Mr eel
The OFLC are Fascist Wowsers
Living in a liberal democracy is nice. Until you realise it’s not as liberal as everyone likes to pretend. Seems it’s enough to pay lip service to the ideal of liberty, but when it comes to the difficult part — you know the bit where you have to put up with things you find unpleasant — loads of people turn out to be wowsers.
Now you might be asking what sparked all these angry words about liberty etc. Oh, it’s just the Office of Film and Literature Classification being knobs. Again.
Specifically they have withdrawn the MA rating for Grand Theft Auto - San Andreas within Australia. This means that the game can no longer be sold. I’m all for rating games. It gives parents a good idea of what sort of games they want their kids to play and it give adults a chance to do the same for themselves i.e. not everyone wants to play a game full of sex and violence. What I hate, is some bunch of out-of-step knob-ends telling me that I can’t play a violent or sex filled game if I want to. Apparently I am not actually an adult capable of making up my own mind, but rather an oversized child to be coddled and talked-down to.
There is no such thing as a R or Adults Only rating for games in Australia. Bah!
Two points I’d like to make here. First lets consider the irony of the OFLC allowing the sale of a game where the the protagonist is a drug dealing gangster, but gets it’s knickers in a twist when they discover it’s possible to see that character having consensual sex. Apparently sex is just so much worse than violence.
Secondly, the rating for this game was pulled without any real discussion or investigation. It’s a knee-jerk reaction to all the furore over the game in the US.
The ratings process is opaque to the public and is focussed on shielding our tender minds from all that nasty stuff in films and movies. Bluntly, I can see worse on the news each night. I’m starting to doubt the need for an organisation like the OFLC, if in the end it means they are going to try and stop me from seeing the films or playing the games I want to, for what are frankly trivial reasons.
Bottom line; this is censorship and censorship fucking sucks.
Comments