Rated R for RantVideo games, that entertainment industry that's bigger than Hollywood and music combined, is finally getting an R rating available to it in Australia. Currently anything that would warrant an R rating in any other Western country would have to be toned down or not sold here. With the average age of gamers being 28, it's high time that an adult classification was available.
The R rating has its place, it allows for the harder edge of society to be displayed for what it is while offering some protection for the creators from legal and cultural issues. Imagine if we were never able to see Apocalypse Now or Pulp Fiction or that movie where the chick turned out to be a dude in the end. Not that I was fooled.
So what are we in for? More gore? More cussing? More (or any) boobs? Right on cue, Mothers Against Fucking Everything pull their teenage children off their teats and bleat to whoever will listen about how outraged they are.
The AFA (Australian Family Association, don't worry, I had to look them up too) say that R rated games will warp the minds of decent society more than other comparable media due to their interactivity and should remain barred for our own good. Lies, and if you don't think lies, then irrelevant. If I want my screen covered in the blood of a newly beheaded hostage, then I should be allowed to have that. If I want to have to push through sets of tits as I try to torch a church with my flamethrower, then there should be a constitutional clause allowing exactly that. Flying a jumbo jet into the Twin Towers is just as fun as watching it on TV.
The AFA's website is the highlight of my week. It reads like one of those conspiracy sites where everything is on the front page and every second heading ends in multiple exclamation marks. Of course it wouldn't be complete without proudly displaying articles by John Howard, George Pell, Roslyn Phillips, Andrew Bolt and other rabid loons.
They seem to be against abortion (mostly legal), cloning (illegal), gay marriage (illegal) and various other fundamentalist bugbears, but I couldn't find much on video games. Will someone PLEASE think of the children! I'm guessing a lazy journalist needed to make his story seem to convey opposing views and did a ring-around of the usual complainers until one took the bait, and all his equally lazy journalist friends used the same quotes in their stories.
Here's a great idea to test this new rating: a child smacking game! I'd buy it, and the AFA would have enough material to keep them busy for a decade. The classic cheek slap? 200 points. Five across the eyes? 1000 points! Silence that supermarket tantrum with a fierce backhander with optional finger pointing. I can't think of a more natural application of the Wii remote.
Of course I am exaggerating, but so are the wowser brigade. The squeaky wheel always does get the grease. The angry people often get their way just so that the rest of us don't have to hear it anymore. Before you know it Professor Mittens' Math Adventure becomes the norm and I'm listening to talkback radio. I suppose I should be thankful that I live in a country where I don't have to worry about Google or YouTube being censored.
On the subject of censoring new media, I wonder how that NetAlert scheme is going? Six months ago when it was unleashed onto the public I couldn't contain my disgust. Results have now been released showing that the rest of you share my view. The NetAlert program has fallen woefully short of its instigators' expectations, and frankly even short of my own. The facts are here in last week's Senate estimates hearings (hard numbers start on page 138, but you can read the whole thing if you want to know about grown adults acting like children). 1.4 million free PC and Mac content filters were expected to be in use by this month. Only 150,000 were ever downloaded and a laughable 30,000 are still in use today. That's about 2% of initial expectations. I'm not sure whether to credit those pathetic figures to informed citizens refusing to use it or just good old fashioned apathy. It's not like an Aussie to pass up free shit, except it wasn't free at $84 million, a quarter of which was blown on "advertising" in the weeks leading up to the election announcement. Rest assured that Rudd's giving it the axe, common sense prevails.
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"...every second heading ends in multiple exclamation marks."
"Multiple exclamation marks," he went on, shaking his head, "are a sure sign of a diseased mind."
--Terry Pratchett, "Eric" and something similar in "Reaper Man"
"Rest assured that Rudd's giving it the axe, common sense prevails."
Umm... WTF? Common sense? You do know the New And Improved plan is to instigate "mandatory ISP-based filtering to deliver a filtered feed to all homes, schools and public internet points," right? (Warning: Actually clicking that link and reading their insane policies is more frightening than most stuff they want to censor... i mean "protect" us from) Finland has legally mandatory ISP filtering, and their super-secret black-list of kiddie porn sites reportedly included a musical instrument store, a doll store, a site of Windows tips in Thai and recently the text-only site of a Finnish free-speech advocate who criticizes the censorship law! It's painfully obvious why black-listing doesn't work; DA INTERWEB IS BIG YO. And constantly, exponentially growing. A manual appraisal of the moral decency (according to whatever random criteria) of every site currently up and every few thousand new sites that spawn every day is impossible, so the bright idea is to create some kind of scanning software that will do it automatically. Obviously that won't work either, because a lot of non-deviant sites will be unfairly lumped in with the real smut due to the inescapable limitations of said software.
This is all besides the point that this is the same tired old censorship argument society has had since day dot. Non-majority religions, salacious prose, indecent bathers that don't cover the ankles, mini-skirts, music, movies, games... What's socially acceptable is completely arbitrary and dynamic. Older people find change hard to take. Older people are the voting majority. Politicians simply leverage people's insecurity and hypocrisy concerning their moral stance. No-one wants censorship, but no-one (who matters) will step up and be the one to SAY they don't want it, for fear the finger of self-righteous moral indignation be pointed at them as well. It's simply about keeping up appearances in a kind of ridiculous holier-than-thou, emperors-new-clothes peer-pressure arrangement. Every priest, every politician, EVERYONE has "impure thoughts" but it's usually only the younger people on the cusp of social change that are secure enough to both admit to AND defend their kicks, and how's that usually done? Why, through artistic and social-commentary-making mediums like music, film, literature, video games... you know, the stuff the prudes are trying to censor. The catholic guilt crowd will always try to foist said guilt onto everyone else, like a disease. People secure enough to be immune to it seem to be in short supply, but hey, there's one bright side: If everything was completely allowable and there was no censorship or social moral compass whatever, a lot of lovely taboos would probably lose their appeal. People dig dirty, perverse and "socially unacceptable" things precisely because they're deemed so. Eating a cookie you're not allowed to have is a hundred times more satisfying than eating one you've been freely given. If naughty is normal, there is no naughty. And that would suck for super-nanny, coz that busty dominant bitch would be out of a job. Incidentally, that same result would occur if parents stopped blaming everyone else for their lack of parenting skills, stopped relying on people like slack-ass govt. programmers to do their parenting for them and actually talked about shit with their kids. Also, guilt is a highly overrated parenting tool. It doesn't matter if we're talking about little Timmy's new found fascination for German Goo Girls or those violent Alien Vs Predator movies/games, as long as he's aware of the differences between what he sees on the screen and what reality is, that there are things called STDs and that Aliens will always have the evolutionary upper hand, you won't have a problem. Says the blasé man who has no children :)
It's always a treat to have your wall of text filling my RSS window. This day was a long time coming. Guy I've started you your own blog:
http://guysownblog.blogspot.com
Username: wiseguy@mailinator.com
Password: you know where to find me
You deserve more than my pretty white speechbubbles.
Funnily enough i already had a blogsome account just so i could occasionally make comments on Dan's blog, a blog and site the existence of which is one of the things that deters me from posting my own crap - anything you may wish to say Dan's probably already said more eloquently, humorously, technically correctly and with just the right amount of sarcasm. I even saw Jaymis post there once, so you know it's full o' funk! Also had a blogger account for a similar reason. Anyway, I'm busier now than i've been in a while, but i might be able to throw something up there some time, just for you. I'm sure you'll only be disappointed though. It'd probably only be fair for you to leave large dumps of verbose reply on something i've written, i guess.
Were I a game developer/film maker or writer I would go out of my way to make sure that my creation gets censored. Nothing drives sales like having the usual suspects complain about it.
I just came in here to say that I think supernanny is hot.
I'd also like to mention that we have these neato-burrito things called 'paragraphs' now.
Otherwise, fine ranting. I really only visit boredomistan to see if WiseGuy has left a comment.
Dude, there was like, 2 paragraphs in that one! Just because they incorporate stream-of-consciousness stylisation and are overly lengthy, doesn't mean they're not there :P It just looks like a lot of text because it's squished into a narrow speech bubble ;)
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