Being a gamer in Australia can be a little irritating at times. For example, if you play online games like Final Fantasy XIV or World of Warcraft, you are almost forced to play on the Oceania servers unless you can tolerate high ping connections to the US or EU (which are more populated). While Australia often has early access to certain games, it rarely takes more than a week or two for the rest of the world to catch up. And until recently, Australia would ban some of the biggest hits in gaming due to an archaic ranking system.

Australia was pretty strict about what content you could watch in a video game for a long time. Before 2013, the Australian Classification Board only classified games up to a rating of MA15+. Anything beyond what they thought was viable for an adult to play would be denied rating and thrown on a “do not import” list. Anyone trying to smuggle in these banned games would face huge fines (prior to digital downloads, of course).

This included “sexuality and nudity in relation to incentives and rewards” for The Witcher 2 and Saints Row IV, the former of which had a side quest where you could receive sex as a reward.

Most famously, the pre-R18+ era included a ban on South Park: The Stick of Truth due to a scene where several characters are anally examined by aliens. This was later changed to an image of a howling koala while a text description describes what is happening.

After 2013, the R18+ rating was created, allowing more adult content to pass through the censors, but still retaining a ban on certain topics, namely drug use related to incentives and sexual activity, including minors or characters appearing to be minors. The latter is of course understandable – nobody should want that – but the former is questionable.

Drug prohibition focuses on in-game drugs that reward benefits and come close in naming conventions to drugs that can be bought in real life. While this ban has caught some pretty funny sounding games that are absolutely aware of what they are, such as “Weed Mod for Minecraft PE”, it has also caught games that don’t involve a lot of drug use, such as Ultreïa, a puzzle game about a world filled with robots and the meaning of life. You can still buy Ultreïa on Steam, but it is not classified.

Other examples include Disco Elysium, which was originally denied classification and successfully destroyed because the developers claimed there were negative effects on in-game drug use – or DayZ, which eventually removed all references to marijuana from its worldwide releases to comply with the certification.

The cannabis item was not fully implemented in the game before the ACB banned it. Fallout 3 had to rename the “morphine” item to Med-X before distribution – so fake drugs are okay, but real fake drugs are not.

Why the strict rules on drug use? Do the censors believe that everyone who plays Mother Russia Bleeds, a pixelated side-scrolling beat-em-up, suddenly wants to inject themselves with an anger serum? In Grand Theft Auto Online, you can build a drug-dealing business that offers the bonuses of being filthy, filthy rich, but there’s no prohibition there.

Today, it seems more than a little reckless to try to brush recreational drug use under the rug and pretend it doesn’t exist. Numerous films contain both implicit and explicit drug use, and yet they are not denied a rating. In any case, it shows how behind the times the ACB is with regard to what is acceptable content in modern times.

A relatively recent report from 2020 suggests that the average age of gamers in Australia is around 34 – clearly old enough to understand the implications of on-screen drug use. The ACB appears to be striving to protect a demographic that is not the primary consumer of the medium from potential exposure to drug use.

All this, however, is vaguely debatable. Players interested in getting their hands on some banned releases can usually do so anyway – Steam, for example, will simply list the game as unrated when you go to make your purchase. You can also sign up for a US or European account and access their versions of the store windows — and their uncensored versions of video games.

The addition of the R18+ rating hasn’t really done much, other than shifting the goalposts slightly to what the ACB believes is acceptable to view. No one in their right mind is going to play a Minecraft drug mod, see Steve snort an eighth or whatever, and immediately call a dealer for an appointment. Perhaps the ACB should take another look at its policies and ask if what they are doing protects the intended target, or if it is instead causing endless frustration.

Written by Junior Miyai on behalf of GLHF

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