Bill Introduced To Ban Sale of MA15+ Games To Anyone Under 18 in SA

dotarray writes "The introduction of an R18+ rating for video games into Australia has been designed to bring game classification in line with the current system in place for films and other media. One state, however, would like to widen that gap." This is being billed (by John Rau's office) as a saner approach than eliminating the MA15+ rating entirely.

Games are an easy political issue

[bonch]

Why is there still political uproar over games after all these years? It may have been understandable in the mid-1990s when Doom and Mortal Kombat were portraying a level of violence people hadn't seen in games before in such detail, but that time has passed without effect, and the attention given to games today feels disproportionate. It's just an easy, uncontroversial issue for politicians to pick up in order to appeal to family-first voters.

Re:Games are an easy political issue

[ShieldW0lf]

The Atari 2600 was released in October 1977,

1983 In Australia, how do I know, I was five when it came out.

The Atari 2600 sold 30 million units over it's entire life span throughout the entire world, so not that many people. For comparison, Nintendo sold that many Wii's in it's first year and the 2600 was sold from 1977 to 1992.

Further more, on release it cost US$199. Add to that the AUD fetched US$0.70 in 83, that's $260 for the console. That would be if things were actually priced according to the exchange rate. The real cost of an Atari 2600 in Australia was $400 in 1983 dollars (cant be arsed figuring out inflation). Now the average wage in 1983 was around the $350-380 mark.

So armed with those facts, I can say not that many people over 35 grew up with consoles.

Gaming really made it's mark in the 90's with the NES/SNES and their inferior Sega counterparts (punk kids, think their console war is a new thing).

The thing we're facing now, is that gaming has gone from being a new innovation to an accepted part of life and this shows a huge generation gap between the under 35's who grew up with gaming and the over 35's who didn't. There may be some over 35's who gamed but the overwhelming majority didn't.

So nice way to over-generalise and pull facts out of your arse (generalise and arse spelled correctly for a discussion about Australia, thank you). You dont even have decent supposition to support your argument and yes, I did register your sample of 1, you are the anomaly, not the norm.

I'm 36. Most of the people I knew had Atari's when I was a child. Myself, I was programming on a VIC 20 in grade school. Both were available at Canadian Tire for a pretty reasonable price. Commodore 64's were so inexpensive I was able to pay for mine with my paper route. I spent junior high school swapping C64 games on 5 1/2 inch floppy disks. One of my favorites was the barbarian sword fighting game, where if you got just the right finishing move, you'd decapitate your opponent and the little green goblin that drags the body away kicks his head like a soccer ball. Great fun.

Hell, we even had portable versions of Pac Man, Donkey Kong and Q~bert for long car trips.

And, of course, if you were really too poor to own any of the above, there were arcade machines EVERYWHERE.

Maybe you just need to recognize that, inane sarcasm about sample sizes aside, you don't have the slightest clue what you're fucking talking about. Of course, you're quite free to continue believing fiction if you like.

Re:Games are an easy political issue

[Electricity Likes Me]

Lots of things can easily be cited.

For example I can cite that the rise in global temperatures is associated with the decrease in the number of pirates.

Re:Games are an easy political issue

[JosKarith]

Kids pick up behaviour from everything. I grew up with lots of dogs in the house and still have bad habits loike sniffing my food and hitting stairs at a quadrapedal run.
Here's a concept - rather than more and more rules on what people can do to protect your precious little crotchfruit how's about taking some personal responsibility for that thing that came from you. Teach the kid right and wrong, don't leave it to Uncle TeVee or Aunty Internet. Teach them respect for themselves and other people and that gutter language doesn't make you look big, it makes you look like a child trying too hard to look big.
But I guess you've already done the easy/fun bit. Everything else is Someone Else's responsibility...
(BTW joebagofdonuts this isn't a personal rant at you - it's just a general What The hell Is Wrong With You All rant aimed at the world in general)