Bans don't work

The latest news from Germany is that senior politicians, including Minister President Edmund Stoiber of the CDU/CSU, are calling for a ban on violent video games.

The Bundesrat initiative is in fact old news, as Germany’s ‘grand coalition’ of the SPD and CDU/CSU signed a document agreeing to pursue a ban as long ago as last year.

But now, as is ever the case, unrelated events have sparked the debate into life again. Those of you who were able to locate the foreign news in the British press (usually afforded about as much space as the horoscopes) may have heard that a teenager ran amok in a school in Emsdetten on Monday, shooting eight people before eventually turning the gun on himself.

Investigations into his online activities revealed the gunman, Sebastian Bosse, had a keen interest in the computer game Counter-Strike. Bosse had used the game’s editing facility to create a mock-up of the school in which he was able to embark on a virtual version of his planned killing spree.

With the link between the shootings and the game so evident, the move to ban such games is likely to meet with considerable popular support over here.

But is it really so easy to establish a causative link to a computer game? It reminds me of the fuss over children’s TV series Power Rangers, in the 1990s. Parents complained that the posterior-kicking antics of the PR team were causing their children to batter each other senseless on a more regular basis than they had previously done.

Nearly twenty years later, it seems ridiculous that such a tame programme could have cause so much uproar. In 2026, it’s more than likely that we will look at Counter-Strike in the same way. To those of us happily free of psychotic tendencies, it’s just a good bit of macho, testosterone-fuelled fun, much like paintball or Quasar.

Of course, for Bosse it formed a virtual arena for preparing his crimes. But who’s to say that playing out his murderous fantasies in his bedroom didn’t prevent him from acting even sooner than he did. How many other hate-filled young men are taking out their anger on their keyboards, rather than on their schoolmates?

No-one will ever be able to prove that a film, computer game, or for that matter, book, has motivated someone to commit murder. Furthermore, any ban is likely to be ineffective, given the proliferation of download programmes which offer access to such games for free.

It is nigh on impossible to regulate human behaviour, whether you’re a computer games manufacturer or a politician. And once the video nasties and violent games have been done away with, who will we blame for the next atrocity?

Parents will be the only ones left. Perhaps we should be looking for answers closer to home.