This is pretty much straight news-blogging. It’d be easy to editorialise on it, but I suspect you know exactly what I’m going to say. Australia is already known for its lack of an actual real 18/R rating, so banning any game that would get over a 15 here. It’s also known for its [forwarding - Ed] net-censoring, with active network-level blocking of sites [being proposed -Ed]. It’s being reported that they’re bringing these wonderful developments together, wanting to block access to sites including any content that doesn’t hit that 15 rating, including everything from shops that will ship real games to Australia to flash games to any other downloadable adult-rated game. Do read the full story, which does explore some of the implications – like, say, World of Warcraft not being rated in Australia due to being an online game. So… is that going to be banned? We’ll follow this one carefully.
Actually, let’s editorialise a bit: Piss Right Off.
Related Stories:
I’d actually expect a double dissolution to go against the current government, due to some of the shine coming off of Rudd now that people have seen what he’s actually about.
Not that I’d expect the opposition to actually win the damn thing.
I’m not TOO worries about the filter, but there is some cause for concern as has been said, it’s riding on the greens and independents, and that mob is capable of all kinds of crazy thinking.
I think you should check your facts before just regurgitating what you read on the internet RPS. Poor journalism indeed.
1) We dont have a net censor, they are looking into it and I have all confidence it wont get enacted (they are just trying to make a senator happy so they can have a coalition in the senate)
2) WoW IS rated in Australia, that was just a rumour that passed around a while ago and has since been cleared up.
3) Just because we dont have an R18 rating doesnt mean that games inappropriate for 15 years olds will get banned, we get 99% of games ok, its just the few extreme ones that get banned (and have _slight_ changes like fallout’s renaming of morphine to stimpacks and then are allowed).
4) We will eventually get at R18 rating, its just the attorney general of south australia is being a dick about it.
4) One day he’ll die or retire.
Everyone’s just super pissed (the U.S. kind of pissed) about the new alcohol tax. They’re legislatively lashing out at everything in order to distract the public.
Actually, our government is currently looking into the exact same options with their newly established web filters…
Man, I love australia. I wanted to emigrate there until they started being douche bags about electronic entertainment. It’s one of the most secular countries in the world on top of of it all. Makes no sense to me.
Oh, also. Dylan, I think you are being confused by the media spin there. Fallout’s stimpacks were ALWAYS called stimpacks. If you read somewhere that Fallout was banned because they were called Morphine you are being misinformed. Fallout was banned till the Australian government got its head out of its ass and that story you heard was just a cover up.
@ Dylan: WoW isn’t rated in Australia – have a look at the OFLC’s website, no WoW there.
http://oflc.gov.au/www/cob/find.nsf/simple?searchview=&searchwv=1&searchmax=5000&count=25&query=%28%5Btitle%5D%3D%22World+of+Warcraft%22%29
Haha, I’m loving the “sweaty danglers”.
The expression, I mean.
Can’t wait for Yahtzee’s reaction.
Not only is WoW NOT rated, it can’t be – as they say when you connect – “content may change during online play” – the game itself can be as family friendly as you like, but people can still join and start sexually harassing people and simulating sex (i’m looking at you WoW guild of naked men).
While they’re at it, they should also ban movies, television, alcohol and smokes to be thorough with it.
so i came to rps to find out about awesome stuff and i am told that:
1)country where i live in is trying to copy their close friends: the china
2)MJ is dead!
shitty day today.
“in Australia, the liberals did it when they were in power, but I believe it is Opt-In and ISP level. Or something like that…”
That breaks my brain…
Over here the conservatives are the book banning censors, and the liberals are, well, liberal. Any American who identifies himself as liberal should be *screaming* at this.
I’m curious as to how the two words acquired a different meaning here in America.
In australia we have the Liberal party, who are conservative. We use the term small l liberal to refer to actual liberals
@Nicomallo: That’s true up to a point, but the Liberal party comprises both a conservative and a liberal tradition. They’re certainly not liberal in the American sense of the word (where it seems to basically be a synonym for ‘left-wing’), and the conservative strand is dominant on social issues, but their economic policy is ‘liberal’ in the true sense, i.e. free markets with minimum government interference. (Though of course all of these things are relative, in this case relative to the other major parties in Australia. I think it’s pretty much futile trying to come up with an absolute centre to define everything else aroumd.)
The Australian Liberal Party has ideals that come straight from Locke and Smith (and others I forget), ie the classical definition of liberalism. Since most of the individualist changes demanded by those times have come to pass, their legal and social conservatism sticks out.
Since the US’s entire political landscape pretty much comes from the same place, and it’s systematically stamped out the traditional left over the last hundred years or so, the divide is over other things. The fact that the US’s major parties used to be the same party (kinda,sorta,a little) is nicely symbolic I think.
I’m from Australia, so I can safely say Fuck Australia. In other censorship news from Australia, the laptops they are providing to schoolchildren instead of textbooks will be blocking near everything.
Yeah. As it stands, the Liberal Party and the National Party are the conservative ones, united in a government coalition. (The NP usually represents the country, the LP the cities). The Labor Party (the current government) was born out of a massive strike action, and is also one of the oldest parties in the country. For a lot of its years its policies were effectively social-liberal to socialist, but its factionalism has resulted in a rather dramatic shift away from that.
So, up front, I’m not for this. It’s just firstly, the difference between unrated/unratable content and RC content hasn’t been grasped by a lot of the people over the internet talking about the issue. It helps sensationalise things, but the issue is pretty big all on it’s own. Secondly, it seems that people seem to have a gut reaction to the word censorship without thinking about it. At some level though some censorship is welcomed by society, Conroy himself has been using that as a tactic when speaking about the filter. The problem is more nuanced than people want to give it credit. The problem isn’t government interference, because there are acts that society wants the government to intervene in, like the child porn example that Conroy is also fond of.
As should be obvious unrated content is fine. WoW and so on fall under this. It’s the content that gets refused classifcation that is banned for sale. This internet scheme is, basically, the logical extension of having a government ratings board that has the power to refuse classifcation. If something is refused classification – that is the board, and therefore the executive, declaring that some work is, on some moral grounds, unfit for sale in Australia. The internet we have today effectively means a government no longer has this sort of control. If something is RC in Australia then a person can still go out and buy it from the US or SE Asia or somewhere, if discovered in transit it’d probably get confiscated, but otherwise it gets in. So under our current scheme you have to either accept that RC material will be bought by Australians (so why bother RCing anything?) or try this completely whacky scheme that hopefully won’t get out of the water. I think actually the answer is a third option that reigns in the remit of the board, but I’ve been writing this post for 30 mins already.
I did like the commenter above defending America saying ‘we absolutely don’t have any form of censorship. No child porn though.’ My argument isn’t that child porn should be allowed, but that stopping it is censorship. It’ s also important to stop it, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t a form of censoring expression. Just one that I, and almost everyone in the world, agree with. Certainly then there is a line at which freedom of expression stops. The difference here is where do you draw the line and how is it policed. The reason child porn can’t be sold in America is because the works created are illegal, the reason is the same for RC material in this country. The line is just put in a different place.
Anyway,
yeah.
Goddamn I was going to write something saying that even if this untenable scheme were somehow piggybacked to the NBN and got up on those grounds, as outrageous as it would be, it would not be close to the atrocities of our previous government. It would be a huge inconvenience to Australians, so maybe more people would be upset about it.
I’m not TOO worries about the filter, but there is some cause for concern as has been said, it’s riding on the greens and independents, and that mob is capable of all kinds of crazy thinking
Not so much crazy thinking, but crazily their “stands on principle” can usually be purchased for the right price / token action.
To the people disputing my categorisation of the ALP as left wing, you’re right in the hard sense of the political spectrum – but politics in the West is so dramatically skewed to the right that in fact centre right parties like Australian Labor become the de facto left wing of the two party spectrum in that nation.
The old concept of the left as being socialist is gone in the West – the definitions of what’s left and right have changed.
@ denright – Fallout 3 WAS banned in Australia because it had morphine in it – they changed morphine to Med-X, not stimpacks.
Do your research. And it had nothing to do with the government, the OFLC is an independant body.
Sorry for the double post, but the misinformation and ignorance in this thread is killing me.
Greens? Capable of crazy thinking? Independents, maybe, especially Fielding and Xenophon. Although it’s easy to dismiss them as tree-hugging nuts, Greens are the most level-headed of all the parties. They’ve shown themselves as superb at going through bills with fine-tooth combs and sifting through the bullshit.
The Greens have shown themselves if not opposed, then visibly unwelcoming towards the plan for a while now.
@Psycopomp – in the US, liberal has become a code-word for “Social Democrat”. Look at Hillary Clinton for example. Self describes as a liberal, however is behind lots of censorship, gun control (it may be a good idea, doesn’t mean it’s liberal), “nanny state” ish policies etc.
@CMaster
To be fair, Hilary Clinton terrifies a lot of people.
I don’t understand banning a game for having morphine. Setting it for 18+ it can understand, but ban? ban sould be reserved for terrible things.
Also, what about tons of books that show drugs? sould these books banned to? are we in medieval times again?
That’s the thing. It’s not that it was bannable offence. Merely that something about drugs and children in the game (can’t be arsed looking up the ruling) meant the game could not fit into the existing ratings for video games.
Almost no games are outright banned. They just have content outside an M15+ rating, and thus are unable to be sold.
If it was a movie or a book it would have been fine as a) the rules are more lax, and b) there are ratings that cover everything anyway.
@Serondal: ‘Completely free and no questions asked’ does not really exist. But here in Sweden (and I believe the rest of Scandinavia) public health care is dirt cheap, and you pay only a fraction of what it costs to visit a doctor or dentist, get operated etc. And with universal health care, no-one is /unable/ to afford subsidized health care. (Incidentally, some people blame irresponsible investment practices for Iceland’s plight?)
Let’s bring the P-word in.
Isn’t this an obvious increase to piracy rates in Australia? I mean, if i didn’t have an access to a game in my country, for some reason, and had the resources to play it, but not buy it… i would certainly resort to piracy. Even if there was a method of buying, but it probably would cost an arm and a leg, or both.
Interesting debate fellahs.
I don’t think anybody has mentioned the proposed banning of ‘all internet access’ for the aboriginal people in northern Australia. This was hoofed about a few years ago (when Howard was still in power) and basically boiled down to an example of state racism. They apparently decided that because a few aboriginal men had downloaded kiddy-porn the whole lot couldn’t be trusted with the internet. Can anyone in Australia clarify this for me? My only aussie freind died last year and i’m a bit out of the loop.
The whole Howard/Rudd axis though reminds me of the transistion from Tory (thatcher-major) to Labour (blair-brown) where the left had to veer so far right to become electable after so long in the wilderness you end up with the muddy centralised nonsense that passes for politics nowadays.
At least the crooked fuckers have all be found out now though.
Not that it’ll change jack shit………….
sigh.
Are all British commonwealths (and Britain itself) destined to become Orwellian dystopias?
I don’t have the time right now to read all of the responses. Did anyone actually support this bone headed idea?
BAN SEX! BAN VIDEOGAMES! BAN BOOKS! COMPULSARY TELESCREENS FOR EVERYONE! WAIT A SECOND! THIS ISN’T ENOUGH! WE NEED TO POLICE THEIR VERY THOUGHTS.
@Dylan: I feel for you, but I didn’t find it surprising. Perhaps some things just shouldn’t be covered, especially when it knocks my faith in my mental image of Kieron being well-educated and intellectual. And I like that image, damn it!
@Cheetar “the laptops they are providing to schoolchildren instead of textbooks will be blocking near everything”: Isn’t that actually a very responsible move? If you’d said that the network of legal adults was being screwed around with, you’d have something, but the Internet often exists within a World that’s as strongly based upon fantasy as video-games are, and misinformation is abundant here.
So given that they don’t want those kids to be exposed to large amounts of misinformation and pre-programmed hate, they lock out the sections which would be unhealthy for them until they’re old enough to comprehend the difference between a biased, idiotic opinion and a truth of high-probability based on peer-reviewed research.
@Tei: There’s a difference between “displaying correct drug information in a medical journal” and “actively, effectively and merrily promoting the usage of fantasy drugs with real names, and actualising the usage of such drugs within the game as largely positive whilst downplaying the negative side effects”, eh?
I wonder when are they going to ban all (video)games, just cause politicians don’t play ‘em.
Maybe that might provoke some arguments and riots and stuff, but do they really care:..of course not.
I am so pissed off with our politicians in Australia who are so fucking out of touch with both contempary social values in Australia and technology
Every poll shows the politicians as more conservative what the public actually thinks on stuff like gay marriage or abortion.
And most of them are technological fucktards. We had a big political scandal the other day – and the thing nobody commented upon – our Treasurer (Finance Minister) gets SHIT SENT TO HIS FRICKING FAX MACHINE. Like 400+ pages of it. BY PEOPLE EMAILING AND ADDRESS IN OUTLOOK FOR HIS FAX MACHINE
@Clive Dunn – Yes, that is true. Although technically the ban was pornography. And they have big signs up at the roads into the settlements saying PORNOGRAPHY IS BANNED HERE.
So all the little 12 year old aboriginal kids can read the signs and ask mummy and daddy what pornography is.
And the sad fact is that both the Liberal (eg Tory) and Labour parties here are actual extremely conservative on social matters.
Oh, I missed this one…
@Krondonian: I didn’t properly stress this before: I’m actually part of a gaming group which is comprised of people from various nations around the World. Sometimes, having fun with a large group of people from various cultures is more important than a low ping. GASP! Scandalous, I know.
So to answer your question, no. I tend to play on servers around the World, even where I have a high ping, it’s nice to find out how people from different cultures play, and thus pick up a few new tricks in the process. Notwithstanding that there are massively multiplayer online games which don’t even require a low ping. The thing is, I’m not the sort of isolationist gamer who lets ping rule their life, and my days on low-end dialup taught me a thing or two about how to compensate for that anyway, so even on a high-ping server I find that I can do pretty well.
At least online gaming doesn’t desynchronise any more. fffffDuke Nukem 3D. No, I kid, I still love you Duke, but those instances of desynchronising were annoying, especially since I liked gaming with this chap from Canada way back when.
Anyway, back to the original topic; despite playing around, the worst example of nation-slamming is still from England. In fact, I was even witness to a thread recently on a forum about the worst people in games, and there was consideration given to loud kids, elitist gamers, armchair commandos, and yes… the British. There were people who were just tired of British people slagging off their nation of origin whenever they lost.
And this is the exact thing that one English acquaintance of mine got ostracised from that gaming group for.
We can stick our heads in the sand and ignore it and blame-dodge as much as we like, but this is a problem and something needs to be done about it, and I can’t do much but damn it I can at least try to shame people into better behaviour. At least try to keep up good appearances for the rest of us, eh?
It’s tiresome having to explain to everyone else that not all British people are like that. I frequently have to show that not every British person out there is a fascist who despises every nation which isn’t their own, or at least that I’m not like that.
/sigh
Thanks Talorc. That’s truly messed up.
When i was travelling in Australia a few years back i met an aboriginal chap who filled me in on the state-racism that is prevelent there. Truly shocking. Akin to aparthiad South Africa and only allowed to continue becuase of the shocking amount of ‘brushing it under the carpet’ that goes on.
@wulf
I agree if theres one thing i hate its racist nation bashing dickheads like those f***ing english. When are they gonna realise you cant prejudge people based on their nationality.
And ye its so tiresome being British when tolerant people from other countries quite rightly assume that im a racist prick because of where I come from and those goddamn english.
P.s. Im not 100% sure if you were being serious but just to clarify im not. So no offense if our sarcasm levels dont match :<
More on topic stuff like this often tends to get blown out of proportion becuase people enjoy whining about it. Hopefully for the sake of australians that ends up being the case here (or someone with half a brain steps in and says "wait this is retarded lets not doing this")
What are they going to do when everything is banned? Ban all the 16+ year old from the country since Australia is obviously not meant for them or ban childrens from the country so the previous bans can be removed?
remember folks:
this is why it’s important to split your voting ticket!
even if you are a died-in-the-wool Labor voter (like me), it’s always important to vote minor or vote across the aisle on the Senate ballot; the major parties are big tents, and they’ll allow any old yahoo in who’ll hold the line in a division. no matter how much of an ardent partisan you are, it is NEVER, EVER a good idea to surrender parliament to one party.
thank fuck for the Greens (and those dodgy indies).
When will people learn… when you can’t get your homicidal-ramprage-fix from slaughtering the random population of some medieval village, you just take out your aggressions at the local office.
Also, yeah, our government sucks.
Left and Right are meaningless in any country without a Monarch or Autocrat Head of State. The terms refer to those who sit on the ruler’s right or left in a parliament. It used to be that the Aristocracy sat on the Monarch’s Right and the Middle-classes on the Left. That system is not entrenched any more, but can loosely be translated to mean that anyone to the Left of the Monarch is Left-wing and anyone to the Right of the Monarch is Right-wing. A spanner is sort of thrown in the works in modern Britain because we don’t actually have a friggin clue what the political alignment of the Queen is, except that she’s obviously a Monarchist. The only clues you can get are from how those around her behave, but that’s even more confusing: Prince Philip is likely a Rightist wingnut, but Prince Charles seems to be a Leftist moonbat.
The US gives the impression that it is very Right-wing; but this is their media doing them a disservice. I’ve visited about 5 states in the mid-west and bible belt and only Indiana and Oklahoma seemed quite overtly Right-wing in my opinion. Kentucky, Florida and Illinois are if anything quite hostile to Fox News; you can always tell the political leanings of the area you are in by watching the local Fox news programmes. When they are louder than the main Fox News channel, you’re in wingnut country.
I have recently changed my position on the subject of game bans: let them. Let the politicians ban what they want. I want them to see the resulting mess.
The misinformation on the Aboriginal question is terrible in this thread as well.
Yes, pornography (and alcohol) is banned in some remote Aboriginal communities – but it’s not because of a “few” Aboriginal men, it’s because of a systemic culture of child abuse and rape. And it wasn’t “swept under the carpet”, it was a giant political firestorm that essentially forced then (then Liberal) government to take action.
And the “intervention”, as it was called, was broadly supported by Aboriginal groups, although not supported by many Aboriginal groups as well.
It is absolutely nothing like apartheidt.
Personally, I think there has to be a better way of changing the culture of Aboriginal communities, but I don’t know what that is and I am absolutely positive that they had to do something.
I doubt they’ll get away with Internet censorship. It’s not like they’re Korea. Their people should be too used to freedom to allow this to happen.
I’m australian, and the internet censorship proposal has been around for a while, and now there’s talk that they’ll start inplementing it without voting :S but i’m pretty sure there are some important politicians who are heavily against it so it probably wont go ahead.
@Railick: I hear australian characters all the time in games. Anytime people want ‘international’ characters in their games they use australia coz we’re so damn cool.
I cant think of any R18 games that i’d want to play, but having the rating would stop shit like the Fallout 3 censorship happening again (australia said no, so they changed every copy in the world).
Speaking as an Abo myself (*draws flag around shoulders*), the need to “do something” does not warrant sending soldiers to do social workers’ jobs. That’s fucking idiocy. I think bringing the army in was a sign that Howard appreciated the scale of the problem, but had no clue what to do about it except throw a handy supply of meatheads at it — no surprise that a bloody privatisation-happy neoliberal wouldn’t have a clue what to even try to fix a social problem (”Shouldn’t the Market have sorted this out? I sold our telecommunications infrastructure and everything! The outback should be doing great!”). Meanwhile, I really couldn’t give a shit if Noel Pearson was impressed; I wonder if he still is.
The situation’s not analogous to apartheid, no — there’s no official structure splitting blacks from whites. The problem is more one of class — black and white communities of similar income levels are strikingly similar, in my experience — but this is exacerbated by an unthinking racism. Would a prime minister dare send the army in to clean up those dirty Westies?
Drewski, saying the ALP are ‘left wing’ because our available spectrum has shifted so hideously to the right is ridiculous; it’s a lame capitulation to anyone who want to put certain ideas beyond the pale. The “spectrum” still exists in its entirety, no matter which parts of it are thriving at this particular moment, in this particular place.
Meanwhile, as for the net filter bullshit, I’m not worried; coming from a party whose main election plank was the rejuvenation of our telecom infrastructure, a program which would catastrophically sabotage said infrastructure is the most blaringly obvious case of political suicide I can imagine. No amount of “won’t someone think of the children”-s can turn around the universal hatred for this scheme. The ALP, insanely, decided to attack the only thing the Australian electorate gives enough of a shit about that it’ll actually get up off its collective arse to protect — its luxuries. They’re holding a knife to their own throats and daring the Australian people to come closer. “Go on, take one more step! I’ll do it!”
Yeah, the real gaming angle here is: what’s going to happen to Zero Punctuation?