Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Intellectual Property Law Blogs -> Video Game Law Blog

Intellectual Property Law

: Video Game Law Blog

Great day to be a zombie in Switzerland

By Chris Bennett, Tudor Carsten, Michael R. Coburn, Sarah Dale-Harris, Pablo Guzman, Danielle (Dani) Lemon, Chris Metcalfe and David Spratley

According to a recent article in Kotaku, Switzerland's National Council recently passed a bill banning the "manufacture, advertisement, importation and sale of any game that promotes as a means of advancement or "success' acts of violence against humans or "human-like' creatures."

Leaving aside for the time being the fact that I'm not fluent in German and so haven't actually read the bill, what exactly is a "human like" creature? I'm assuming on the basis of the medium in question that the likeness would have to be based on combination of visual and aural features, i.e., if it walks on two feet and talks, its "human like", but where are developers to draw the line? While it is relatively clear that there will be no more slicing virtual zombies in half with machetes in Switzerland, as was half the fun of Dead Rising, what about the rest of our favourite video game machine gun fodder? Are walking, talking metal robots too "human like" to have their limbs torn off by pixelated rocket-propelled grenades? Can Ryu continue to hurl hadoken at Blanka? Can Mario still stomp on Bowser? It's not clear what the answers to any of these very compelling questions are, but I for one would have loved to sit in on the debate between the legislators that ultimately passed the bill in question to see what they came up with.

And what about violence against "human like" creatures that is not actually rewarded in gameplay? I've scored millions of points from executing clean headshots in numerous first- and third-person shooters, and decapitated hundreds of blood mages in Dragon Age: Origins (which is an amazing RPG, if you're interested), but nothing disturbs me more than wantonly mowing down hapless civilians with my tricked-out Infernus in the Grand Theft Auto series for absolutely no reward (and unless the police see you do it enough times, with no consequence). Presumably, this sort of senseless violence would not be banned in Switzerland because it does not advance gameplay. Strange.

Bookmarks: Delicious, Digg , Facebook, Google, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Yahoo

Full post as published by Video Game Law Blog on March 25, 2010 (boomark / email).