A new draft of the R18+ classification has been released by home minister Brendan O’Connor through the Australian Federal Government. The new guidelines closely match those in place for Australia’s film industry. The new R18+ rating removes restrictions on bad language, drug use and nudity; in contrast, the current guidelines forbade the classification of any adult-themed games.
O’Connor’s draft claims that the R18+ rating will allow “virtually no restrictions on the treatment of themes”, and violence in games “except where it offends against the standards of morality, decency and propriety generally accepted by reasonable adults to the extent that it should not be classified.” As far as sex, the draft says, “Sexual activity may be realistically simulated. The general rule is ‘simulation, yes – the real thing, no'”.
Of course, “standards of morality, decency and propriety” is still troublesomely subjective, while “simulation, yes, the real thing, no” is comicly inept for videogames, where everything is simulation. You may be able to tell when live actors are actually performing sexual acts, but when can you tell a videogame character is actually having sex?
O’Connor stated:
“The Gillard government wants to provide better guidance for parents and remove unsuitable material from children and teenagers. The introduction of an R18+ classification will help achieve that and will also bring Australia into line with comparable nations. This issue has been on the table for many years, without the necessary progress to make a change. We’ve recently seen several states publicly express their support for an adult only rating for games and I’m keen to reach a unanimous decision at the July meeting.”
Rather than banning games, why not punish stores for selling mature games to underage children? Or put the onus of raising children on the parents?
In an interesting interview this week at 1up.com, 
Journalists and bloggers around the Net are doing whatever they can to scrape up news on the gaming industry. What’s the deal, it’s a Monday and nobody in the gaming industry has anything really big to announce, talk about or “leak” onto this here Interwebs?
Hi guys great episode!
@Apple: I think Paul brings up a good point that there are some men that would really benefit from this as a teaching tool. I just think they need to put a mature rating on this and have Adult section for apps like this to go into. I think Jordan is right the majority of times male masturbation is mentioned it’s usually derogatory like in Family Guy when Chris Grandpa berates him for his supposed masturbating in the bathroom. They also treated it like a dirty word on Roseanne when DJ was locking himself away in the bathroom. TV and movies gave me the impression that masturbation just isn’t shouldn’t be talked about.
@Sony working on new models of PS4/PS3: I understand working on the current gen console but why PS3? Not that I’m complaining, maybe there will be worthwhile addition or changes.
@External Storage for Xbone: About time I say, I think it’s silly NOT to support external storage via USB. I also love the Xbone term as well.
@Blizzard Sues: For once I’m hearing a good case to sue someone, usually you see very furiously made lawsuits like the lady suing the parents of the kid she hit and killed. I’m glad they are cracking down on those who just break the game, I agree people cheating really turns me away from a game.
QotW: At first the only Party game I could think of was Mario Party but it’s not really a game I would call favorite, the fate of wining left to a random dice roll doesn’t sound appealing to me.
Games that I played in groups were light sports games like Wrestling, however still not my favorite. I do remember getting into fights over Bubble bobble, some people just can’t stand it when you take a power up or 1-up from them.
I haven’t really had good experiences with party games so I’d like to answer last weeks Question:
Lost Mind of doctor brain and the rest of the series of games, I really loved how the entire series would explore all facets of science, history, geography, math and logic puzzles. It honestly made learning fun.
Let me start by breaking the spell and saying that I’m unfortunately not a hunting-killing machine from the Polish woodland 😉 I went to a shooting range once, though, and I did pretty well so maybe hours of Duke Nuke’m 3D did their job…
@Apple
On the one hand, censorship is obviously not welcome but the truth is that a company can do and publish whatever they want. It’s not the government that is limiting the freedom of speech, it’s a private company selecting their content. I’m pretty sure that if it had been an app for male masturbation they would have done the same. The ‘free market’ allows the content creator to look for a different outlet that will decide to publish that content and maybe Google or Microsoft be the ones to grab it.
I personally have no problem with such an app as an ‘introductory course’ but in the end I still believe that the best teacher of female stimulation for guys should be the partner herself.
@Pre-loading
Maybe I’m not as hardcore a gamer as many other people. Well, for sure that’s the case. Still, I can’t really understand that they can’t wait several more hours to play a certain title and they HAVE TO have the game installed and running at midnight when it launches. What is more, I’m very wary of buying the $60 titles online. These are ususally games with many hours of gameplay and ones that will probably be revisited years down the line. What if I want to re-download the game in some years and the servers are no logner working or something is wrong with them? That’s why I’m always a physical-copy-first guy. Also, you can’t really re-sell a downloaded game. Taking all that into account, I don’t beleive the online store revolution will be as successful as the publishers believe. Having said that, I don’t know any numbers that would prove or disprove it. What do you think?
@External storage
That’s a great feature. Although 500GB may sound like much, when you consider that the new Wolfenstein takes up around 60 of that and that only over 100 GB are taken up by the system itself, it quickly turns out that there’s not really that much space for games. Being able to store them on an external drive is fantastic. I’m not sure if the PS4 supports it or plans to do so. I would like to have it there too. However, support for media streaming (DLNA) is something I want sooner. Does the XBone provide that functionality now?
@QOTW
The only two party games I ever play on the PS4 are the Sports Champions titles and Just Dance. SC are really fun and something everyone can play. Obviously, with my notorious hunting skills, I’m unbeatable in the archery competition. Just Dance, on the other hand, works like crap on the PS4. Ubisoft put no effort whatsoever to optimize the use of the PS4 camera so tracking doesn’t really work. Still, for half-drunk friends who simply want to make fools of themselves, it works. The ‘highlights’ of each song shown at the end are hilarious.
The games that Alphashard talked about – Wrestilng or Bubble Bobble, I wouldn’t consider party games, really. I used to play them with friends back in the day because they were fun co-op games and the ‘party game’ genre hadn’t really developed yet. Those games destroyed friendships more than built up a fun, party-like atmosphere 😉 Also, they required some gaming skill whereas the modern titles are created often with non-gamers in mind.