I will be one of the judges for the upcoming PGD2007-competition, and since german (yeah, that's actually were I'm living) law is very strict on national socialistic insigina I open up this thread that every participiant should carefully read through!
As most of you know World War 2 games are very famous these days (Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, Panzers, Wolfenstein, etc.) some of you may want to make a game for the competition that also play in that World War or maybe even has a mad futuristic vision in which the nazis took over the world (or the whole universe) and therefore I want you to inform what symbols you are not allowed to use.
If you use such symbols, I won't download your entry and you won't get any points for it from my side. The reason is simple : Those symbols are illegal by german law (§86a) and downloading an entry that contains one or more of those symbols will make myself offend this law and in the worst case could me, or any other interested in your game german person, get into jail.
So now you may ask why we have movies over here that contain those symbols? Easy : Movies count as art here in germany and as long as those movies don't promote national socialism they can use those symbols. Games on the other side are treated very badly over here in germany (especially since "killer-games" on some amok-running youths PCs were found) and are under no circumstances allowed to use those symbols and games such as Wolfenstein or Call of Duty have special german versions with those symbols changed (and often even names changed, so no Heinrich Himmler in the german Wolfenstein).
What symbols are forbidden in germany :
The german police has a list of the symbols that are forbidden, so please take a look at it here. The german law also forbids using symbols that resemble those ones, so something that actually is no nazi swastika but resembles it is mostly also forbidden unless the context clearly shows that it is assigned to something different. Same goes fro some ancient nordic runes like the odal rune.
But I want to make a game including national socialistic settings, what to do?
Best way would be to do it like the german version of Call of Duty. They don't totally ruin the setting like Wolfenstein did and replaced the nazi flag with a flag with the same color but using a stylized iron cross instead of the swastika. This way players still know what the flags refer to but without troubles for german players. And as for names : You don't need to exchange them with fantasy names. There are games (like Wolfenstein) that do this, but this is not something you must do.
Thanks for reading this, and if the you decide to enter the contest please take care of the above matters. I opened this as a separate thread instead of having Dom put it into the rules so you can discuss this and if you have direct questions or if you're unsure wether the things you do are against german laws just put them here, I'll try to respond as fast as I can.
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