Target Australia’s decision to pull GTA V from shelves is surprising for a few reasons, the least of which being that the product has been on shelves with nary a buzz since September 2013. Not much has changed since then, other than the title’s rerelease on next gen platforms last month, the windows version coming in 2015, and the announcement that the PC version will have first person mode, which apparently makes for some spicy sex scenes. And by ‘spicy’, I mean, ‘holy uncanny valley, batman!’ And, ‘you people do know you can get real porn on the Internet, right?’ Also, it really seems like the biggest badass in Los Santos should last longer than 25 seconds.
What is lost in all of the discussion is how this is actually a step forwards for games censorship in Australia. You see, for more than a decade, Australia has had one of the most repressive gauntlets of government game censorship in the world. This has been one of the most ridiculous parts of making games in the industry for quite some time. Among the highlights on the banned list.
- FEAR 2 (banned until they changed the name of your medpacks from ‘morphine’).
- South Park: Stick of Truth
- Singles (yes, the shitty Sims clone, for, you know, Sim-like stuff. The Sims are not on the list )
- Marc Ecko’s Getting Up (banned for glorifying graffiti).
- Blitz: the League (banned for drug mentions)
Seriously, you’d expect a former penal colony to be a little less prissy about their digital entertainment.
Games that were banned were simply ‘refused classification’ by their ratings board. In 2011, the Australian government agreed to invent a new over-18 rating for games, and for the most part, if your game stays away from incest and child pornography, it looks like the government has relaxed quite a bit: only three games have been banned since 2012, and all three were allowed back on the marketplace with a bit of editing.
So the government has backed way the hell off in terms of letting games for adults be made – which is a good thing! So the decision as to whether or not to put GTA V on your shelves is fully in the hands of retailers – which is also a good thing! And not to put too fine a point on it, that’s what freedom actually looks like. Christian book stores don’t sell Satanist bibles. Feminist book stores probably aren’t going to rush to stock a Davis Aurini or a RooshV book should one spontaneously be produced by the ass end of the Internet. Store owners get to curb their inventory based on the clientele they hope to serve and build.
As long as the government doesn’t get involved, SOMEONE will profit from Target stepping out of this arena. I mean, despite what some people think, it is widely regarded by the gaming press to be a masterpiece. There are definitely things that critics might call ‘problematic’, but little of that is new. Sex workers have been complaining about GTA for more than a decade now, long before Anita Sarkeesian make games her calling. And sex in GTA San Andreas was also what mobilized the conservatives, who rallied around Jack Thompson. The only thing new is the addition of transexuals to the mix of things to be unpolitically correct about. But games, like movies, are allowed to have problematic content, and the makers of GTA have built a large audience who embraces it.
Don’t get me wrong: the topic of stores ‘censoring’ their content based on the demands of an overly defensive corporate culture, or an excitable fringe is always something that is a tad troubling. It’s also not a new problem. Twenty-five years ago, Kurt Cobain was lamenting how, in America, if you couldn’t sell your records (or other Wal-mart disapproved goodies) in Wal-Mart, you effectively couldn’t sell your records in any small town in America. But this kind of censorship is doomed to fail – as Tycho points out, Amazon and digital downloads means that brick and mortar product bans are coming increasingly irrelevant, just as Spotify and iTunes makes virtually any music you care to hear today available within a few keystrokes. In this day and age, the problem is not getting past the gatekeepers – its that so many games and bands are able to do so now that getting attention for your game so you stand out from the crowd is way, way harder than it used to be.
Which brings me to my final point. I’m sure this is all very tinfoil hat of me and all, but I suspect Rockstar is crying all the way to the bank here. This is a publisher that has mastered the art of turning controversy into sales. I strongly suspect that the recent hullaballoo will result in far more sales for them, not less, and I’m suspicious that they might have consciously embraced being thrown into the briar patch.
(There’s a typo where you link gaygamer.net about transsexuals in the seventh paragraph; looks like the link goofed up and missed a letter)
How do you feel about the ban morally?
I don’t think anyone’s really questioning whether or not Target should be allowed to stop selling it, or whether it’s a good thing for Target or Rockstar, because those questions have pretty black and white answers, for the most part.
Do you feel that Target should have banned it?
1. Well that is mostly a matter of monopoly. Is supermarket chains didn’t have such a pull over retail, there wouldn’t be a problem. Now credit card companies refusing to process payments for online sites is an effective censorship since it cuts all effective ways to earn money. Atleast until CryptoCurrency came along.
2. Isn’t it entitlement to expect a game to be stocked in stores? Like you don’t expect the latest installment in your favorite porn series to be on the shelves of family friendly supermarket chain. Neither as you mentioned the Satanist bible.
Why have we decided that GTA V is such a commodity that is must be stocked in non-specialized major supermarkets, as opposed to any other more obscure title. Why not sell Super Meat Boy? Is it censored by not being available in stores?
3. We are talking about physical retail copies. Does it even matter? Who buys physical disks anymore? (And why?) Can’t the game be obtained online, legally even? Or can’t you just, ship it?
There will still be a call for physical media, and the console model still gives a good argument for it. Super Meat Boy is 3 years old at this point, but if your point is to promote a smaller-scale game, then yes, brick and mortar is long since past irrelevant for those kinds of games. Better to sell gift cards for Club Penguin in that space.
But when I found out the install size for Wolfenstein: New Order was 80 GB. If that’s the future of AAA games, then we’re going to want to keep that shit on some separate media. Smaller games can fill the cracks, and receive proportional promotion. But having it on the shelf at a store doesn’t carry the same weight it did before, just because it isn’t the only way to do business. Not long ago, that’s all there was.
I went to a Target (Australia) shop the other day. Within a few minutes’ walk there were two other shops I could buy GTA V from, if I wanted to. I’m not all that worried about my freedom.
Yeah, it’s just a *little* censorship. If you squint and parse the words right, it isn’t even censorship at all.
–Dave
Hey Damion, just an FYI, “transsexuals” isn’t that great a term to use these days, and the trans community very much tends to prefer “transgender” as the adjective or “transgender people” as the noun. It’s not a slur like say, “tranny” would be, but it’d be like calling a black person a “negro”; it’s just outdated terminology.
Just a heads up, since you seem like a guy with a good head on his shoulders who means well. 🙂