Computer game Fallout 3.
In August, new South Wales Attorney-General Greg Smith agreed in principle to a revised draft of an R18 classification for video games in Australia.
Look back over those phrases – ‘in principle’ and ‘revised draft’ – and you can hear the umming and ahhing. It’s a baby step. that in-principle agreement doesn’t mean anything yet, which is why Sega’s PlayStation 3 game The House of the Dead: Overkill – Extended has just been refused classification in Australia.
My girlfriend’s 15-year-old brother, Ryan, likes playing video games at our house. I let him play M-rated games, watching over his shoulder. Partly because it makes me feel like a responsible adult and partly so I can make fun of him when he dies, laughing and pointing and telling him you have to press Cap Lock to enable autorun.
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Watching him play Grand Theft Auto IV gets boring because he spends most of his time ignoring the game so he can shoot people. at first I was concerned by that display of teenage psychopathic-ness, but then he played Fallout 3 and put my mind at ease. Fallout 3 is set in a version of America where the science-fiction dream of the 1950s came true, all robot maids and nuclear-powered cars, but one that led to the USA becoming an international bully who goaded China into war, reducing the world to radioactive rubble. It’s Buck Rogers crossed with Mad Max, with a focus on morality and choice.The player is confronted with dilemmas like whether to step in when a gang of slick bullies with Elvis haircuts pick on another kid in your fallout shelter, or whether to protect the sheriff of a settlement from being shot by a dastardly villain. Each time he makes one of these decisions I ask Ryan why he made his choice, and each time I’m essentially asking him the same thing: For something you believe in, what’s worth risking? And what are the consequences.In the wise words of John Mellencamp, or maybe it was Malcolm X, “If you don’t stand for something you’re gonna fall for anything.” That’s one of the messages Fallout 3 teaches, and it’s one worth learning before you hit 18.It also teaches you not to drink irradiated toilet water unless you absolutely have to, which is important in its own way.Fallout 3 was almost refused classification here. This post-apocalyptic morality simulator originally featured morphine, which you could use to lessen the pain of being shot by raiders or mauled by a mutant bear. Whether to use the drug at the risk of becoming addicted to it would be another decision worth talking about with the person looming over your shoulder.But to get it into our country, Fallout 3’s developers took the morphine out and put made-up sci-fi stimulants in. meanwhile, Duke Nukem forever sailed past the Classification Board at MA even though the hero uses steroids as a power-up. It’s a game where your girlfriends, who are twins, get abducted and impregnated by aliens and when you show up to rescue them – they’re naked of course – they promise to “get the weight off in like a week, we swear”. then they explode in a shower of gore.I won’t let him play that. Overseas it’s rated R and I’ve no idea why it wasn’t here. It’s one of many baffling Classification Board ratings that makes me think they could benefit from somebody looming over their shoulders asking them to explain their decisions. And every time the Attorneys-General take another baby step towards putting the R18 rating into effect I wish I was looking over their shoulders as well – so I could tell them you have to press Caps Lock to enable autorun.
3Screens is on Twitter: @jodymacgregor
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