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Risen Refused Classification – OFLC Strikes Again

by dkpatriarch

© 2009 David Hilton

Here we go again.

Risen, due for release in October for PC and 360, is the latest game banned in Australia, given the dreaded “refused classification” tag by the Aussie Classification Board.

The offending game Risen, by Gothic developers Piranha Bytes, is a third person Role Playing Game (RPG) that apparently contains “sexual activity and drug use related to incentives or rewards.”

According to the US Ratings board:

During the course of the game, players can interact with prostitutes (referred to as “whores” in the game) at a local brothel.

Players can trigger a lengthy dialogue to engage in their services; sexual activity is strongly implied, but never depicted on screen.

Many of the characters in the game smoke a fictional drug called “brugleweed.” The “wood reefer” plant is described as having a mild relaxing effect on users, and can be bought, sold, and used by players. Some profanity (e.g., “f*ck” and “sh*t”) can be heard in the dialogue.

Risen has fallen foul of censors

The problem in Australia is that we still do not have an R18+ rating for games, though we do in film, and so this means the game gets “refused classification” making it illegal to purchase or own here.

Australian distributors of the game, Madman Interactive, now have to see if the creators will change Risen enough to pass the Australian classification system into MA 15+, which is the highest current rating a game can be given.

This is always an iffy proposition as Australia is a very small gaming market anyway.

I’ve said it before, but the fact is that the average age for the Australian gamer is now 30 years old, according to a recent study by Bond University, Queensland.  Yet we live in the dark ages where, while film is rated with R-ratings for content inappropriate for younger viewers, games are not.

Besides the issue of censorship and an adult’s right to choice, there is simply the issue that the current antiquated system is too inflexible to properly classify games by content.  Games full of violence and gore (eg. chainsaw killings) pass into MA 15+ category, but some games with implied sex and drug use are banned.

Swearing was huge in the Wii game House Of The Dead: Overkill and 50 Cent: Blood On The Sand, but they passed.  Implied sex has been in a number of games including Fable, and prostitution has been in the GTA series.

As Tom Crago, President of the Game Developers Association of Australia, as well as working in the game development field as CEO of Tantalus software, said recently:

It’s ridiculous because it assumes that games are fundamentally different to film and outrageous in that it assumes that adults shouldn’t be allowed to access adult content in video games.

And of course it is a fundamentally broken system in that games that should be classified R are being shoehorned into the [MA 15+] classification, which means you get a 16 or 15 year old, who really shouldn’t be able to play a particular type of game actually able to play that game, under the age of 18.

While we don’t know exactly what content irked the board in this game beyond what has been said, the fact is that there needs to be an adult-only category (R18+ rating) where games with any adult content are classified, as it is in most of the world.

Currently games like Dead Space which are classified 18 overseas have been put in the MA 15+ category here, simply because we don’t have an R rating.

No R18 + rating means banning

Remember Dark Sector being banned here for its violent content until it was changed?  That game was nowhere near as violent as some games before it or since.

These inconsistencies will see future games continue to meet the same fate as Risen.

We were promised a say last year, but that doesn’t look likely.

© 2009 David Hilton

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