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?

Comments

Deja-vu

[codexus]

Here's the same story

aye what a shame

[gtx]

that game was like a religious experience for me.

way to go oz for fucking over one of the best games ever written.

-c

Whatever

[fleener]

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."

Re:Whatever

[renehollan]

The reasoning is similar to this, though not identical.

The notion is that a woman can claim to not have consented because of circumstantes that have not been communicated to her partner at the time, because they should have been "obvious" to him.

IOW, even without lack of explicit withdrawl of consent, her partner is supposed to know that consent is not present, or was withdrawn.

Re:Whatever

[fleener]

I'll ignore your off-topic argument (straw-man as my logic instructor used to say) and give more reaction...

I'm a big time lover of first-person shooters. Detractors note the games are tremendously violent. I've wondered if I was dulled to the violence. But the description of the prostitute assault shocks even me. There are extremes even I cannot support. I now have no problem with the idea of requiring age limits on games. It won't keep adult games from kids (nothing will), but it will send a stronger statement to borderline parents who buy games for their kids if the parent is asked for an I.D. at the register. We have ratings for movies, why not for computer games (which are more compelling and personally involving than static film).

Re:Whatever

[renehollan]

Off-topic != straw man.

Assuming that the major premise is correct, that in Canada, women can claim rape after consenting to sex (actually feminazis there weasel on the definition of consent), it stands to reason that all sorts of other absurdities are reasonable: i.e. violent video games, particularly where the virtual victims are respresentative of the source of absurdities in reality.

The only question then, is if the major premise holds up to scrutiny. See a previous reference on feminazi attitudes in Canada regarding consent, and thus whether rape occured.

I suppose one could argue that the link between the source of absurdities in reality, and objects of anger in a virtual setting is weak, and so the argument linking them is, indeed, a straw-man argument, but I don't hold that view.

Feminazi movements in Canada have resulted in absurdities such as child support payments that exceed the payor's income, resulting in jail time for contempt of court. The reasoning behind this folly is as follows: the payor is "artificially" earning less than he can to spite the recipient.

It strikes me that in such an environment, where legislation and attitude feeds a hatred of women, games that permit the resulting anger to be vented on virtual victims would be in demand.

I am not suggesting that this is reasonable or healthy, merely that it is to be expected.

Re:Whatever

[fleener]

I am not saying off-topic = straw man. However, your post is another good example of a straw man argument.

Re:Whatever

[DarkZero]

Honestly, yes. It's called "free speech". Morally, people should be allowed to create video games that allow us to bash and kill a prostitute for money after having sex with her. And morally, I should be allowed to play that game that allows me to bash and kill a prostitute for money after having sex with her. However, the government of Oz seems to differ in the legal department of this issue. Because they're prudish assholes.

Re:Whatever

[smaughster]

What crap is this? Freedom of speech is a notion introduced to protect the single person standing on a crate claiming that the government sucks. It is not a "get out of jail for free" card that will allow you to say everything. It certainly does not have anything to do with moral arguments as to whether it is "right" or "good" to be able to kill a prostitute in a video game.

Re:Whatever

[DarkZero]

"Free speech" is a very simple concept that means exactly what it says. It is the freedom to say what you want. It's the freedom to talk about anything, and that freedom should certainly extend beyond spoken words and into other forms of speech, such as books, movies, music, and video games.

The government deciding that it's alright for you to stand on a crate and claim that the government sucks, but deciding that you shouldn't be able to say, read, listen to, watch, or in this case play what you want to, is not free speech. Free speech is the government not messing with speech AT ALL. What you're talking about is limited, but certainly not free, speech.

Re:Whatever

[renehollan]

Exactly.

The problem stems from the fact that consent can be implied... she never even suggested to stop, but never explicitly said, "yes" (just smiled and beconed to the bedroom).

The context in which this becomes a problem is a situation where expectations of a subsequent relationship weren't clear: he wanted a one night stand, and she thought this was the start of something. Since her expectations were not met, it must have been rape, no? [obviously, I think no]. So the problem reduces to what "default" expectations are supposed to be. Since individual morals and community standards vary, one would think that the burden would be on the prosecution, but feminazis in Canada have seen fit to try to push the burden on the defense, with some success.

Another example of this kind of feminazi pressure is, in custody disputes, the fact that a woman's accusations of abuse need not be substantiated by fact, but a man's do (this was a real problem in BC c. 1995-1996). The justification is that the woman is "scared of retribution" and will testify only reluctantly, so the scantiest evidence must be true.

Finally, statistics (from the same period) in Ontario reveal that 98% of recorded domestic violence cases involve men striking women... not surprising once you consider that police are required to record such forms of battery, but not the reverse. This distorted statistic helps feminazis to lobby for more preferential treatment under the law.

As I said, under such circumstances, it is not surprising that there is hatred toward feminazis that gets misdirected toward women in general.

However, the game player who has sex with and kills a virtual woman in a game may be playing out a fantasy where he "gets even" with such a feminazi and not an arbitrary woman. In such a legal environment, I would not consider this irrational.

Still, is it any wonder that injustice breeds violence as a potential response?

Re:Cant say I'm too disappointed here.

[GTRacer]

WTF is up with the sick fucks over DMA Design?

They're Scottish?

GTRacer
- Games beginning with "GT" rock!

Re:Cant say I'm too disappointed here.

[91degrees]

Well.. Strictly speaking its not DMA who did that. It was whoever was playing it who did it. The game allows you to beat innocent people up, and then steal their money, and also allows you to have sex with prostitutes, but does not require you to do this in order to complete the game. Clearly only a sick twisted mind would actually attempt to do this.

hmm, now there's a moral dilemia

[QuantumG]

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.

Re:hmm, now there's a moral dilemia

[KITT_KATT!*]

It's further complicated by the fact that the OFLC doesn't actually set the censorship guidelines - they enforce the censorship guidelines written by nine state, territory and federal ministers. The OFLC is working quite closely with the game industry trying to get an R rating, but all nine ministers will have to approve the change!

Re:hmm, now there's a moral dilemia

[Dyolf Knip]

Hahaha, that's a great point! How does one rate a game when its level of violence is set not by the programmers but rather by the depravity of the person playing it?

(R) wont help

[QuantumG]

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.

Re:Future of videogames

[Dyolf Knip]

Indeed. A Star Trek holodeck program would be rated X, no matter what it's supposed to be. There's simply too much freedom of action to slap a label on it. In our quest for realistic gaming experiences, we are rapidly approaching a level at which you can do virtually anything you want within the theme of the game. And what will things be like after that?

What about strategy games? Should it be illegal to raze a virtual city and kill its inhabitants, especially when some of them have real-life counterparts? What is the criteria that censors use to say that computer generated violence is unacceptable? Anyone who's played Master of Orion is familiar with sterilizing entire planets, how is that OK but the CG killing of single person (there have been more people killed on TV than exist on planet Earth) is banned? None of it is real anyway.

Re:Future of videogames

[Eric S Raymond]

because destroying a planet, as in star wars, etc.. is somehow supposed to be impersonal; you do not know all those people or ever meet them; yet in this game, you have sex with a prostitute, which by itself could offend some people, but then you kill her, and it is very graphical shown up close in detail.

Interesting history

[Anonymous Coward]

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....

Re:Future of videogames

[Dyolf Knip]

So as long as I don't fuck her I can kill her and the censors won't mind so much? :)

I see your point, but it's still stupid reasoning. They showed Saving Private Ryan, uncut, on one of the big networks a few weeks back. If someone can explain to me why reinacting hundreds of guys getting turned into hamburger is fine art while the killing of a woman who never actually existed in the first place is worthy of being banned, I'll listen.

Re:Cant say I'm too disappointed here.

[MindStalker]

Yes, BUT! and this is big.
The programmers released a gameplay movie before releasing the game, in which it shows you doing exactly that. Seems to me that such actions were fully intentional and encouraged by the programmers. Now had they not done so, and people simply figured it out on their own. That would have been a totally different story. Advertised uses for a product are considered to be proper uses. So the dumbfucks who made this advertisement have only themselves to blame.

Front page?

[DarkZero]

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.

Typical Australian Liberal Government Policy

[Self Bias Resistor]

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.