Just Get the Fucking Discussion Paper Out
Michael Atkinson continues on his 'adult gamers can suck it' spree.
Michael Atkinson, Australia’s attorney-general who doesn’t care for adult gamers or the evidence regarding our prominence [PDF], is back in the spotlight. This time he calls proponents of an adult games rating – likely to be you – ‘nerds’ who rape mothers.
A reader of the Adelaide Advertiser wrote in to the publication and claimed that he is undemocratic for refusing to consider an adult R18+ rating for games. As reported by The Escapist, Atkinson responds by claiming there are at least three other attorneys also opposed and welcomes a challenger in his electorate at the next general election. He then proceeds to whip out the old ‘who cares for your cause’ card.
“[The election] is hardly likely to hinge on the ‘right’ to score gamer points on the computer screen by running down and killing pedestrians on the pavement, raping a mother and her two daughters, blowing oneself up in a market, cutting people in half with large calibre shells, injecting drugs to win an athletics event or killing a prostitute to recover the fee one just paid her,” Atkinson claims.
“Welcome to the world of R18+ computer games,” he adds.
Well, we’d like to welcome Mr. Atkinson to the world of today and MA15+ video games. With our lack of an adult games rating, many of the activities he mentions are presently available, in Australia, for the same fifteen-year-olds he’s blindly trying to protect.
The sheer magnitude of his ignorance is astounding, but also quite worrying for one of our nation’s attorney-generals. Although his views come across as very much on the conservative side, they’re quite ludicrous, because that which he speaks out about preventing is already an issue.
Games designed for adults are being shoehorned into our inept classification system. This becomes pretty clear when you compare our ratings of various titles with those from overseas. Stereotypical Aussie jokes aside, it’s not like our children are any more jockstrap and hardy than their overseas counterparts. Societal standards may vary slightly, but these differences in ratings are not slight and more a case of the Classification Board being backed into a corner.
‘Protect the children’ has always been Michael Atkinson’s mantra on the issue of an adult games rating. It is abundantly evident that he’s clueless as to the content currently available on store shelves for teenagers. An adult rating merely aims to right that, yet he still throws out that old line involving kids having easy access to their parent’s games – which is ridiculous for multiple reasons, not the least of which involves advocating governmental parenting.
Considering he’s not protecting the children at all and actually making matters worse for what is plainly one of his life’s ambitions, who or what, exactly, is he really protecting? No one at all, from what we can tell, other than his holier-than-thou logical fallacies.
Atkinson needs to quit jamming spanners in the release of the discussion paper concerning an adult rating for games. Rather than getting in its way and using this constant period of waiting as his own personal rostrum, just let the paper be published and allow Australia to finally have its say. We can then have a proper debate on the matter instead of being forced to put up with an out-of-touch fogey essentially trolling a good chunk of Australians by pushing his draconian, yet demonstrably contradictory ideals, onto everyone.
Slip on your brave shoes, Mr. Atkinson, and quit making this ordeal a one-sided argument, for once.
Supporting our habits:
Fresh confabulation