Australia and Rimwold

 STOP! You have violated the law!

The Australian rating board for all things entertainment is like a bogey man hanging over the industry with his scythe constantly dangling mere inches over the neck of 'everything fun'. Consumers from the land down under already have to tackle a near garish hike in prices for most of their products as it is, but then that ultra sensitive board of hair-trigger pearl clucthers might just go the extra distance and ban any little thing from their storefronts altogether. Apparently they operate by the age-old logic that people are so perceptive to what they watch that seeing a single illegal thing portrayed in a fictional setting has a 50/50 shot of instantly getting that person strung out on cocaine. So with geniuses like that running the show, you can beat that creatives sometimes have an up-hill battle trying to bumrush their way to Australian customers. (I wonder if New Zealanders have better moderation?)

The latest victim of the Aussie ban-hammer was none other the stellar story-engine colony management game: RimWorld, one of my favourite games of it's type ever made. RimWorld shoves players on a mostly uninhabited planet in the middle of nowhere and asks them to build up a functioning society to prepare for the dangers that the various AI storyteller systems will cook up for them on the regular.  You can expect roving bands of bandits to come to kill you, psychotic blaring drones driving your colonists insane, colonies of burrowing insectoids crawling up to eat you, and just about everything terrible that the devs could cook up. It's a great and mostly feature complete (Still think the world simulation is begging for some fleshing out) platform for player driven stories and trying management fun. So of course if something is great, the Australian ratings board is going to come for it.

As it so happens, RimWorld had actually snuck onto the Australian version of Steam back in 2013, same as it had in every other country, without a lick of scrutiny. Perhaps because the sheer deluge of Steam games that flood in every other year is wholly too much for the Ratings Board to comfortably go over, so they demonstrate the breadth of their incredible talents by giving up and doing nothing. (True heroes. What would the Australian people do without them?) But when it came to sizing up RimWorld for console ports in the near future, oh that is when the ratings board could pull itself off it's rump long enough to go hole poking in this clever little title. And what they found was apparently bad enough to have RimWorld retroactively pulled from Steam due to a 'Refused Classification' label which was handed down, effectively making the purchase of RimWorld in that country illegal.

But what was the charge? Eating a meal? A succulent Chinese meal? No, it was because the game depicted "matters of sex, drug misuse or addiction, crime, cruelty, violence or revolting or abhorrent phenomena in such a way that they offend against the standards of morality, decency and propriety generally accepted by reasonable adults." Wow, what a wrap! How utterly scandalous and lascivious! Gosh, it makes me shudder to imagine the sort of depraved and unholy acts being performed in a game where you play little dot people travelling around a graphically simple world. But its all in the imagination, right? That's what fuels the fun of RimWorld, and it will be the fuel of all the sick monsters of society that spawns from one second of playing this dastardly game. RimWorld: Not even once!

Except of course it's not that deep. RimWorld is indeed a game wherein the creation and use of drugs is a gameplay mechanic, but it's used in a totally fantastical context. None of the drugs are named after real items and each are tied to systems of addiction and withdrawal which does not make them glamourous in the slightest. As for sex- none to be found. And violence? Okay there's a bit of violence, quite a bit; limbs can be blown off and eyes shot out, but none of this is actually visualised. Indeed, much of the gratuity of RimWorld is entirely depicted in status boxes and stat debuffs, allowing for the mind's eye to paint the picture. And also drawing a curious line that this ratings board is crossing. Are we to ban objectionable text now? How does this relate to books? Are the Sherlock Holmes books not worthy to adorn Australian libraries for their portrayal of recreational opium ingestion? Where do we draw the line, Australia?

But this isn't the first time that Australian officials have overstepped their mark when it comes to gaming. Just recently the stellar RPG that I've owned for a year and really need to get around to playing, Disco Elysium, got pulled up for it's drug use before appeals managed to overturn bans. And if we're to pull up ancient history, Fallout famously had to change the designation of it's drugs to 'Chems' and the name of Morphine to 'MedX', all to play nice with the Australian ratings board. Now of course this worked out for Black Isle Studios, and their legacy is better off for the changes if you ask me, but that does sort of reveal the asinine tiptoeing that these rules demand. Clearly no one is really enforcing the spirit here if they're going to let Fallout get away with some light renaming, so if no one likes the rules and the people in the office don't even want to stand by them beyond the exact lettering; why are they still there?

RimWorld appealed the ban that struck them off Steam, and thankfully the ratings board has come to their senses so far; although the game has been slapped with an R 18+ as though it's a freakin' porno movie. And the reason that RimWorld managed to slip through the cracks? Well it's like I said, because the use of drugs isn't glamourized in the mechanics and actually somewhat disincentivised, alongside the visual distance of the simplistic stylised art. Seems one can get by with leaving the weight of the details in the description bar; one again the power of writing has been underestimated for the good of society everywhere! Thank goodness for measures so draconic that even the dinosaurs who enforce them actively search for reasonable loopholes!

I'm not beating around the bush here; this is straight stupid. There never should have been this backlash anyway and once more, the rules were circumvented through corner cutting and excuse conjuring; to me these are the telltale signs of outdated rules that no longer serve the society they were made for. If you can't back up the evidence of the ways in which your laws have benefitted the ends it was designed to, and they tend to be more a tripping hazard than a safe-guard; review, reimagine, adapt. I'm happy for RimWorld's success in this matter, but I'm not naïve enough to think it will set an actionable precedent; no this will be a battle that will be fought every year until someone finally has the head-on-their shoulders to just throw out the rule book and start from scratch.