Thoughts on Freedom

The Preposterous Posturing of Platonic Piffle

or

Why South Australian Attourney-General Michael Atkinson Needs A Brain Enema

By Andrew Russell

As is well known by regular readers of this blog, I happen to be fond of playing video games. This has led to my own following of the debate about permitting an R18+ rating for video games in Australia. Since my tastes in games tend towards those with darker subject matter, occasionally there are times where games I want are refused classification by the OFLC and hence banned from being sold in Australia.
As you are probably all aware, video games are rated on a different scale to literature and films. Specifically, the highest a game can go is MA15+. If a game cannot be fitted into this category, it is refused classification and it will not be sold in this country.

The fact that games are rated differently to other forms of media causes a lot of discontent amongst the Australian gamer community. As such, there are proposals involving the introduction of an R18+ rating for video games. In order to do this, every State Attourney General must agree to modify the classification system.

The one State AG that has refused to allow this to happen is Michael Atkinson, ALP member for Croydon and a social conservative who is a devout Roman Catholic.

To put this in context, the support for allowing an R-Rating, equivalent to the one used for films, to be introduced to the Australian video game classification system is overwhelming (see the following: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1427266). To put this in further context, the study clearly shows that the average Australian gamer is a legal adult.

So no, it is not fair to say that “games are for kids.”

But this is not about the fact that Atkinson is attacking human liberty in the name of his values. This article attempts to place Michael Atkinson’s censorship in an historical and philosophical context.

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