Would you trust a politician over a gamer?

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Wednesday, 17 February 2010 16:28

Opinion and Analysis

While there may well be politicians who are also console and PC gamers, there's one politician in Australia who has already gone down as THE most anti-gamer politician in the history of the entire planet, right in the midst of the greatest gaming revolution the world has ever seen.

When your politicians want to censor you and what you do, you know that your freedom and liberty are slipping through your fingers bit by bit and byte by byte.

A particularly notorious content censor on Planet Earth happens to reside in Adelaide, the capital of the Australian state of South Australia, a curious state with some odd laws, vicious bikies, an excellent recycling system, unbearable hot heatwaves at the height of summer, and a history for having a capital with something like either the highest suicide or murder rate in the past.

Whichever it is, it's not a great thing to be (mis)remembered for, but South Australia will forever go down in history for having the most anti-gamer Attorney General since the first Atari was but a glint in the eye of Nolan Bushnell.

His name is Michael Atkinson, and his extremely biased views are preventing an entire country from enjoying adult games, for adults, which in some countries get MA15+ type ratings but in Australia won't fit into an R18+ category because, for games in Australia, such a category simply does not exist.

It does exist for movies, but even though games are basically interactive versions of movies these days, the passive nature of R18+ movie watching is ok, but the interactive nature of playing R18+ games is discriminated against by someone that doesn't appear to have played a modern game in his life.

Earlier today, iTWire gaming editor Mike Bantick wrote about the controversy surrounding Atkinson's appearance on ABC television's 'Good Game' show, where he claimed that gamers put him more at risk than vicious outlaw motorcycle bikies, something that Atkinson has successfully and in a most welcome fashion, railed against through Anti-Motorcycle gang legislation.

Atkinson told the Good Game show that: 'About two o'clock in the morning I had a threatening note from a gamer shoved under my door. I feel that my family and I are more at risk from gamers than we are from the outlaw motorcycle gangs who also hate me and are running a candidate against me.

'The outlaw motorcycle gangs haven't been hanging around my doorstep at 2:00 am, a gamer has.'

But how did Atkinson know it was really a gamer that sent the note... was it because it was signed by a gamer? Perhaps a more sinister plot to dupe Atkinson was in play... speculative details and more commentary on page 2, please read on!