Phoenix Down Under: Adults Only

Welcome to what will hopefully become a weekly occurrence - me writing a series of articles entitled Phoenix Down Under, and you reading them... though I'm not much of a Final Fantasy fan... Let's look past that. I am however Australian, and hope to provide the site with some kind of international perspective on the video game world - probably not a Cambodian or Madagascan one... yet. I'll stick with Australia for now. Then, my influence will encompass the globe.

This column will most likely cover all of my sins, ranging from reviews to news and opinions.

This week I wish to talk about adult games. No, not that kind of adult game! I'm referring to pretty much any game with any kind of content not catered towards the younger folks. You know - blood, violence, criminal activities. All that good stuff.

Using an extensive research process I like to call "Googling for fifteen seconds," I've come to understand that America has an "Adults Only" rating for video games. Australia does not.

Australia has an "R18+" rating for movies (though strangely in my experience I find that MA15+ is often given to movies released here that received an 18+ in the States), but no such rating exists for video games.

Instead, the games are simply refused classification and are never released, forcing those who love the game enough to import it through other means, or download it illegally.

You may recall the situation with the Australian release of Left for Dead, which was so gimped in order for it to be approved for release here (for example, there were no riot police zombies, and a lot of the gore was removed), international players specifically requested that Australians not join their games. Which probably didn't make much difference anyway, our internet speeds are terrible.

In the case of the recent Alien vs. Predator game, it too was refused classification on the grounds of the horrible, horrible (but still pretty awesome) gore. Fortunately, Rebellion had the gonads to give the equivalent of the middle finger to the Australian ratings board, saying: "People who want the game will get [it] imported, it's not going to hurt us... if anything it's been a bit of decent publicity... We're not going to water down the game for countries that can't treat adults like adults."

They re-submitted the game, with no changes at all - only this time it was accepted.

Australian gamers reacted to the lack of an Adults Only rating negatively, stating (quite rightly) that the average gamer (in this part of the ocean at least) is over 30 years old, and therefore should be able to make their own decisions about what is and isn't appropriate for them to play.

However, many gamers (not all of them) proved themselves to be little kids in big people bodies, spouting school-yard bullshit and threatened the one man holding an R18 rating back (Michael Atkinson) with death. Unfortunately, this kind of proved the man's point - some people, even adults, clearly aren't ready for those type of video games. Not when they sport that kind of behaviour.

Gamers4Croydon was a political group founded in South Australia based solely on this issue, and venues such as EB games collected signatures from customers in support of it. The government even released a discussion paper on the issue, which received great support for the introduction of an R18+ rating. Unfortunately, in true Australian government style, they decided to take what the public said, bitch about it, and do nothing. Apparently the views submitted were "too biased", as mainly gamers submitted their views. No shit, Australian government - the only people who this issue would affect wanted their voices heard?

Michael Atkinson has since stepped down from his position, but how this will effect gamers remains to be seen.