Being a player in Australia can be a bit irritating at times. If, for example, you play online games like Final Fantasy XIV or World of Warcraft, you’ll almost be forced to play on Oceania servers unless you can tolerate high ping connections in the US or EU (which are more populated). While Australia often enjoys early access to certain games, it rarely lasts more than a week or two before the rest of the world can catch up. And until recently, Australia would ban some of the games biggest hits due to an archaic ranking system.
For a long time, Australia was quite strict about what content could be seen in a video game. Prior to 2013, the Australian Classification Board would only classify games with an MA15+ rating. Anything beyond what they felt was viable for adult play would be rejected from the rankings and thrown into a “don’t care” list. Anyone caught trying to smuggle in these banned games would see massive fines (before digital downloads, of course).
This included “sexuality and nudity in relation to incentives and rewards” for The Witcher 2 and Saints Row IV, the former of which had a side quest where sex could be received as a reward.
Most famously, the pre-R18+ era included a ban on South Park: The Stick of Truth due to a scene in which several characters are anally probed by aliens. This was later changed to an image of a crying koala while a text description describes what is happening.
After 2013, the R18+ rating was created, allowing more adult content to slip through the censors, but still retaining prohibitions for certain themes, namely incentive-related drug use and sexual activity, including minors or characters who appear to be minors. The latter is understandable, of course, no one should want this, but the former is questionable.
Drug Prohibition focuses on in-game drugs that reward benefits and adhere to the naming conventions of drugs that can be purchased in real life. While this ban has caught some pretty fun-sounding games that are absolutely aware of what they are, like “Weed Mod for Minecraft PE,” it’s also caught games that don’t involve too much drug use, like Ultreïa, a Puzzle. about a world full of robots and the meaning of life. You can still buy Ultreïa on Steam, but it’s not rated.
Other examples include Disco Elysium, which was originally rejected for classification and successfully overturned because the developers argued that there were negative consequences for drug use in the game, or DayZ, which eventually removed all references to the marijuana from its worldwide releases to meet the certification.
The cannabis item had not been fully implemented in the game before the ACB banned it. Fallout 3 had to rename the “morphine” item to Med-X before distribution; so fake drugs are ok but real fake drugs are not.
Why the strict rules on drug use? Do the censors think that anyone playing Mother Russia Bleeds, a pixelated side-scrolling beat-em-up, will suddenly want to inject themselves with a rage serum? In Grand Theft Auto Online you can start a drug-trafficking enterprise, which confers the bonuses of being filthy, stinking rich, but no bans.
In this day and age, trying to sweep recreational drug use under the rug and pretend it doesn’t exist seems more than a little reckless. Countless films feature drug use both implicitly and explicitly, but are not denied classification. If anything, it highlights how far behind the ACB is when it comes to acceptable content in modern times.
A relatively recent report from 2020 suggests that the average age of gamers in Australia is roughly 34, clearly old enough to understand the implications of on-screen drug use. The CBA appears to be intended to protect a demographic that is not the primary user of the medium from possible exposure to drug use.
All this, however, is vaguely debatable. Players interested in getting hold of some banned builds tend to do so anyway: Steam, for example, will simply show the game as unrated when you go to make your purchase. You can also sign up for an American or European account and access their versions of the storefronts, and their uncensored versions of video games.
The addition of the R18+ rating hasn’t done much except slightly shift the poles of what the ACB considers acceptable. No one in their right mind is going to play a drug mod for Minecraft, see Steve snort an eighth or whatever, and immediately call a dealer to hook up. Perhaps the ACB needs to take another look at their policies and ask themselves if what they are doing is protecting their goal, or if it is causing endless frustration.
Written by Junior Miyai on behalf of GLHF