Australia’s R 18+ Rating0

This is a video game celebration article. Why? Well it looks like Australia is finally going to get an R 18+ classification rating for video games. A week ago the states and territories finally came together and agreed to support the new system. This is the best win for the Australian gaming public since that Michael Atkinson guy got booted. Up until now any video games made in or coming to Australia that contain violent or sexual material would have to fall under MA 15+ classification or be heavily censored. There have even been a large number of games that have been denied classification and outright banned. As a gamer and as someone who believes in free expression it makes me sad that the gaming medium is held in such low regard. After all in this country we are (as consenting adults) allowed to watch R rated movies, read R rated books and listen to R rated music but games are a completely different story for some reason.

This sums it up best

The problem is that so many people are still under the impression that gamers are children. But the fact of the matter is that in this century the vast majority of the gaming community are between 25 and 40. Which means that they are adults. As adults, gamers would like the same choice as the rest of the world as to what they can play. The other big problem that many people fail to realize, is by using an out of date ratings system a large number of 18+ games manage to come into the country under an MA rating. This means that a lot more of this adult content makes it into the hands of younger kids. So a lot of the lobbying groups trying to keep this new ratings system down to protect children are in actual fact trying to stop the very thing designed to do just that.

But of course a lot of these groups would like to have all games censored or banned and that’s where we get into that never-ending debate of censorship vs freedom of expression that has been raging for the better part of a century. It just happens to jump to a new medium every decade or so. First it was rock n-roll then comics, movies, TV and now video games. In another ten years it’ll be something else and games will be thought of as just another form of entertainment/art and be regarded the same as film and literature.

This hasn’t happened yet but it looks like Australia will finally put this ratings system into place making it the last developed country in the world to do so. Yippee for us…….. Wow I didn’t really want this article to be this serious but there you go. Now I was going to put up a short doco about the whole censorship in video games issue but then again I thought it would be more interesting if I show a video about the violence in games issue. Because lets face it, that’s what it’s really all about. So this is a video from one of my favourite internet gaming shows The Game Over-thinker. Its really interesting so check it out. So that’s all from me this week. See you next time.
Rowan

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoht0Xy5nQs&w=425&h=349]