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Left 4 Dead 2 Banned In Australia
An anonymous reader writes "According to Australia's Office of Film and Literature Classification, Left 4 Dead 2's content exceeds that allowable for an MA15+ rating. Any such game is rated as Refused Classification, effectively banning it. From the report: 'The game contains realistic, frenetic, and unrelenting violence which is inflicted upon "the Infected" who are living humans infected with a rabies-like virus that causes them to act violently. The player can choose from a variety of weapons including pistols, shotguns, machine guns, and sniper rifles. However, it is the use of the "melee" weapons such as the crowbar, axe, chainsaw and Samurai sword which inflict the most damage. These close-in attacks cause copious amounts of blood spray and splatter, decapitations and limb dismemberment as well as locational damage where contact is made to the enemy which may reveal skeletal bits and gore.'"
I didn't know valve did such a good job of making a proper gorey zombie game.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
The player can choose from a variety of weapons including pistols, shotguns, machine guns, and sniper rifles. However, it is the use of the "melee" weapons such as the crowbar, axe, chainsaw and Samurai sword which inflict the most damage. These close-in attacks cause copious amounts of blood spray and splatter, decapitations and limb dismemberment as well as locational damage where contact is made to the enemy which may reveal skeletal bits and gore.
Seriously. Did they pay the ratings board to write that?
'However, it is the use of the "melee" weapons such as the crowbar, axe, chainsaw and Samurai sword which inflict the most damage.'
That's odd, I think I'd rather be hit by a crowbar than blasted with a shotgun. Oh well, only one way to find out.
" These close-in attacks cause copious amounts of blood spray and splatter, decapitations and limb dismemberment as well as locational damage where contact is made to the enemy which may reveal skeletal bits and gore."
Sounds like a pretty convincing advertisement for the game! Darn astroturfers....
Seriously, the game is sold on Steam. Will steam sell you the game and let you play online if you have an australian IP address? Do they have to block you from purchasing it or not?
As someone who enjoys the first L4D, this is a really great description of the next one. I'm looking forward to it based on this description alone.
Looks like somebody high up in Austrialia is a wee-bit angry about not having any of the promised downloadable content of l4d...
For some reason I thought this was China. I guess I stopped reading after I saw the word Banned.
This is different than the evening news? I'm all for sex over violence and a happy world but honestly the stuff that happens in that description is up nightly on TV. My friend down in AU says he watched 28 days/weeks later, so how is this any different?
Don't they have an 18+ rating for games in Australia?
Polls consistently show that the vast majority of gamers are adults.
The game that was so good it was banned in Australia.
Aren't there people over the age of 15 in Australia? If not the level of drinking in that country is really worrying.
Hey, at least there's no nudity!
The silly thing is that when they ban a game, they increase the number of local torrenters, which increases availability to those under 18.
Valve's Zombie shooter has been refused classification, which means it can't be made commercially available in the country.
Valve should thumb their nose at Australia's rating board and make the game freely available there.
Yeah, I was tooootttally going to buy it in the shop before, but now I'll just have to pirate it.
"Crikey", doofus.
Where the bloody hell are you?
dnuof eruc rof aixelsid
...that the first L4D was rather gory and that L4D2 is doubtless gorier still. Even so, I have difficulty understanding the "gore is gore, regardless of the context" type of thinking that seems to be going on here. Just as the treatment of gore in Saving Private Ryan is vastly different than the treatment of gore in , I'd hold that some games treat gore very differently than others. Some games are simply designed to glorify gore and the act of murdering. Others have gore, but it isn't the point.
I mean, take Manhunt 2. From what I saw of it, it was basically built from the ground up to glorify murdering people in order to create controversy so that it could sell a few more copies. Regardless of whether it actually crossed lines, I think the point was that they were trying to get as close to the line as possible. I don't see worth in that.
But if you look at the treatment of gore in L4D, it's obvious that while it definitely contributes to the gameplay (i.e. the game would feel very different without the gore), it isn't the point of the game. You wouldn't stop in the middle of a zombie swarm to call a friend over so that you could show him how blowing off a zombie's leg might have X effect. What you would show someone is the strategy for surviving that swarm though. I mean, sure, occasionally something particularly gory and satisfying happens, and everyone goes, "whoa, did you see that?" (at least, when you first start playing), but that's not really the point of the game; people don't go seeking out those moments. Instead, they just happen incidentally, which is in stark contrast to the earlier-mentioned game.
Anyway, I've rambled enough. Long story short, Australia is really backwards in some things, and I feel sorry for the friends I have from down under, and not just for this stupidity.
Aussies, if you want to see blood and gore spluttering from some zombie's guts, it's time to go to your parlament!
How you read that, well, that's up to you...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Man, you suck at rugby, and now you cant even play L4D2... My heart breaks for you guys.
Actually, a lot of people will have that reaction. I'm not planning on buying it any time soon (too many other great games coming out at the end of this year), but a local ban on it would certainly remove any of my moral reasons not to pirate it.
Valve will just do the classic of making green blood or saying that these are in fact robots hell-bent on transforming the survivors into furries or something like that...
The "restoration" crack will be available approximately 30 seconds after release in Australia.
I'm sorry you had to endure your wartime experience and believe you deserve respect for what you've endured.
It's possibly worth noting that the game in question is not a war game but I don't think that probably changes your core objection, which as I understand it is against making violence against humans (or human-looking things) and personal peril a recreational activity. I should note that, politically, I'm generally in favour of not banning things where reasonably possible. Why? Well, my core reasoning is based on the principle of freedom of speech. I prefer for the state to minimise its use of control over its citizens, even if well-intentioned, as this minimises the temptation / opportunity to increase their own power at the expense of the citizenry.
I'd just like to explain what violent games have done to me, psychologically. Before I started playing them, I was squeamish about even swatting flies. I avoided pretty much any game with remotely realistic representations of gore or death, not because I was morally opposed to their *existence* or to people who play them but because I personally felt uncomfortable with them. Since then I've been persuaded into playing them and now enjoy them regularly, although I must admit that the most graphics / violent games make me uncomfortable and I still prefer to avoid those. The psychological change that's resulted? The violence in the game doesn't feel as real to me. But this is not, as some opponents of video games feels, because I've become more accepting of violence in general or because I've lost empathy for images of injured humans. Rather I've dehumanised the computer-generated pixels on the screen - I don't see video game violence as realistic anymore since it is simply a bunch of bits and computations inside a computer chip and some flickering lights on a screen. So for that reason it doesn't bother me as much. Real world violence remains an entirely different matter - I still hate killing insects and avoid doing so wherever possible, I abhor violence against humans and I hate to see suffering. This is because I know that real world violence is *real*, actual suffering is happening, and it pains me to think of that.
This is obviously merely anecdote. Also, as I understand it psychologists do not rate a personal evaluation of one's own thought processes as a very convincing way of determining what's really going on. But I think it's worth noting that, whilst changes can occur as a result of playing violent games, they're not necessarily going to be the immediately obvious and clearly detrimental ones that some people expect. This is, I think, a major reason why there's a fairly acrimonious split between people who (quite understandably) think that violent games present images of unacceptable acts and the people who cannot see the problem with them at all. I think they're both right - they are sometimes images of unacceptable acts but that does not *necessarily* make the images themselves unacceptable. My personal position, as you've no doubt inferred, is that real violence is usually morally unacceptable (avoiding thorny philosophical questions about how it's sometimes justified) but that images do no direct harm and are therefore acceptable to me even though I find some of them disturbing and would personally prefer not to see them.