Even though Norway handled a recent terrorist attack in a very mature and straightfoward fashion, one store has elected to stop carrying certain games that the accused terrorist Anders Breivik claimed to have played.
Geir Stokke, director of Coop Norway Retail has decided to temprarily remove the games out of “consideration for those affected”, and Andre Holt had said something along the lines of “We have made our assessments of each department, and removed various games.”, the rest of the line when machine translated makes no grammatical sense but the point was made.
Electronics Spaceworld, another Norwegien store, has not taken any products off their shelves, the marketing manager Carl Klafstad saying “We cannot see any connection between the tragedy that happened and the fact that we sell games. We have never seen any research on that games alone have lead to such incidents”
If you are wondering, Coop is like America’s Wal Mart, except smaller, a general store that sells everything. Though I have to commend them for showing some respect, taking a product off the shelves because someone allegedly played them and was inspired is not the way to go about it in the least. According to a friend of mine in Norway, Coop hardly sells games because of their absurd price tags.
The games in question include Homefront, Black Ops, Modern Warfare 2, World at War, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Sniper Ghost Warrior, and Counter-Strike Source. Of course, this is one small retailer and it’s unlikely other stores will follow their lead.
In my opinion Coop is just making themselves look silly. I get the gesture but I think a far better means of showing respect to those affected would be to have a charity going to collect some cash to help rebuild the damage done and to send out Get Well Soon cards to those injured in the attack.
