace. Frattini thinks this kind of hoop-jumping is necessary to keep kids away from the dangerous opiate of video games.
It seems that Europe is sprinting headlong into becoming a continent wide nanny-state. These “morality enforcement” actions, along with some of the more Orwellian things that have been going on in the UK and other countries, have made America’s fight against ultra-conservatives seem tame by comparison. The next time the President tells the media that his god backs the war in Iraq, thank that same god that you can still head down to the local Best Buy and pick up a copy of Dead Rising (without getting an itchy rash or a recurring colony of oral crabs).
