The Australian media must be having an extremely slow news day amongst all those war causalities, carbon taxes and beef trade scandals that have been clogging up the airwaves all day and, as usual, have turned to bagging out the world of video games.
This time, Dead or Alive: Dimensions for Nintendo 3DS is in their lazy sights as The Sydney Morning Herald (Fairfax), among others, have label the 3D fighter as a “child porn game”. The allegations come despite the title being rated by the Australian Classification Board – a Government run body – as “PG” with a “mild violence and sexualised gameplay” warning. The articles seem to point at two of the characters as being described as under 18 years old, coupled with the fact that the game allows players to take photos of the characters in various poses and costumes somehow equals “child porn”.
A similar claim was made by the media in Sweden last week which possibly lead Nintendo to pull the game from it’s scheduled release. Nintendo have not released a statement regarding it’s decision, which also affected the release of the game in Norway and Denmark.
But as anyone who has actually played the game will tell you, the characters in the game are hardly ‘children’. Were it not for a small description only viewable in “Arcade Mode” of the characters ‘stats’ (which include age, fighting style and blood type) one would be hard pressed to determine the age of any of the characters.
The Australian Classification Board claims they have not had any requests to review their decision on the title, as for Nintendo Australia their stance is clear;
“The game contains a wide variety of fictional characters which depict Japanese style cartoon images some of which are female fighters. This is not classified as child porn,”
But the allegations are starting to flood the internet – even reaching as far as Wikipedia in what appears to be record speed.
What do you think of Dead or Alive: Dimensions? Are you offended by it’s contents? Do you think it should be banned? Or is the Nanny State syndrome that Australia seems to all too happy to embrace getting out of hand? Are you going to buy it before it gets banned due to these stupid stories?
[Opinion]
