 t’s been said before, and it will be said again:
Australia needs an 18 certificate for games.
This will eventually happen, but it’s a matter that
will endure much procrastination and one that
will suffer from the thinly-disguised
prestidigitation of so-called current affairs
programmes that will continue on with their
fear-mongering so long as their target audience
continues to react with trepidation and underresearched
concern. These are people who
grew up with books, movies and rock ‘n roll (oh,
the irony), and until there are enough people
who also grew up with videogames beyond
Pong – and, by turn, can segregate the reality
from the fiction – to make up a sizable ratings
concern, nothing is going to change.
I’ve spent a number of years living in
both Australia and the UK, and am presently
writing this column in the Blue Mountains
while on holiday from a games retail day job in
London. It’s not my immediate intent to look at
how various aspects of human rationale and reasoning
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develop in a growing child, although
this is something I may probe in the future, but it
is my intent to say that the BBFC 18 certificate
for games makes a lot of sense. But there’s
frustration at how little respect it sometimes gets.
Let’s look at GTA 4. This is a game that got
through the OFLC with an MA15 certification,
probably because its presence would be too big
to outright refuse classification and because,
well, there’s no way to plonk in with an R18
sticker. This is a game that opens on a bondage
scene, allows you to knife bouncers at a strip
club after a couple of private dances, displays
characters doing lines of coke and generally
portrays a criminal underworld in a very sharplywritten
manner. Maybe it’s no worse than
spending an afternoon watching Scarface, but
how many people doubt that film of deserving
the age restrictions placed upon it?
What’s worse, however, is that the ‘it’s just a
game’ mentality actually exists. I can be legally
prosecuted
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for selling a game to an underage
child, and to be quite honest I quite relish asking
for ID because I’m developing a growing hatred
of bratty kids who believe that anything they
want is their right to have. But if they can’t buy
it then they’ll just drag an uneducated parent
along to get it for them, and what’s worse is
that their parent will blindly obey. I’ve actively
told parents in the process of purchasing Vice
City for a child who looked to be about seven
years old that the game allows players to beat
hookers to death with dildos. And they still buy it,
often giving me dirty looks for so much as daring
to question their obvious apathy. I sometimes
wonder if similar things ever happen in liquor
stores.
Fortunately, there are those who heed
what I tell them and look at their kids in horror,
suddenly realising what they’ve been conned
into doing once it becomes apparent that Gears
of War includes chainsaws. The evils that their
children give you are honestly something that
can be relished, and
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there’s a flicker of hope
that their parent actually listened. But it’s still a
shame that the rating on the bottom left corner
of the box isn’t taken half as seriously as it would
be on a DVD, and that it had to be pointed out
verbally – with examples.
The irony, perhaps, is that it won’t be until
people understand the full expressive potential
of videogames and start to evaluate things
for themselves that an 18 certificate will even
become a reality in Australia. Because at the
moment, the 15 limit doesn’t represent the
juvenility of the content – it represents the
juvenility of people’s perceptions.
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