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Oz Government Seizes Games For "Full Classification"
sprayNwipe writes: "QGL is reporting that the Office of Film and Literature Classification has raided game stores in Australia and removed games from shelves, after deeming that said games are offensive earlier in the day. Some of these games are big christmas sellers, too (Grand Theft Auto 3, and Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon). Why must our government be filled with luddites?" Can any Australians comments on what "full classification" means? Does it only mean labels, or are some games outright banned?
Under the shade of a parliamentary inquiry
And he sang as he pulled and classified 'til the children weren't spoiled
You'll come a-seizing matilda, with me.
Apparently, the Australian government doesn't take kindly to games that promote the stealing of cars and running down of people; they won't even give GTA3 a rating so it can be sold.
Do they censor books and other forms of entertainment/media like this in Australia?
"...today consumers have been conditioned to think of beer when they see a bullfrog..."
Maybe it's all a cover so they can get the good games for themselves.
Other than humor, I find this action too stupid to even comment upon. I hope nothing like this happens in the U.S. If the gov't wants to enforce a rating system (something I don't have a problem with), they need to get their act together before the product is on the shelf.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
I find it amusing that they took these games on the pretense that, if the public had access to them, they would learn by example to do things that are not good for society (ie, stealing cars).
So the Aussie government's solution is to go out and legally steal all of the video game copies from the stores.
Yeah, really great example there guys.
I guess their message is that stealing is ok if it's being done For the Children(tm).
It reminds me of the tee-shirt, with a picture of a swat team breaking into a house, the caption reads "We're from the government, we're here to help!"
Jordan Bettis
``Wherever you go, there's another stupid sigfile quote.''I think it's pretty simple. If the government takes away these 'unsuitable' games from shelves, the people will get them by other means, either by downloading them from warez rings or importing them from overseas. As always, the gov't is just making a huge ass of itself and farting in our faces.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
The Australian EFF equivalent site has a lot of interesting information on censorship in general, and they also a review of some of the guts of the issue.
This doesn't seem to be a new issue though -- in 1999 The Age printed that the first game banned for violence actually occurred in 1997.
GTA3 lets you pretend to steal cars and run down animated people on a tv screen. It doesn't promote really stealing cars or running down people in actuality. My son plays good guys/bad guys with his friends, and he pretends his finger is a gun and pretends to shoot his friends with it. Is his game one that "promotes" the shooting of people? Should the government be able to regulate my child's imagination?
Don't forget that Friday is Hawaiian shirt day.
Doom skirted the edges. It was violent, but it wasn't realistic. You were obviously killing monsters, not people.
Now that 3D technology has gotten to the point where the graphics leave nothing to the imagination the issue has arisen again. At the core, these are the same games that have been played since the beginning of computer games. But on the surface the games look real. What this means is that with a single glance a non-gamer can be exposed to violence -- while previously you had to get into the gameplay and use your imagination to feel/see the same thing. Violent computer games used to hide behind graphical limitations. Whenever the technology catches up with the designer's imagination we have problems like this.
If they thought GTA3 was bad, I wonder what they'd think of Postal and it's sequel?
He using Australia as an example/reflection of what is going on in the us, which is why he makes the ammendment reference, of course you where just looking for an excuse to be snotty anyways, or you would have read his whole post.dimwit.
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