Sucking sounds are heard

EDITORIAL: I don’t profess to know too much about the computer games market -- I’m a bit more of an enterprise IT person myself. Unlike the Atomic boys (Atomic is one of CRN’s sister publications), I prefer to get my kicks out of the real world. No, I don’t get my jollies from enterprise IT if that’s what you’re thinking!

Not that there’s anything wrong with strapping yourself to a chair for an afternoon and trying work through the intricacies of Halo 2 on Xbox. I’ve never really had too much interest in PC and console games at all.

My first computer -- a Commodore 64 that I received as a kid in the mid-80s -- spent a great deal of time sitting on my bedroom desk unused while I played backyard cricket with the other kids from my street.

You can’t blame me, my father wouldn’t pay for a disk drive so I was stuck with Wizard of Wor and games on cassette tapes (yes I’m talking about the old C64 tape drive) that took upwards of half an hour to load. Bah! No wonder the outside world seemed much more interesting.

Anyway, enough of the nostalgia. Games haven’t been on my radar since, until recently. Arguments over the banning of several games in this country over the past few months fascinates me, hence my decision to run a cover story on the subject in this issue.

Banning computer games, of course, opens up the floodgates for piracy, having potentially devastating consequences for retailers that do the wrong thing. Our cover story
this week takes a look at the repercussions.

Over the past few months, Leisure Suit Larry and Manhunt have been deemed to be too sexually explicit in nature (Larry) or too violent, by the Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC) – and banned. A game called Postal 2 was also refused classification by the OFLC.

Pity really, Leisure Suit Larry was one of my favourites on the old C64 ... Hmm, I wonder why? These days, Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude is apparently far too ‘sexual’ for modern teenagers and young adults and was refused classification by the OLFC.

After all, you wouldn’t want to expose young people to full motion video sequences that include instances such as Larry receiving ‘below screen fellatio’ from Koko. Would you?

‘Sucking sounds are heard,’ was what the OFLC said when I wrote a story about the banning last October.

Ok then -- we can show death and destruction and full-blown nudity on TV and at the movies but we can’t depict any of these things in PC and console games. Maybe it is time for an R rating! I’ll have to ask the Atomic writers for an update on that one.

By making these games illegal, we may just face some serious piracy issues in the future, which is a potentially disastrous situation for this multi-billion dollar (bigger than Hollywood) worldwide industry.

Games technology has come so far over the past five to 10 years and the games sometimes feel ‘too real’, or so I’m told. I’ll be looking forward to developments over the next few months. Maybe games are more appealing than enterprise IT!

What do you think? Do we need an R rating? Is the games market of interest to you? Do you prefer cricket? Let me know.