Game Brain – Censorship: blunders from Down Under

Brian Diefenbach
Western Herald

What happened to you, Australia?

You used to be cool.

Well, I guess you are still cool. You gave us Nicole Kidman and Steve Irwin. You gave us boomerangs, didgeridoos and shrimp on the barbie.

But this is about video games. Yeah, you still have a ways to go in that regard. Not that your excessive censorship hurts me any. You see, I live in the greatest country in the history of the world.

Thanks to concepts like “freedom” and “capitalism”, I can buy pretty much anything I want as of a certain age. And as cool as you are, your citizens can’t enjoy their video games without a nice side dish of censorship.

See, Australia has this government entity known as the Classification Board (formerly known as the Office of Film and Literature). Basically, board members are responsible for viewing every film, video, and video game that enters Australia.

Pretty sweet gig, you may think. What if I told you that the Classification Board had to issue a rating for every material they viewed? Meh, too much work. No worries mate!

According to a spokesperson for the Classification Board (in an interview with Gamespot Australia), board members aren’t required to sit through the whole thing.

OK, that’s fair, I suppose. How could you possibly watch every second of every film, video, or video game? It’s fairly easy to get the gist of it from just a few minutes. The same applies to video games; not every board member needs to play it, and nobody has to play it all the way through.

Why does Australia bother with all this watchdog busy bodying? Why, to protect moral, upstanding Aussies from inappropriate material. The guidelines for what is and isn’t appropriate are fairly vague, so the board members have carte blanche to drop the ban hammer on pretty much anything they want.

To be correct, the Australian government doesn’t really “ban” video games or any other entertainment material. Video games are given a four tier rating scale (G, PG, M, MA 15+).

This pretty much covers anything from toddlers to 15 year-olds. But what about car-stealin’, hooker robbin’ games like “Grand Theft Auto?” Surely, there’s a classification for adult-themed games?

You’d think so, but no. There’s no R, 18+, or equivalent of the ESRB’s (America’s voluntary Entertainment Software Rating Board) Mature rating. So if the game is too naughty for 15 year-olds… Denied!

The dreaded fifth tier is RC, or Refused Classification. No classification, no sale or distribution inside the borders of the Land Down Under.

It’s understandable, then, why so many games that are rated Mature in the US have problems clearing the Classification Board in Australia. While plenty of games are classified and sold in Australia every year, the banned titles make the news.

Take for instance “Fallout 3” from last fall. Great game. Extremely violent. You can break into someone’s house (I use the term loosely. Ramshackle domicile is more accurate), rob them, kill them (or vice versa), desecrate their corpse (no, not in that way) and make off scot-free (more or less). Good times! But the Board’s hang-up in all of this was the drug use featured in “Fallout 3.”

Even in the American version, the drug morphine was renamed to “Med-ex.” Apparently, the in-game use of morphine in “Fallout 3” was deemed too unsavory. So, it was renamed, and “Fallout 3” was “unbanned.”

Yay! It’s OK to get high and murder people in a video game, as long as you call the drug a made-up name!

From this example alone, we can conclude that the Classification Board (a) Is easily fooled and (b) Has messed up priorities. The practice of refusing to classify games in Australia has become so common that it’s a running joke in the game community. Developers and publishers, who aren’t willing to give up Australian sales for the fight against censorship, usually play ball with the Board and edit their games for the poor, sensitive Aussies.

No matter which way you slice it, the Classification Board is really just a bunch of “C” words– Censors.

Deciding what people can and cannot see? Judging the merits of a game based on an elite group of old fogeys who have probably never played a recreational video game beyond solitaire? Holding businesses by the short hairs in a childish attempt at government control? Sure smells like censorship to me.

Even the almighty US. isn’t free from this taint. Our stores won’t stock games rated “Adults Only.”

Granted, it is fair to card people when they buy Mature rated video games, but for every well-intentioned policy aimed at protecting our children from inappropriate content, there’s a specter of censorship lurking.

We Americans will always have a Jack Thompson or Hillary Clinton getting their undies in a twist over video games. But in Australia, they have an entire government body dedicated to it. We’re far from perfect, but at least we aren’t Australia. Crikey!

Brian Diefenbach, a columnist and copy editor for the Western Herald, is a senior majoring in imaging. For more Game Brain, visit the Game Brain blog.

Short URL: http://www.westernherald.com/?p=10607

Posted by heraldstaff on Oct 22 2009. Filed under Weekend Scene. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

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