Comments on: Australian video game censorship: Does it work?

By: refused classification - StartTags.com

refused classification - StartTags.com — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 23:00:02 +0000

[...] [...]

By: Australian Government Survey on Parents’ Ease of Managing Media Use | The Technology Liberation Front

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 15:15:34 +0000

[...] engaging in) some fairly significant content regulations for media, including fairly significant video game censorship, subsidized, government-approved PC-based filters, and now mandatory ISP-level content filtering. [...]

By: Adam Thierer

Adam Thierer — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 07:29:18 +0000

Wow, thanks for the feedback guys. I had no idea that Bethesda Studios shipped the edited game worldwide, but I guess that's not surprising. It's the old "lowest-common-denominator" problem of global markets and regional regulation: Sometimes the best business decision to ship the "cleaner" product to avoid local hassles. Unfortunately, that means that the some very creative game content may be getting censored to appease just one set of regulators. Sad.

And I realized that regional encoding / box-locking might be one way such bans were enforced, but I was wondered how many people were hacking their games or boxes to get around that. Of course, I understand that isn't easy (or legal, in some cases).

Thanks again for the input!

By: Spikeles

Spikeles — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 06:08:30 +0000

"It’s a brilliant game and I just can believe it would be censored such that the Australian public could not play the same version of it that I can."
Actually, because of the Australian banning, Bethesda changed ALL versions(including the US one) to be the same: http://www.videogamechat.net/news/gaming-news/C... ( and all they did was change the name of the drugs to fictional ones )

"Can you still get games from overseas and play them on consoles and PCs in Australia?"
The OFLC rating only governs the selling, hiring or demonstration of games, not the actual playing or owning, so if you can get it, for example, from overseas, the government can't do anything about it. Also, multi player on-line games are exempt from the classification scheme. Due to region restrictions on consoles, even if we imported games, there wouldn't be any guarantee they would work anyway. PC's fare a little better since they aren't region locked. Some Digital distribution channels, for example Steam, enforce region locks by requiring a valid billing address for your credit card to be in a certain country, whereas others like Impulse do not.

I have download uncensored versions of games before. I remember i did once for Duke Nukem 3D. Did you know it was originally censored in Australia?

By: Michael Meloni

Michael Meloni — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 06:03:17 +0000

Hey Adam,

Firstly, thanks for visiting. Your comments above are appreciated.

In regards to Fallout 3, you may be playing the same version we are thanks to our censors: Fallout 3 to Ship Worldwide with Cuts Made for Australian Censors. I don't think there have been any other developments on this since.

Do the bans work? To some extent yes. Removing the ability for retail outlets like EB and Target to sell these games means less people buy them. It has direct consequences on the market. As does people importing them from overseas (fairly common and nearly always successful).

Downloading banned games is also an option. Torrents aside, distribution methods like Steam make it easy for users to bypass retail stores. That means such systems will certainly be of interest if mandatory ISP filtering is implemented.

Many people are also satisfied with the cut versions released locally. Others would be left with no option but to buy the edited version.

By: Adam Thierer

Adam Thierer — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 03:29:18 +0000

By: Adam Thierer

Adam Thierer — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 02:29:18 +0000

By: Spikeles

Spikeles — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 01:08:30 +0000

By: Michael Meloni

Michael Meloni — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 01:03:17 +0000