So, hep! and all that jazz. Today's a day of cleaning for me - mostly spent with laundry so far, but I'm to be tackling the kitchen as soon as I've finished procrastinating here. I didn't have much of a weekend this week, and once I did get some time to myself last night, I sadly spent the most part of it completely failing at doing anything useful in TF2 that I think I might give up on the game for a while. The upside to which is that I can spend some time finishing Freedom Force (for freedom!).
We recently posted my new blogpost on the rockethands.com website. There's obviously a lot to the issue of classification of games and the proposed internet-filtering by the Federal Government - I'm certain I don't have complete and total understanding of the situation, but I'm also certain I have enough to rightfully be concerned.
I have to admit I've been mulling over the next part of this post for a few hours now, and I'm not quite sure what I want to get out of saying it. Censorship bad mmkay? - most people would agree with this, or at least have some good input. Penn Jillette had something to say back in May regarding the banning of the Japanese game Rapelay. I don't know if I agree with all of his spiel, but at least he's thinking about the idea of censorship instead of knee-jerking. (On the topic of this "game", how could a group of adults sit down in a room together and even consider the idea, let alone spend the significant amount of time needed to implement it into an interactive product? I honestly don't understand.)
Is it as simple as the Classifications Board being prone to kneejerking themselves? That seems a little harsh as far as criticism goes, but their results don't seem to help prove anything otherwise. As I mentioned in my RH post, how the hell can Godfather II ship to Australian retailers without a single whimper from anyone; not the retailers, "watchdog" and supervisory groups or sensationalist media outlets? Kane & Lynch nickname its difficulty settings with drug names that almost caused Fallout 3 to be outright banned. The decisions of our classifications board seem arbitrary at best.
It's fair to say that if this board will be an important element in Conroy's filtering of online games, I'm a little concerned how this might affect local digital content creators. Looking at the case studies listed on R18games.com.au, a lot of refusals have come about because of "high impact violence". I don't see God of War, Godfather or the Warriors feature on this list, so what's their definition of "high impact violence"? If these decisions can cause a product to be completely blocked from public consumption, shouldn't content creators have access to at least the broad terms of these definitions, if not the specifics?
It makes sense to me that if the public cannot have an Adult Only classification for interactive media, the OFLC should explicitly provide the details of their guidelines for content creators so we can have a better idea of what boundaries we can work within. I can foresee this kind of request providing one of two things; a solid framework for game makers to adhere to when creating mature content, or evidence that our classifications board is based on the merits of arbitrary subjectivity.
Either or, I don't mind.
In other wind-tossed news, my darling fiancee has taken to replying to my statements of "All business!" with "... at the front, all party at the back." It is evident I am in dire need of a haircut.
-Anthony
toasted bad guys comin' up!
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