Filth! Filth! It’s all filth! Sinful, sinful world!

Thanks to this article here (yes, it’s from News Ltd again, my apple-logies for that), I can confirm that South Australian Attorney-General Michael Atkinson was, in fact, not misquoted. His justifications for censorship really are that spurious.

Atkinson obviously hasn’t read the “Computer Games and Australians Today” report which parliament commissioned in 1999. If he had, he would know that his concerns about the possible greater impact of interactive entertainment are unfounded. In any event, it is disturbing that he is seeking to base the law of the country on what, to him, is still an unsubstantiated premise.

He then continues on to say that any access restriction technology is likely to be compromised by children. I would raise three points in response to this. Firstly, if they are expert enough to break the access restriction, then they’ll certainly know how to obtain the game through illegitimate channels, rendering any censorship regime ineffective. Secondly, his claim that “Today’s children are far more technologically savvy than their parents” may be true in a general sense, but if he believes that the skills of children that are able to circumvent such access protection measures are anything less than extraordinary, it indicates that he knows little about the technologies he so readily dismisses. Thirdly, even if we were to accept the second point as valid, if a parent is unwilling or unable to control the games their children play (or for that matter, their Internet activities), then surely the only appropriate course of action is to physically prevent their children from accessing the technology altogether, rather than seeking to cripple it for everyone else by advocating unjust and ineffective censorship legislation?

He then tries to terrify us with accounts of currently-banned games which, he seems to imply, would be granted the proposed R-rating. In fact, at least three of them, Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure, Narc, and Blitz: The League, would likely be banned in any case. From my understanding of their content, all three could be deemed to promote illegal activity, which cannot be accommodated at any classification level.

Atkinson needs to realise that computer games are not kid’s stuff. The average gamer is aged in his or her late twenties. It is a mature medium with a predominantly mature audience. That Atkinson takes such a casual attitude toward banning adult games is a cause for great concern. It is a compelling fact that, were the same standards applied to The Godfather, widely perceived as being the finest motion picture of all time, the adults of Australia would be legally barred from seeing it.

Won’t somebody please think of the children?

I’m on a roll today…

Now, I’m no gamer – on the rare occasions that I play a computer game, it is invariably a quick blast on some crusty retro classic. However, I do have an appreciation for the medium and believe it should be accorded the same respect as other forms of entertainment, hence this post.

A little background to begin with. In the mid nineties, Australia introduced a mandatory and legally binding age classification system for computer and video games, broadly similar to the one already existing for films and video recordings. However, there was one important difference. Unlike films, for which the highest rating available is the R18+ classification, the highest possible rating for games was capped at MA15+. As a result, to this day, any game deemed unsuitable for a 15-year-old can not be legally sold to anyone, adults included. This restriction is in stark contradiction to one of the principles that supposedly guides Australian censorship decisions, namely that, to the greatest degree possible, adults should be able to see what they wish.

How did this slightly ludicrous state of affairs arise? The primary justification offered at the time was that interactive entertainment *might* have a more profound impact on the participant than passive entertainment. However, the report “Computer Games and Australians Today”, commissioned by Parliament in 1999, found no evidence that this is the case. The motivation for basing censorship legislation upon this unsubstantiated premise was largely the fact that, at the time, the balance of power in the Australian Senate was held by Brian Harradine, a deeply religious independent senator who, as it happened, was also a stalwart of the Senate Select Committee on Community Standards and notoriously pro-censorship. His favour was no doubt viewed by the Government as a prerequisite for carrying out their legislative agenda.

Now, at last, the reform of this absurd regime is on the agenda. The Standing Committee of Attorneys-General is to discuss the possibility of introducing an R18+ rating when it meets this month. There is, however, a fly in the ointment. The Attorney-General of South Australia, Michael Atkinson, has already publicly stated that he is opposed to the proposal. Unfortunately, standing practice is that unanimity is required among Attorneys-General for legislative change to occur.

Disturbingly, according to one of Michael Atkinson’s spokespeople, his perception of the type of material that would be accommodated under the proposed R-rating for games is of “computer-generated pornography and depictions of extreme violence“. This is absolute nonsense and I can only hope that he has been misquoted. As Atkinson is surely well aware, the criteria for the games rating would be exactly the same as that applying to the R-rating for films, under which pornography and extreme violence are expressly excluded. Indeed, under the present guidelines, if a game were to contain content of an equivalent impact to that of a classic R-rated film such as, say, The Godfather, A Clockwork Orange, or Apocalypse Now, it would be banned in Australia.

Will Atkinson be successful in sabotaging this much-needed reform? Or will the adult gamers of Australia finally stop being treated like children? We shall soon know.