Aussie Politicians Angered Over Downloads of "Getting Up"

"And we all know how well that game sold…"

You mean it did sell? I suppose there's some people with an obsession who "must have it.".

In the words of Daffy Duck, "pronoun trouble." The "they" in the statement "They pretend to be talented and to be the forerunners of a new age of street art or something, which is just arrogant piffle" goes back not to games or gamers but to the taggers.

It's not illegal to posses RC material. Stop making crap up.

"So if they really care about this issue, they should have a “Adults Only” label on the game and regulated its distribution."

But no, that would make sense, and sense has no place in politics.

Hmm... Looks like I can get Reservoir Dogs online, too. Me > Law.

Yuki
to bad politics can be as easily "fixed"

Who are the politicians to say what we can and can't watch or play? Just because you don't like something doesn't mean that you can ban it. I'm utterly sick of them treating the adult population like children, because they believe they've got the moral high-ground. If I want to play a game that has 'immoral' content (Postal 2, GTA, Leisure Suit Larry comes to mind), then I'm going to play it whether they like it or not.

You know what banning something does? It just makes it go underground, and someone will make money off it, illegally if the need be. You're just creating criminals, and a black market.

Free country indeed. In reality it's free***, with terms and conditions in the fine print.

"which is just arrogant piffle"

That's what I hear every time an Australian politician opens their mouth,

Unenforceable bans are worse than not banning altogether.
And regulated "bans" are better than not banning something considered "not nice."

So if they really care about this issue, they should have a "Adults Only" label on the game and regulated its distribution.

I know this is childish but i don't care:
Take that Aussie politicans who refuse to allow an R18+ rating for games. Hope this happens more often for games in countries they're banned in.

Gotta agree, I hate getting up, but by banning it, the Australian governement may as well have just handed Marc Ecko a cheque for several hundred grand, that's effectively what they have done.

"GP: We’ve heard games called a lot of things by politicians and activists, but 'arrogant piffle' is a first."

Yes, but the term is suprisingly accurate in describing Marc Ecko's game, especially after his, "I tagged Air Force 1," stunt. I think "Arrogan Piffle," sums up Ecko's career quite well.

Now banning the game because of that? Yeah, good luck, as Brer detailed for us.

To me this just seems identical to the situation we'd have if Tack Jhompson actually had a position of power somewhere :-P

A perfect example of the basic problem with the internet and control of information. You can always go someplace else where the video game/porn/music/political commentary/news/novel/film that's illegal in your country is readily available. There are three basic options here:

1) The country with material it wants to ban completely blocks citizen access to the internet (North Korea) or tries Nation-wide firewalls and invasive Net-Cop presence to arrest dissenters (China). Unfortunately the former only works if, like North Korea, you've had an absolute lock on ALL traffic of information and even physical material into and out of your country since before the internet existed, and the latter is never 100% effective as all the efforts dedicated to finding workarounds for the Great Firewall of China have demonstrated.

2) The country wanting to impose censorship gets together with other countries that want to impose censorship and attempt to get the internet regulated internationally to what you might call the "least free denominator". For an example of this, watch the posturing of countries like China, Saudi Arabia, and Iran the next time there's an international summit on "Internet governance": ideally, they want western countries to enforce -their- free speech bans wherever their citizens could get to the speech in question. Even some european nations and groups are in on this act on issues like hate speech (which isn't criminalized here in the US or is criminalized only -selectively- in other countries such as in the Middle East). For obvious reasons, this sort of solution is absolutely unacceptable to most nations with fairly strong free speech protections.

3) The country wanting to impose censorship is forced to recognize that it can't control the internet, and that it will simply have to live with that hole in its enforcement capability or *GASP* modify its stance on censorship.

All the arguments over the various ways in which the Internet can be peacably regulated, governed, and generally destroyed will eventually settle on a variant of one of the three scenarios outlined above. And yes, I'm one of those who argues that a well-regulated internet would mean the complete and absolute loss of everything that made the Internet valuable or useful.

Am I the only one who has never heard of 'Getting Up'? It seems that Australia only ever wants to ban games that are failures from the get go. But you must admire them targeting specific games and not games in general.

But oh well, they can cry because other people don't want to play with them.

Is there a way we can censor comments about censorship?

How about banning censorship? That sounds even better!

ok i think that getting up is a shit game. by the way i live in Australia and it wasn't hard for me to obtain a copy of it. The gameplay is completly unrealistic and not greatly thought out. Being an experienced writer this game is portraying us graffers rather stupidly so I have no problem with them banning this certain game but do not support how they're basically trying to wipe out a culture and the whole aerosol artform deeming all graffiti criminal and talentless.