Although you might not have expected from a country so fond of its beer and violence, Australians have held temptations of R-rated games at bay. Loosing out on the fun of R-rated games has been more a matter of chance than of choice. Australia has been loosing out on some serious gaming fun because of pathetic classification system for games. Australia doesn’t classify games as adult and hence some games do not enter the market devoid of such classification. On the flip side, some games that do get through the Classification Board as MA15+ actually have adult content. Of course not having serious games on the shelf doesn’t deter Aussies who simply download them. A research conducted by the Bond University in Queensland for IEAA (the Interactive Entertainment Association of Australia) found that majority of the gamers was in fact over 18. In a survey of 1601 respondents, the researchers found that the 88 per cent of the Australians were rooting for an introduction of R18+ classification.
As a potential piece good news, the Federal Government has a proposal to introduce R18+ rating to put mature content on gaming shelves. Such proposal, however, must be approved by the Commonwealth and all state and territory attorneys-general. If this goes through then the draconian law would end and games such as Dark Sector, Blitz: The League, BMX XXX, and Reservoir Dogs could finally go on sale. Of course, it’s about time. To blame all the society’s ills on games is just not done. Also the pathetic classification regime meant that the games that ought to have been banned were getting on the shelves anyway. Maybe a newer regime would introduce a bit of sanity into the whole procedure.
