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Australia Considering iPhone App Censorship
srjh writes "Having raised concerns about 'the classification of games playable on mobile telephones,' the Australian government has now 'put the wheels in motion to address this.' Under current Australian legislation, video games sold in the country must pay between $470 and $2040 to have the game classified, and due to the lack of an 18+ rating in Australia, if it is not found to be suitable for a 15-year-old, it is banned outright. This is the fate met by several recent titles, such as Left 4 Dead 2 and Fallout 3. Over 200,000 applications are available for the iPhone, many of them games, and developers have raised concerns about the prohibitive costs involved, with many announcing an intention to drop the Australian market altogether if the plan proceeds."
What is with the Australians? This is just the latest in a long line of this sort of shit. Is this really what the average Australian wants? Surely the Assie public is not this stupid? They do elect their politicians, don't they?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Why isn't it about the government trying to help parents?
It is! If we had an R18 rating that's exactly what it would do! Instead they absolve parents of their responsibility by just banning anything not suitable for a 15yo.
It's much more logical and consistent for a parent to be able to say "you can't watch any 18 rated films" to a child rather than "well OK, you can watch this one because I've heard a good review of it and it has artistic merit, but you can't watch this other one because it's too violent/pornographic/sweary".
Yes, which is why we want an R18 rating for games, but the government won't do that. That's exactly my point, they decide they will just wield the ban-hammer instead of having an R18 rating that parents would have to be aware of.
Funny you should say this (about religion).
We are nominally Christian. A friend who is much more religious than us urged us to read the Bible to our kids. Thinking it couldn't be a bad thing, we get a Bible and looked through it. HOLY S! I would *never* read these stories to my kids. They are full of the sickest violence and perversions imaginable. There's incest, rape, murder, revenge, and overall a very callous attitude towards extracting violent revenge and causing misery. We told our friend that if the cover didn't say 'Bible' on it she would never allow any of her kids to hear stories like this.
We tried cleaning up a story. We took the story of 'Lot' and skipped over the part about the townspeople wanting to rape the angels staying with Lot. We skipped over the part about Lot offering to give his daughters to the townspeople to rape instead of the angels (a tempting offer, I'm sure, since Lot told them they were virgins). We skipped over the part where Lot's daughters got him drunk and had sex with their father so they could get pregnant (seriously WTF?! If you tried to make a movie of this without the name 'Lot' on it the religious right would freak). We only told that Lot left the city and his wife looked back and God turned her into a pillar of salt.
My kids laughed and laughed at how stupid the story was and how mean and nasty God was in the story. They started playing 'I caught you peeking, ZAP I turn you into salt! HAHAHA! It turned into a game of Simon-Says where if you missed an instruction you got turned into salt.'
Maybe I should show them the movie 'Saw' next, but I'll write 'Holy' on the cover to make it ok.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
I've been frequently surprised by the Australian Govs at time puritanical, at times "Big Brother" attitude with new technology and its social impact. I've spent time with Aussies in Japan, mostly meeting them at bars and they seemed to be quite good folk. Then I hear about this stuff and I have to ask "Are these really the same people?"
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'