Silent Hill: Homecoming is the latest game to be refused classification by the Australian Classifications Board this year, and if what you read on some other 'game' sites is true, this is a sure sign of the start of the apocalypse. On quite a few sites there is varied and increasingly inaccurate information on how this is some massive deprivation of your liberty; many wording their articles in such a manner that it leaves the reader feeling that this is some kind of common occurrence (as opposed to 4 times this year).

I thought I'd take two seconds to be the (increasingly) lone voice of differing opinion on this issue and offer a few reasons why I'm happy that an R18+ classification does NOT exist in Australia.

It's a shame that a few games each year have to bear the brunt of the current environment that game censorship in Australia finds itself - indeed those games are actually fine and I have no issues with them - but in every system there are victims, and I'd personally rather the victim in this saga be a publisher than a child.

My issue with ratings comes from spending the last eight years managing and maintaining game servers and large game communities. The company I work for has probably been doing this longer than anyone and has had more exposure to the Australian game community than anyone else in the country, no question. This gives us some insight to how censorship is applied in your average Australian household. So here's the scoop on that: Generally it isn't applied, at all - not one bit.

The number of kids we've had to try and moderate on our services has been massive. This is playing games that are either M, or in the case of Counter-strike, MA rated games where clearly the child is too young for the game. That is to say, where the person has admitted to being under the age of 15, and the game is MA (which makes the game illegal for the person in question to purchase in Australia). Does the parent care? Probably doesn't even notice. Does the Game Retailer care? Probably doesn't even occur to them.

So the problem becomes this - If you introduce an R18+ rating into an environment where you have zero policing of laws, an ambivalent parent, and an un-sympathetic retailer who just wants to make their money and who doesn't have any repercussions when breaking the law - what happens?

While I'm all for an open society where adults can buy what they want - children absolutely must, at all costs, be protected. They cannot be protected in the above scenario. An R18+ classification cannot exist until the method by which games are sold is corrected to allow the correct application of existing classifications.

Its worth adding here, that I know not everyone agrees with me, hell even in our office here we all don't agree, as such this is my view not that of everyone that works here.