14 DAY TRIAL // For some time now, Australia has been known to gamers as the place that protects the purity and innocence of children from the vile video games with a nail-club and flanged mace, in many ways akin to the Inquisition that served a lovable, merciful and forgiving God by persecuting and torturing pretty much everyone. The problem with video games in Australia is that the country lacks an MA18+ rating for them, the highest one being the 15+ one, which prevents titles of a more explicit nature from being commercialized. As such, a lot of games have ended up being banned and have never been sold in the state.
And while the idea of creating an appropriate rating system for video games was initiated, the reason it failed was because a single man in a high place opposed it, which was enough to collapse the entire project. When the topic came up, the South Australian Attorney-General decided that Australia could do without the MA18+-rated video games. Currently, the subject is once again under discussion, and, while there are plenty of those in favor of a new, up-to-date rating system, like EB Games Australia, and its "Grow up Australia campaign, Michael Atkinson, the South Australian attorney-general, is also making his play to stop the new rating from being approved.
In his latest statement concerning the threat that violent video games, and subsequently, the players that he claimed they created represented, Atkinson admitted that he felt more intimidated by video gamers and by "the outlaw motorcycle gangs." Speaking to ABC TV's Good Game, he said that, "I feel that my family and I are more at risk from gamers than we are from the outlaw motorcycle gangs who also hate me and are running a candidate against me. The outlaw motorcycle gangs haven't been hanging around my doorstop at 2am. A gamer has," referring to a letter that was left on his doorstep.
And while this may sound rather suspicious, it could be just an unfortunate coincidence. Maybe the mailman just did a bit of Super Mario when he was a kid, and that was enough for Atkinson to label the pour soul as a gamer. Now, true, 2am might be a little bit late to deliver a letter, but if "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night strays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds," then, surely, a bit of overtime wouldn't hinder the loyal public servant from performing his job.
To get a wider picture of the game-banning situation in Australia and the role that Atkinson played in it, we should mention some of the titles that didn't make it past his watchful gaze. While there were plenty of violent games that were banned, like Left 4 Dead 2, at least until Valve released a censored version of it, there were also some titles that might have not deserved this fate. According to Atkinson, Blitz: The League was banned because, "The player may use illegal performance-enhancing drugs for the members of his or her team," and Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure suffered the same fate because, "It promotes breaking the law by vandalizing public buildings with graffiti."