Where Is the Line?

Concerns over unclassified MMO games in Australia hint at deeper problems with progressive content.

By John Gillooly on 3 February, 2009

Apparently, nearly every massively-multiplayer online (MMO) game that has ever been released in Australia is illegal. According to Asher Moses over at the Sydney Morning Herald, MMO titles are routinely released without any pass through the Classification Board, thanks to a perceived loophole in the way games are defined. Even World of Warcraft, the game our Prime Minister’s son advertises on his T-shirt, is apparently in violation of the law.

Technically speaking, a boxed copy of an MMO is a client designed to connect to a game server. The game, itself, cannot be played without this crucial link and, because of this, the games industry considers boxed MMO clients to not be games themselves. On the other hand, various attorneys-general are of the belief that this is not the case, making the sale of unclassified MMOs illegal.

Of course, this has never been enforced and is more an issue with the Classification System being rooted in the past than an issue with the MMO business model. Because games are classified in the same way as movies, the system well and truly breaks down when you are talking about the dynamic environment of an MMO. Our system revolves around the sale of physical product – online distribution and patching happens at a much faster rate than it takes for a product to hit retail shelves.

Invariably patching and the progressive content delivery favoured by MMO developers means that the actual content of a boxed MMO client changes forever. This often happens within months of release, and poses the question of just what a boxed copy of an MMO is. As an extreme example, a game like, say, Hello Kitty Island Adventures passes with a G rating. What happens when, a few patches down the track, developers add a new ‘Hentai Tentacle Monster’ class?

In that case, the retail product is still the same G-rated piece of software. However, the game would definitely not be G-rated and, most likely, anyone buying the G-rated game would be compulsorily patched to the latest version. Considering the already nebulous nature of downloadable game content within the classification system, this could provide an almost intractable issue. That is not to say such an extremity would ever happen, but it highlights a challenge that is deeper than the relatively simple he said/she said issue outlined in the SMH article.

Call it progressive content, episodic delivery, or plain downloadable content (DLC) – the issue remains. At what point would a patch be more than a patch, and just how much extra work would it put onto the Classification Board. I was actually a little surprised, the other day, when my regular classification database search pulled up an MA15+ rating for the Grand Theft Auto IV DLC, The Lost and the Damned.

It makes a huge amount of sense for Rockstar to be overtly cautious with its products. It has had a rough and tumble relationship with the Classification Board over the years, and there are indications in the US that Rockstar will be selling the DLC in retail stores (via boxed redemption codes).

While Microsoft does, indeed, submit Xbox Live Arcade games for classification, DLC generally doesn’t get looked at. Search for the recently-released Operation Anchorage DLC for Fallout 3, for example, and there is no mention on the Classification Board website.

There is obviously a problem here. However, the very reason we’ve seen little enforcement when it comes to MMOs is that it will open a Pandora’s box for all online content distribution. We haven’t even made it to an R18+ rating yet, but this issue highlights the fact that there is a lot more thought and discussion to be put into the way games are treated in Australia.

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