Video Game Banned...

...because you could paint some graffiti!

The following is a story that appears on Australian gaming website www.gamepower.com.au. I'll leave it to them.

It was sort of coming. There had been some chatter of the Mark Ecko's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure being refused classification for the Australian market. There have been a number of frankly questionable and downright stupid decisions in recent times but this one has to be the one that takes the cake.

Consider, if you will, games that got through without drama. Manhunt, which is a game that I couldn't finish. It just made me ill. The OFLC allowed it to breeze through, stating that it fell within the boundaries laid out by the OFLC. After the traditional sales cycle of the game was over, in fact, nearly a year after its release, the OFLC revisited the MA15+ classification, and withdrew it. By then sales had dribbled down to a few units every now and again and the 'damage' was done. The question is, what the hell are these people on?

In a perfect world, nothing would need banning because the people who use violent or sexual images to excuse their dreadful behaviour wouldn't exist. Because it's not a perfect world and there is some nasty stuff out there, we have a rating system to inform our choices. The problem is, that rating system is inconsistently applied across different media. Games are by far the most poorly treated because there is no R18+ because of the incredibly naive assertion that games are just for kids. Are you a kid? Thought not.

In a country like Australia, you can sell a book that says the Holocaust was invented, you can pollute people's minds with all sorts of trash (Australian Idol, X Factor, Hot Dogs from Big Brother) but if a game contains images of people creating graffiti, or worse, a female nipple (gasp!), you're out.

Australia is a free country and probably the best country in the world to live in (and I've been around), but boy do we have a government that is trying to nanny us into submission. Governments have dug themselves an insanely deep hole where they refuse to introduce an R18+ rating for games. If they were serious about restricting games that are not good for impressionable young minds, there would be an R18+ rating to push many MA15+ games up to and the protection would be there. As it stands, banning the game just does what prohibition of most things does - makes people want it more. All this will do is help companies like Amazon as they deliver planeloads of the games to Australian customers. That is incredibly difficult to control.

Australian gamers should draw the line here and now. We should contact our state attorneys general and write them a letter. Write a letter to your local member of parliament. Write letters to the OFLC. Be cool, be calm, be collected. Express your support to Atari Australia who are taking the OFLC to court. Tell all of these people why you play games and that banning them is a ridiculous knee-jerk reaction. The banning of this game is politically driven and clinically insane. And the people who did it should hear about it, loud and clear.

(Source: http://www.gamepower.com.au/, used by permission)