A Strong Turn Out By Gamers May Have Hurt the R18+ Rating Campaign – WTF!

Only in our strange weird world can a strong turn out in support of something cause it to fail! Okay, fail is a harsh word, but the discussion on the introduction of an R18+ Rating for games seems to have stalled.

According to Federal Homes Affairs Minister Brendan O’Connor, more than 86% of the submissions for the public consultation on this issue came from EB Games and the GrowUp Australia campaign and that has skewed the results. They now want to have an even broader consultation of the public because the dominant response only came from ‘interest groups’! Of course it did, gamers are the most interested in this topic and considering that approximately 68% of the population could be considered gamers (according to a report from Interactive Australia in 2009). You could say that the other people weren’t as vocal on this issue because they just don’t care.

If they wanted to introduce a new policy that affected farmers, I would expect that 86% of those submissions would be from farmers or those involved with agriculture.

I am so sick of having to continually fight the same battles. The system for bringing a new law or policy into effect is in place, we played by their rules and they don’t like the answer, so they want to change the rules. Why is the government so hung up on this issue? An R18+ rating for games would offer greater control over the availability of adult orientated games (win), it would offer more games for sale (more tax collected, win) and it would make a large percentage of the population (remember that 68% thing) happy and content (win).

Don’t even try and use the ‘but children might get to play the game when it is in the home’ argument because, quite frankly, that is a bullshit argument. We already have R18+ (and in some cases X18+) movies on DVD and Blu-Ray in families houses and I don’t hear anyone complaining about that. In other homes parents smoke and drink in their houses in front of the children and I don’t hear about a ban on Stubbies or smokes. And besides, what goes on in people’s homes and how a parent raises their children is, quite frankly, none of their business.

And lastly, and probably most controversially, I don’t care what any religious group has to say on this matter. How dare they try and tell me what I can and cannot play based on their faith and religion. I am not part of your religion.

How about this for an idea, introduce the R18+ rating for games, let me (I am 42 years old) and my fellow gamers (all over 18 years old) play whatever games we want to to under the new system and if you don’t like the games, you don’t have to play them!

You can read more of the details on this (without my ranting) at Gamespot.

4 comments

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    • popshot on May 13, 2010 at 8:53 pm

    Yeah you tell them Dave!

    • Snake on May 13, 2010 at 9:45 pm

    Wonder how they are going to feel when this special interest group votes them out of government. I just don't think the Kevin “The Milky Bar Kid” Rudd and the rest of the powers to be really know what is in our best interest. I guess I'll be importing most of my games from now on. I also wonder if this will make the Internet Filter go back on the agrenda. I may need to start looking for property in NZ

  1. I don't think the Rudd government knows what it wants at the moment, they seem to be scared to death of the impending election because they are desperately trying to please everyone while pleasing no one. I hate Abbott and it is times like this I really wish we had a viable third party. If only the Democrats hadn't imploded, we could use them about now.

  2. Thanks Popshot. I do my best.

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