“According to a recent survey, 68% of Australians regularly enjoy video games. Their average age is 33, and nearly as many women as men enjoy the hobby…but, by an unfortunate quirk of demographics, very few gamers are the kinds of people who create or enforce the laws.
Australia’s government has long been known for effectively banning the release of games. For many years, the Australian Classification Board didn’t have an “M” rating, effectively rendering games that could only have such a rating “unacceptable”, and unable to be sold by commercial retailers. Past titles around such controversy include Fallout 3 and Left 4 Dead 2. The Classification Board now has an “M” rating, but developers and publishers continue to face difficulty when publishing games in Australia.
Essentially, Senator Leyonhjelm just singled out a problem in Australian media regulation most in Australian government have until now lacked the boldness to openly challenge…the Australian government has used its power to censor, against the will of its legally-emancipated, mature citizens the right to freely indulge in the entertainment content it chooses, without restriction.
It’s been doing so for some time. Former member of the South Australian House of Assembly, Michael Atkinson, is known for championing the Australian anti-video game cause with Jack Thompson-level tenacity.
The oft-criticized Atkinson once advocated for stringent and ridiculous censorship on all mature media, including a ban of cover art on the boxes of “M”-classified films on display at movie rental stores.
That means that, in the name of preserving “moral values”, Atkinson literally advocated banning the public display of cover art to, among others, “Fight Club”…which consists little more than Brad Pitt holding a bar of soap looking vaguely perturbed.
In his speech, Senator Leyonhjelm proposed that part of the problem is that, not only are few lawmakers considered “Gamers”, but access to popular news outlet for Gamer Culture (IGN, Polygon, Gameguiders) are almost totally blocked by Australian government computers…“presumably this is because we might stumble upon an image of something that someone disapproves of…on a medium we don’t understand.” He went on to point out that those same users on those same computers have uninhibited access to Neo-Nazi sites and Liveleak.com, a site which hosts a number of videos shot with cell phones and home cameras, in which real people are killed.
You can watch a 14-year-old get shot to death by police officers from an Australian government computer, but you can’t read Kotaku’s review of Mass Effect Andromeda.
Senator Leyonhjelm, a slow clap for you. You’re doing the work of a true servant of the people. What comes of it, only time will tell – for now, I think everyone can agree that government officials making laws about something a large portion of their people enjoy doing regularly, when those officials do not know much of that subject and, in fact, fear its influence, is a bad sign. I think we can also agree, challenging the system that perpetuates it, in the name of the people you represent, is the admirable action of a politician who’s got it right.
Originally posted to GameGuiders.com,
3/26/2017
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