As you may or may not know, three weeks ago a 18 years old boy went into his former school and started shooting people. This incident has caused several politicians to demand a ban on all violent video games. Some (like Bavarian minister of internal affairs Beckstein or the Lower Saxony minister of internal affairs Schünemann) even go so far as to demand 2 years of custody for creators and distributors of violent games. According to them, video games are nothing but a waste of time whose only aim is to lower the inhibition threshold and to prepare new school-shootings.
Considering that about 80% of the people between 14 and 21 years regularly play some sort of video game, these politicians should not complain about the fact that the youth is alienated from the politics.
Wolfgang Schäuble (Germany’s minister of interior affairs) fits nicely into the picture of the ignorant, technology-hating politician: he considers the internet to be a “distance university and training camp for terrorists”. He thinks that Internet surveillance and censorship are the way to go in the war on terror. Anyone how has some knowledge over the way the Internet works knows that you cannot block content. Those who want to access the terrorist-propaganda can do just that (an encrypted tunnel to a server outside of Germany and the whole censorship is useless). China has been trying the same thing for years with huge efforts, and the great firewall of china still does not block everything.