The following article originally appeared at Robot Geek
and is completely fictional, although if you actually need to be told
that I doubt this disclaimer will do much good.
Australia’s notoriously strict censorship of videogames has
received shocking vindication in the aftermath of the Australian’s
government’s recent decision to allow the release of R18+ games in
the country, a decision immediately followed by an eruption of
videogame-related violence and social decay that reduced the country
to a nightmarish post-apocalyptic wasteland less than a week later.
By law, every game released in Australia required a classification
from the Australian Classification Board, a government body that
regulated media content. Previously, the board refused to give any
classification to games with content that would result in an R18+
(Restricted to 18 and over) rating, preventing an official release. A
bill creating an R18+ classification for videogames was finally
passed by the Parliament of Australia on July 18th.
What happened in the immediate aftermath
remains unclear, due to the rapid collapse of Australia’s
communication infrastructure and the country’s subsequent reversion
to a preliterate culture dominated by savage nomadic warlords,
heavily armed bands of murderous neo-barbarians, and the insane
god-kings of despotic Bronze Age city-states, all struggling for
survival in the crumbling ruins of a once-advanced civilization.
However, according to the still-fragmentary reports that have
trickled out of the country, several major cities were already in
flames by early July 19th as hordes of videogame-maddened Australians
took to the streets in what one surviving observer called “an
orgiastic spasm of unimaginably savage
Dark Sector-inspired
violence.” The chaos escalated into a cataclysm that laid waste to
huge swaths of the Australian countryside, destroyed most major
cities, and caused the utter dissolution of Australian society,
reducing a prosperous nation of 22 million people into what an
official United Nations report describes as “a desolate hellscape
where only the strong survive.”
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June 21th: With the Australian military thrown into disarray by
the collapse of the central government and local law enforcement
incapacitated by an imported copy of Dead or Alive: Dimensions,
Perth is turned into a burning ruin as long-standing rivalries
between Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 owners escalate into open warfare.
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How the R18+ rating had such rapid effects remains a mystery,
since the bill would not have actually gone into effect until 2013.
Several possible explanations have been offered, including a sudden,
uncontrolled release of years of frustrated, pent-up hunger for
gaming violence caused by gamer excitement in the aftermath of the
bill’s passage, the hypothesis of some physicists that the social
and moral degeneration that Australia would have suffered in the
years following the decision eventually increased to such
overwhelming levels that its collapsed mass tore a hole through
space-time into the past, and anti-videogame activist Jack Thompson’s
controversial “portal to Hell” theory.
Australia’s future is uncertain. Reversing the decision allowing
R18+ games is impossible, since both Parliament and the Australian
Classification Board ceased to exist with the dissolution of the
Commonwealth of Australia as a sovereign state after the fall of the
capital city Canberra to the bloodthirsty armies of Lord Colossus the
Despoiler- formerly Duane Harris, assistant manager of a recently
closed GAME Australia location in the Canberra suburbs- on June 20th.
The entire country is now under a strict blockade maintained by an
enormous international naval task force, rumored to include the
entire US Third Fleet. In a recent press conference, US President
Barack Obama insisted that the ships are there solely to render aid
to an American ally and “have absolutely nothing to do with any
rumors involving supposed expansionist warlords, a ferocious race of
rapidly breeding radioactive mutant kangaroo-men who have already
made beachheads in New Zealand and Indonesia, or alleged battles in
the Tasman Sea that are classified and didn’t happen anyway where
one or more American nuclear aircraft carriers was destroyed by an
orbital ion cannon that doesn’t exist because the army of vaguely
Abrahamic techno-religious fanatics that controls it doesn’t exist
either. So just drop it already.”
Critics of violent or sexual content in videogames have now gained
considerable credibility. The most prominent is former New South
Wales Attorney-General Greg Smith, who had been one of the principal
opponents of allowing the release of R18+ games in Australia and
managed to escape the country via Sydney Airport just hours before
the city fell to a cannibalistic horde of New South Welshmen dressed
in cloaks of flayed human skin and The Witcher 2: Assassins of
Kings promotional T-shirts.
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June 27th: In Adelaide, the new Parliament of the State of
Victoria gathers for its first legislative session since its
“reorganization” on June 24th. Issues facing the new Parliament
include the poor condition of the State’s road system, public
health problems related to widespread cannibalism, and the ongoing
controversy over whether the remains of the previous Parliament
should be displayed on pikes as a warning to outsiders or simply
devoured.
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Now widely hailed as a visionary, Smith has been proposed as a
possible prime minister for an interim government-in-exile. He is
reportedly holding meetings with the government of the United
Kingdom, the United States, and the alpha males of the packs of feral
humanoids who dominate northern Queensland about a possible joint
military expedition to retake the country.
In a speech shortly after his escape, Smith said, “At last, do
you understand? People claim that censorship of games is
unjustifiable and old-fashioned. Tell that to a mother who’s lost
her child because his friends started fooling around with real guns
after playing Grand Theft Auto. Tell that to the
hundred-kilometer wall of human torsos that’s encircled Brisbane
since the city was conquered by an army of loincloth-clad barbarians
and renamed ‘South Goroshire.’ Tell that to someone whose entire
hometown was massacred by thousands of pale, bloodthirsty maniacs who
were out ‘grinding’ for human heads to build a five-story pyramid
of skulls on the Melbourne Cricket Ground honoring their dark god
Namira, Daedric Prince of insects and ancient darkness. They
understand the importance of this issue, I assure you.”
