A while back, I posted a thread asking why the game Return to Castle Wolfenstein was required to have all Nazi symbols removed in Germany when movies such as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade do not have this requirement. The answer at that time was that the game could have been released uncensored, but it would have had its sales restricted to 18+ only, so the game company voluntarily removed the Nazi symbols so that Return to Castle Wolfenstein could be sold to younger gamers.
Now, we have Wolfenstein: The New Order, which is already rated PEGI 18. The German version does not censor any of the violence that gives it this rating, yet it still removes all Nazi symbols. From what I’ve heard, this is because German law considers movies to be art, and therefore Inglourious Basterds can be shown there, while video games (even 18 rated games) are considered “toys” and therefore require censorship.
So, what’s the Straight Dope? Does German law really make such a distinction between movies and video games with regards to Nazis?
(I might add that the censored version isn’t fooling anyone. The swastikas are replaced by black Wolfenstein logos… in white circles… on red backgrounds, while the Nazis are replaced by a fascist “Regime” which just happens to have its capital in Berlin. Even German gamers on YouTube readily admit they’re fighting the Nazis in this game.)
The distinction is, as you said, between art and non-art, not between movies and computer games, which, sadly, does apparently still exclude games for some people. As the publishers want to openly sell this game in Germany, they probably chose to err on the safe side. Since the advent of the new rating system (the old one was just a voluntary recommendation) the alternative is much more terrifying also: it used to be that your game (book, movie, whatever) was “indexed” meaning it could not be advertised, sold to or shown to anyone under 18, meaning you had to ask for it in the store. Nowadays, that avenue does not exist anymore, so if a game fails to get an 18 rating because of illegal content, it will just be plain verboten, which I suppose the people responsible wanted to avoid.
I don’t think so. The law against NS propaganda doesn’t concern itself with feasibility, only legality. If a film contained questionable scenes, those could be cut out just as easily if desired. I really think it has more to do with the fact that it hasn’t quite registered with everyone yet that video games are just as much art as movies are. Maybe the fact that games are more immersive also has something to do with it.
It should be noted that advertisements also cannot contain banned symbols (although a poster for an exhibition at a history museum could probably get away with it, not sure). Inglorious Basterds are usually named in this context, but The Producers (the Mel Gibson Broadway musical) was also affected. When the show was running in Berlin, the theatre was adorned with huge red banners with a black pretzel in a white circle, like this. This stunt raised quite a bit of protest (mostly from people who had no idea what the show was about), but is of course perfectly legal.
Well, they aren’t seriously trying to ‘fool’ anyone, they’re merely following the letter of the law. Even though Germany was made a democracy after the war due to the horrendous atrocities the Nazis committed they felt it worth putting limits on free speech & expression when it came to those. You can be arrested & jailed just for doing the Nazi salute in public. You can Google it but I remember a while back a guy was actually prosecuted for teaching his dog to do it on command(!)
I think you mean Mel Brooks. Mel Gibson doing a version of The Producers?!? The mind shutters to think…
