What the title says.

The well regarded RPG Risen, by the same team that made Gothic 1-3, is on a 50% off sale at Steam. Somehow, Australian Steam users are able to buy Risen during the sale. This is probably a mistake. Risen is still listed as Refused Classification on the OFLC website.

Why was this filthy, disgusting game banned?

A more detailed overview of the sickening and depraved content was given by the ESRB:

You can read more here:

http://www.kotaku.com.au/2009/08/rpg-banned-in-australia-sex-and-drugs-to-blame/
http://news.bigdownload.com/2009/08/11/risen-latest-game-to-be-banned-in-australia/
http://www.classification.gov.au/ww...searchmax=5000&count=25&query=([title]=risen)

And absolutely should not go here to buy it you devil spawn!:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/40300/

Despite being banned in Australia, Risen is still on Aussie Steam servers. If you're using a tool to force Steam to only use Aussie servers, this game will still download at full speed onto your no doubt filthy, porn filled computers.

I've got it and it works. I'll play with it tomorrow so that you don't have to.

 

Wtf is up with your government >_>.

 

Neither major political party will make a policy to support an adult rating for games, but the real problem is our attorney generals.

Every state has one old fogey who gets to be the attorney general and every attorney general in the nation has to unanimously agree before we're allowed to change our Classifications system to allow for mature games. It only takes one fuck head to block mature games, and of course the details of how they each voted and their discussions in these meetings are secret.

 

I'm curious: did they ban Dragon Age in Australia as well? Because for all that matters, you can speak and engage in perverse activities with prostitutes in the game. IIRC you can even make small chested characters!

Edit:found the answer: @ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banned_video_games

Some are hilarious.

Haha.

 

No, and Fallout New Vegas got a pass as well, which has off-screen sex, fake named drugs, swearing, prostitutes you can pay for sex, and even sex as a method of reward.

The Office of Film and Literature Classification has been historically inconsistent in their ratings of video games. In general the OFLC would love a proper adult rating, but they've been denied one by the Attorney Generals. I remember an OFLC spokesman complaining in PC Powerplay magazine in the mid/late 90s about no R18+ rating. There seems to be a subset of OFLC content judges who try to pass games at a lower rating, even though those games would have been banned by others. It's thanks to those public servants who bend the classification system that we can get as large a range of games as we do.

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That list definitely isn't comprehensive. One of the more infamous bans was against Duke Nukem 3D, which is missing from the list. The OFLC fucked up and they were forced to allow Duke to be sold on our store shelves uncut.

 

I am surprised governments even bother banning multimedia content anymore.
Anyone who knows his way around the internet can simply download it in other ways.

 

You can still significantly shrink the potential audience this way.

Btw: As a kid I thought Red Alert (the game) was about robots fighting an alternative 2nd world war, because the game was changed that way for the German market. The soldiers made sounds like a plastic can being crushed when they were killed. :facepalm
Even more ridiculous is the swastika being changed to an iron cross or a square or some other symbol. Or the evil leader is named Arnold Helfer.
I guess otherwise people would become Nazis from playing such games.

 

Germany's even worse than Australia when it comes to game censorship. It seems strange for western societies to do this. Even Germany got Risen untouched, though most likely that's because the game was created there.

 

Video games are the current scapegoat for whenever some fruitloop goes postal. Started circa Columbine, and it's still going - the bodies had barely hit the floor at Virginia Tech before the media 'revealed' that the nutjob played Counterstrike. It'll pass before long, though. The Wii and the DS and suchlike have finally dragged gaming kicking and screaming into the mainstream, and when your grandma plays a DS it's much harder to believe that video games are murder simulators.

So before long something new that Average Joe Fucktard knows squat about will stumble into the media crosshairs and video games will be free to slip quietly out of these regulations. It's a multi-billion dollar industry, and that can shift red tape quickly once the public's distracted by shiny objects.

I, for one, am just glad we've left behind the era where D&D was synonymous with satanism and GURPS expansions were raided by the Secret Service.

 

Well, it's voluntary censorship by the game companies themselves.
I f a game is considered by the regulatory agency to be not fit for consumption by minors, it gets indexed, which means you're not allowed to advertise it or even display it on store shelves. Only under-the-counter sale is legitimate.
This would kill the commercial potential of most titles, so the game companies modify the title so this doesn't happen.
(The same process applies to books, movies, music, etc - although it's much rarer especially for books. Banning books has a taboo that doesn't seem to hold for other media.)

Now if a game gets actually banned (for Nazi references or glorifying violence) then it's not allowed to be disseminated at all.
But it's not forbidden to own it or play it or acquire it somehow.

Nazi references are allowed for educational purposes and 'art'. So movies are allowed to display Nazi flags (fun for tourists if they picked the right day to visit: make photos of government buildings in Berlin with huge Nazi flags) but games are not, because games are toys and not art.


Another fun censorship fact about Germany: Importing porn is forbidden for private citizens. Only shops are allowed to do that. They have customs officials who do nothing all day but check incoming mail for porn. Nice job...

 

There should be some interesting reading material when the US Supreme Court decides on one of their newer cases...

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/11/03/judges-say-the-funniest-things/

 

Who knew that a group of judges could be awesome? It's a pity about out-of-touch Chief Justice Roberts being the proverbial fly in the ointment.

 

What impressed me more was the court reporter that somehow knew to spell Mortal Kombat with a K.

I wonder now, if I were a Supreme Court judge... could I say I was conducting research on violent video games as an excuse to stay home and play video games? Honestly, the judges should be forced to play some, over the next few months. Nothing beats first hand experience. Some of them are old enough they probably don't know much about any of them.

 

@Chime??
Well, the Judge did also imply that most of the clerks had probably played it, so.. heh.(although the one judge's immediate "I don't know what you mean/what you're talking about." was worth a chuckle)

Anyway, it was a decently long read, but rather interesting. Thank you for providing the link.