Game Buzz is a new weekly opinion column designed to take an irreverent look at one of the biggest news stories to break in the past week. Every Friday evening we’ll be bringing you another slice of reaction to topical gaming news, and inviting you to agree, disagree, shout assent, vent rage, scream and complain to you heart’s delight. This week we take a look at Michael Atkinson’s recent comments about ‘threatening’ gamers and the nature of ‘interactive media’.
The perpetual struggle of Australian gamers continued to roll slowly onwards this week with chief antagonist – South Australian Attorney General Michael Atkinson – labelling gamers as dangerous, violent and accusing them of loitering with intent.
“I feel that my family and I are more at risk from gamers than we are from the outlaw motorcycle gangs who also hate me and are running a candidate against me,” Mr. Atkinson said on ABC TV’s Good Game. “The outlaw motorcycle gangs haven’t been hanging around my doorstop at 2am. A gamer has.”
The attorney general has also alluded in interview to threatening letters posted through his letterbox, abuse in the streets, and bile-laden emails that brand him a paedophile for standing in the way of an R18 adult classification for video gaming in Australia. Although that last is undeniably a childish knee-jerk reaction, it’s hard to imagine the biker gangs he whom he refers simply passing over a floridly written, expletive-heavy note in the early hours of the morning. If you had any of them on your doorstep, you’d probably be facing glass projectiles, chains and a fire or two.
Michael Atkinson: Not a fan of door-to-door salesmen either
It should be noted that this isolated incident is practically a year old, and that with election week coming up Down Under it’s no real surprise that this has been trotted out and wildly embellished. Of course, Atkinson’s stance on the whole issue revolves around a series of seemingly-altruistic contradictions, that it’s all to do with protecting children and ‘vulnerable adults’, that the MA15+ rating encourages developers to be responsible and modify their content appropriately, and it all sounds like he (and, allegedly, a few other unnamed classification ministers that either don’t exist or are too nervous to come forward) is the last bastion of cultural sanity standing against a ravening horde of debauched gluttons for a bit of sensationalism.
