Create new account
Forgot password?

NEWS

David Jaffe Slams Australian Game Censors

Tom Ivan's picture

By Tom Ivan

December 8, 2009

  • Login or register to post comments

See also:

Related Articles:

God Of War creator David Jaffe has slammed the methods employed by the Australian classification board to rate games.

"There's a government board and if they say it's too offensive, in that case there's no fight to fight — it is what it is," he told the audience at the Game Connect: Asia Pacific conference in Melbourne, according to IGN.

"There's not much you can do if you're making games aimed at a mature audience. We never like to cut it, but what are you going to do? You're dealing with governments… The reality is people still see a lot of these things as kids' toys. It's utter BS."

Jaffe was speaking shortly after Sega’s Aliens vs Predator became the sixth title to be refused classification by Australia’s classification board this year.

While Australia’s federal government said last year that it was considering introducing an R18+ classification for games, no rating higher than 15+ currently exists for the medium, despite the fact that movies and magazines can receive adult classification.

Jaffe is by no means the first to criticise this set-up. His stance is backed up by, among others, Tom Crago, the president of the Game Developers Association of Australia, who recently labelled the country’s rating system a “joke”.

Image: NewsWeek

toadwarrior's picture
On December 8th toadwarrior said:

Games are treated as toys by the old and clueless because it's quite apparent to everyone that no one makes any real effort to stop children/teens from playing adult games. In fact I dare say that most adult games wouldn't get decent sales numbers if it weren't for children buying them.

Ben_Lathwell's picture
On December 8th Ben_Lathwell said:

There was a documentary on channel 4 last night about debt, credit crunch blah blah blah.

But as part of the show they did an experiment getting a woman with good credit and a woman with bad credit to buy a few popular items this christmas.

When the presenter was setting the challenge she kept reffering to 'Modern Warfare 2' (one of the products in the challenge) as " the game all the KIDS want this christmas".

Proper annoying when even documentary makers can't differentiate age ratings, she wouldn't have set them the challenge of buying 'a bottle of White Lightning for the kids', although i'm sure most teenagers want one.