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Aussies Ban GTA3
KITT_KATT!* writes: "Australia has banned Grand Theft Auto 3 for PS2. This is a tragedy for Australian gamers! According to this story in Australian IT, the problem is that there is no R rating for games - MA15+ is the highest permissible and GTA3 exceeds that because it contains scenes of sexual violence." Aren't you glad Australia has a helpful rating system?
Here's the same story
True warriors use the Klingon Google
that link is in the story itself, sorry for the redundant comment. But if they were aware of that previous story I can't see why they posted this one. There isn't much new content in this one.
True warriors use the Klingon Google
It looks like as a form of retaliation for Troll Tuesdays, /. has come up with Oz Monday, crap flooding us with articles from/about Australia.
that game was like a religious experience for me.
way to go oz for fucking over one of the best games ever written.
-c
"I hope I don't make a mistake and manage to remain a virgin." - Britney Spears
great game after a stressful day. do the weapons cheat and have at!
:(
:(
i love to start small, just beating bums and old women with the bat..maybe taking a few shots at them with the pistol. make my way to the hospital area, then steal a Barracks OL in Staunton and ram people off bridges until the car blows up.
leave the charred remains in the middle of the road to block traffic, then walk by all the cars lined up with the flamethrower setting them onfire (too bad they dont blow up usally). start throwing grenades then until the cops come. kill them with the ak47 and you should have 3 stars.
steal their car, and start ramming the other cop cars and pedestrians, and drive by with the uzi until the FBI comes. i usually die around here though
i did this last night. i was in a cop car driving down thr sidewalk, downhill, pretty fast for maybe 8 blocks. i hit like 3 people at once and it set my car on fire lol. i pulled into the street and tried to get out, but as i was doing so an FBI car rammed the front end and they both hit a wall and blew up - but i was just standing there. i was laughing pretty hard so i didn't react quick enough to the next FBI car that came up, and shot me
but i started again by the hospital in Staunton so I could get the Barracks OL again! yay!
ok thats my amusing GTA3 story for the day.
,
faeryman
i wish i could get paid $1.00US everytime i hear of yet another thing BANED in AUSTRALIA! W.T.F. do you expect, first they get the GUNS from the RULED then they take their freedoms... at first it's slow going but soon they start to get momentum, then they start banning vidio games. soon AUSTRALIA will be just another turd world country.
I guess it goes without saying that we all believe games should allow us to "bash and kill a prostitute for money after having sex with her."
What scenes of sexual violence? The cut-scenes imply some, but it's never shown.
The Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC) refused classification for Grand Theft Auto 3 because of a scene in which the player can bash and kill a prostitute for money after having sex with her.
Even with an R rating this would not be permissible content for a movie, let alone a game. WTF is up with the sick fucks over DMA Design?
How we know is more important than what we know.
How well does this reflect on their ratings scheme as a whole? Are any games targeted at mature audiences containing mature enough content? What happens to Soldier of fortune II when it is released? Will they just not allow it to be sold? I think it's about time to look at ratings systems, especially in our own country. What gives a person who made a decision on what was mature content even 10 years ago the right to affect decisions today? 10 years ago, the most violence found in entertainment was in games whose reality was determined by the power of the system. If a game wanted realism, it contained .mov's to enhance the gameplay. Now, games like Max Payne present an engaging story immersed in a realistic gaming experience.
One thing these games have in common was that they were targeted specifically at an older crowd. Kids dont learn to shoot guns from games, and anyone old enough to pay for his own game has the right to select what s/he wants to play. Movies (another archaic system, but more effective by far) require an ID to purchase tickets for films above a certain level of rating, they dont simply refuse to sell tickets at all. Most stores now require the same for games, but based on a faulty system.
What we need is less censorship and more intelligence on the part of the lesislators who create the environment that such a game could be legally banned for content in.
TJ_Phazerhacki
Physics is nothing like religion. If it was, we'd have an easier time trying to raise money!
I'm sure no-one put it forward that way for the people at the OFLC. Neither am I completely convinced that such acts of deprevity are immoral (after all, it's just a game folks). As games become more like free form environments is there a requirement that programmers add restrictions to conform to a rating? Maybe rather than har haring about all this classification stuff we should be getting in there and asking the hard questions of people like the OFLC.
How we know is more important than what we know.
GTA3 was crap anyway.
I'm not even from Australia(though my dog is a Aussie Shepherd), and this makes me mad. GTA3 is such a great game. I am almost mad enough to fly down there, rip some OFLC member out of their car and run over them a few times while leading the cops in a high speed intnercity chase. What? No, video game violance doesn't inspire real violance!
-Henry
"Useless organic meatbag" -HK-47
As the technology increases, we're going to see more videogames that present realisit worlds in which we have more and more freedom to do what we wish? Have sex with a prostitute and then killing her is NOT part of the primary gameplay in GTA3. It's simply the result of a game that allows you the freedom to do what you wish instead of confining you to abstract game rules.
I wonder if reality should be banned since I have the ability to have sex with a prostitute and then kill her.
people use simulated violence for an outlet, what sort of people want the outlet of a simulated rape?
If the content in question is sexually violent, an R rating wont help you in Australia. You would require an X rating (of which I believe only the ACT has on shelf) and you are really opening a pandora's box by going after such a rating. If every possible sequence of game play has to be scrutinized to get a rating (the maximal set of violence if you will) then what happens when we have truely mulible worlds? What happens when we have NPCs in games that can converse with us about any topic we choose (before we shoot them). Not only is it an unanswerable question, it's also an NP-hard problem. I would really like to have some confirmation that the OFLC did indeed refuse classification because of the posibility of certain game play. That's a story.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Of course these are the same group of people who initially gave Hannibal a MA+ rating instead of a R rating, until the outcry by anti-censorship people amongst others forced them to change it. The reasoning behind the anti-censorship people going against the decision was that if you were going to have censors you should at least have censors who make consistent, commonsense decisions. Not to mention one of the chief Australian censors went on to start a porno film company....
... if you live in Australia, just order the game from someone off of eBay in another country. Do they look through every fucking box that comes into the country? Banned schmannned. They can only ban it if you let them.
Of course, the Aussies gave up their guns so I dunno.
Is there any way this story could get bumped up to the front page? Is there a system for that? Because personally, I think this is incredibly interesting, especially in the comments. This story brings up a deep and interesting question: In GTA, you can choose to be fairly good (ambulance, taxi, police officer) or incredibly evil (fucking and murdering prostitutes, doing drug runs, stealing cars). That's the nature of an extremely open game world where you can do almost anything. So if Australia's going to start banning games for what you CAN do instead of what you must do, will MMORPGs be banned for "sexually explicit dialogue" because people can talk dirty to each other in them? Will gaming worlds that are becoming increasingly more open have to restrict themselves in some areas to avoid being banned, thus cheapening the reality of the game in the internationally released version?
These questions are very important for the future of gaming, i.e. incredibly open and diverse gaming worlds.
The current world trend to the political right affects US and Australian citizens in much the same way.
... and I trust in their inherent good natures and a positive home environment to help them ignore the nasties and benefit from the positives that on-line life has to offer.
It isn't the person in the street asking for more censorship, but those in power making the most of their time to impose conservative values on the rest of us!
In Australia it was the Port Arthur massacre that was used by the conservative government to ban firearms nation wide, just as in the States it was Sept 11 used to push through a range of restrictive legislation.
Do we get the governments we deserve? I dunno, these are complicated issues, but keeping a balance between the right and the left requires that we use our voices while we still can, etc etc.
I don't want my kids to have the sort of violence described above shoved down their terminals, but at the same time I want them to be empowered to explore whatever virtual realities their minds are capable of
Censorship sucks, Put some faith in human intelligence to make the right decision. Removing the ability to choose results in atrophied thinking apparatus. That is why the right wingers are ultimately working against the values they claim to uphold!
This move to "reclassify" (ie. censor) a whole stack of games right before Christmas, when demand for such games is at its highest, reaks of not only ignorance but a certain sense of mean-spiritedness. And this isn't the first time that the Australian government has tried to ban games it didn't like. First up was an FMV-driven graphical adventure by the name of Phantasmagoria because it contained very violent scenes and was thought to have contained a possible scene of sexual violence. Next in the firing line was Carmageddon, which the government attempted to ban on the laughable premise that it would encourage people to run each other over (interestingly enough, the sequel, which contained more realistic graphics than the first, passed through without dissent). The game Postal also came into the firing line, although I'm not sure if it was banned or not (I think it was). What strikes me as even more odd this time around is that the first two GTA games passed through practically untouched, while this game was allowed to be released and is now being recalled right before the busy and lucrative Christmas holiday period. Furthermore, the basis on which the game is being banned ("sexual violence") is extremely tenuous because the act of killing a prostitute after (and not before or during) sex shouldn't qualify as sexual violence. The term "sexual violence" refers to violence that is being committed during the act of sex (eg. rape or killing someone during sex), which is not the case here. Yes, the game does allow you to kill a prostitute after you have sex with her, but the two acts as described are not mutually exclusive (ie. you can do one or the other as well as both) and are not necessary to win or advance in the game itself. Yes, the possibility of committing the described acts may offend your sensibilities but you do have the democratic freedom in this country to not perform the acts in-game or, even better, not buy the game altogether. This recent move to remove all the games from stores effectively removes that democratic freedom. Controlling what you see, do, read, write and say should be your responisibility and not that of your government. Same goes for parents with children. If you continue to abdicate such a right (this responsibility is also one of the fundamental democractic rights of my nation, Australia) to government then you lose the right to complain when things don't go the way you want them to or when the government starts to take more than they're entitled to.
The reason for all this madness when it comes to the classification of video is that the Liberal government (which has just won its thoroughly undeserved second term by successfully tapping into the nation's xenophobic tendancies over the Tampa incident and illegal immigrants in general) is notoriously conservative and ignorant when it comes to matters of new technology. For instance, they banned online gambing in Australia, effectively giving the world market a huge headstart, because a moratorium was needed to "assess the risks of online gambing" when in reality the government had allowed, even promoted, the installation of poker machines in pubs and clubs with willful ignorance of the social consequences. They also tried to remove "offensive content" from the Internet (ie. net censorship), which merely made it hell for companies to host content locally for fear of being shut down by an anonymous person who was offended and forced ISPs to do the technically impossible and monitor their services for such "offensive content" (a term which was not even properly defined and hence gave the bill a DMCA-like level of scope). However, this bill was necessary to gain the support of Independent senator Brian Harradine, whose vote was needed to swing the balance of power towards the government so the "wonderful" GST could be passed (which the government screwed up in spectacular fashion by creating mountains of red tape through increased business paperwork and "exceptions" fiascos, when they would have been better off by taxing everything and giving income tax cuts). So what starts out as beeing a possibly good idea becomes a complete pain in the ass. Furthermore, the little surplus (which was collected by slashing budgets across the board, especially in the areas of health, R & D, the arts, science and education - now university costs a packet and we're behind in pretty much everything), often derisively called the "election battle chest", was used to offer all kinds of expensive gifts to the electorate to lure their votes in the election. Now that they've spent it, the only way they can get more money to actually do something useful is to raise taxes or cut spending (usually the latter). Wonderful.
So as you can see, this kind of inconsistent, ignorant, poorly-implemented crap, I mean policies, (ironically the only consistency in government policy is it has all these properties) happens all the time. The sad part is we're used to it, even expecting it to happen.
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When the pin is pulled, Mr. Grenade is no longer our friend.
What fucking world do you live in, Mr. Roger's neighborhood? What self-respecting little kid depends on their Mom to procure all their games? If they have a damn PS2 in the first place they are probably savvy enough to find the games of their choosing. Your argument is not only self-righteous, but naive to the point of uselessness.
I walked into my local 'Games R Us' store picked up a copy and brought. There were huge displays and lots of copies of the game. So how this story got publised is beyond me. But it is not true.
this speaks mostly for the US and its concept of "free speech," but the general idea applies in countries that protect speech thus:
- you can't defend yourself from a slander or libel charge claiming "free speech"
- you can't defend yourself from inciting a riot claiming "free speech" (http://www.spectacle.org/freespch/bomb.html).
the idea is that if your speech is doing or advocating damage it's not protected.
the next question is whether a game is speech, art, or a product (like a pen or a sponge). i don't think most governments have figured that out yet.
"Mister Potato-head --MISTER POTATO-HEAD! Backdoors are not secrets!" (War Games, 1983)
...and if you seriously believe that a gun in the home is more likely to kill an intruder than a family member...
Yeah, and guns have minds of their own. Did you know that they can grow legs and shoot themselves off without any prior provocation by the owner? I hear that guns' favorite targets are family members. Yes, it's true, it's true...
not allowed in a movie you say?
I'm gona point you in the direction of the film "Seven" with Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman and Kevin spacey.
kevin Spacey gets a very weird sexual tool built with a blade inserted. he then forces a man to use that on a prostitute therefor killing her in the act of sex, to complete his murder for the deadly sin of Lust.
it's close enough to illustrate my point that there is MORE than enough violence on TV that GTA3 isn't overly out of place in its violent nature.
Society has been trying to blame violent video games for violence in children for years... nothing new there.