Feb 25
Australia Pulls Stick Out of Butt
It seems that the Australian government is finally considering having the equivalent of the US’s R rating for movies or the UK’s 18+ rating instituted to allow dozens upon dozens of ‘adult’ titles to be shipped to the blood famished country.
It looks to be a hard sell to members of the Australian Family Association who believe that the violence in video games is potentially more harmful than that in other forms of media due to its interactivity. The Association says that there is NO reason to allow an R rating for video games in Australia.
“We’re concerned about the level of violence and so on in R-rated material,” said Angela Conway an AFA spokeswoman. “But in terms of the games, it seems that there’s a lot more scope to actually change people’s brain structure and their attitudes with games.”
Currently, Australia’s highest rating is MA (mature audiences) and is for ages 15+, anything that doesn’t meet the criteria for MA is immediately deemed inappropriate and does not get granted its classification. Games can not be released in Australia without the age classification.
This seems like a step in the right direction for the extremely conservative country to take in order to help them play catch up with the other westernised democratic countries that have less strict guidelines for releasing games. Maybe we’ll see some Aussies playing Bonestorm one of these days. One can always hope.
[Quotes via ABC News]
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It always kind of baffled me how anti-video game violence Australia is, considering the country’s history as a place of banishment for criminals back in the colonial days. Their ancestors are killers, but suddenly they’re too good to even play killing? It’s like Germany and video games with Nazis.
Well at least the Germans allow violent video games, they just cant have Nazi symbolism.