I wrote a short and sweet e-mail to Mr. Atkinson regarding his stance on the matter, and he responded to me with a form letter that was also sent out to other Australians who contacted him (credit to a redditor who scanned and uploaded this copy).

The letter essentially quoted a bunch of the same old tired statistics and was coupled with a healthy dose of Atkinson paranoia, logical fallacies and at the end, a rather roundabout way of saying “fuck you” to gamers Australia-wide.

I wrote a response, which is below, and here.

The Hon Michael Atkinson MP

11th Floor
45 Pirie Street
Adelaide SA 5000

Thank-you for your response to my e-mail concerning the lack of an R18+ classification for video games. It is certainly refreshing to see that an MP is willing to engage in discussion with individual members of the public, even if it is by form letter.

As your response has spanned several pages, I will quote the relevant section of your letter as I respond to it.

“Although some members are advocates of this classification, I believe other Attorneys- General, like me, reject it. Hitherto, Attorneys-General have not agreed to create an R. 18+ category for computer games. Other Attorneys-General who are opposed to introducing an R. 18+ classification for computer games are content to let me be the lightening rod for the gamers.”

If I were in your position, I would be quite annoyed. That aside, your belief that other Attorneys-General support your position is not verifiable by any publicly available information. Indeed, most news reports seem to put the blame for the lack of a discussion paper squarely on your shoulders. There are many, many references to this online, but the most important I think is a direct quote of Victorian Attorney-General Rob Hulls; “I fully support there being consultation on this issue, but ultimately SCAG is waiting for the South Australian attorney to agree to consult on the matter.”

“[...] With people travelling so readily between States and Territories, a State-based classification coding system would be unworkable and useless [...]”

I agree, the only way to properly introduce the rating is nationally through the OFLC.

“I am baffled and worried about why proponents of R. 18+ games are putting up their hands and saying ‘Give us more cruel sex and extreme violence!’”

This is the crux of the argument, and I think the major point of contention between yourself and gamers such as myself. The point of having an R18+ classification is not to allow access to explicit content, the point is to enable adults to make their own decisions about what is and is not suitable for themselves and their children.

In your letter, you go on to cite many examples of games that have been refused classification on the grounds of containing extreme violence or explicit sexual content. The examples cited are relevant to this discussion in an ancillary fashion, but to debate the validity of each and every game between yourself, myself, and the Australian public is obviously not a workable model. The main point of contention as I mentioned earlier is not one game in particular, it is the ability for adults to decide for themselves what games they want to play.

“[...] These are all activities that are illegal for individuals in the real world so why ask governments to give people the right to do them virtually?”

Why ask governments to give people the right to watch films which contain illegal activity, or read books which contain illegal activity? It’s a rhetorical question, and you’re avoiding the issue by posing it.

“Given this data, I cannot fathom what State-enforced safeguards could exist to prevent R. 18+ games being bought by households with children and how children can be stopped from using these games once the games are in the home. If adult gamers are keen to have R. 18+ games, I expect children would be just as keen.”

Your inability to understand is a common theme in your stance on this issue. Here’s an easily enforced safeguard: require proof of age for purchase of games rated R18+. It works for alcohol, cigarettes and everything else, so why not games?

“Access to electronic games, once in the home, cannot be policed and therefore the games are easily accessible to children. If adults think they can devise a lock-out system to defeat children, tell ‘em they’re dreaming.”

Replace the words “electronic games” with anything else (some examples: drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, pornography), and one is lead to ask, whose responsibility is it to protect children from explicit material? You’ve already answered my question:

“It is up to parents and responsible adults to ensure a game is appropriate for a minor whatever age he or she is.”

All modern gaming systems have parental control safeguards in place that allow the restriction of games operation on the device. It is possible to restrict a particular system, using a password, from playing games which are outside a parent-defined safe range. All of these systems require escalation to the relevant customer support agents to have “forgotten” parental control passwords reset (I.e., the child trying to circumvent the system would have to go to some lengths). This nullifies your assertion that parental controls are useless.

These systems are easy to use and setting them up is straightforward. There is no reason at all for parents not to make use of these systems if they are concerned about the material their children are able to access while playing electronic games. More to the point, introduction of an R18+ rating should have absolutely no effect on children what-so-ever. The Australian gaming public cannot understand how you are so ignorant of this fact. By definition, a person over the age of 18 is not a child, therefore the introduction of such a rating will have no effect upon children, as they are not legally allowed to view the material.

What happens if the safeguard does fail? You’ve answered that question:

“It is up to parents and responsible adults to ensure a game is appropriate for a minor whatever age he or she is.”

A parent intervening in their child’s entertainment is normal; indeed it is expected of every responsible parent. You trying to govern in such a way as to protect the few children of irresponsible parents at the liberty of adults is unfair. “One bad apple spoils the cart” is an extreme oversimplification of the issue.

“What the present law does is to keep the most extreme material off the shelves. It is true that this restricts the adult liberty to a small degree, however, I am prepared to accept this infringement in the circumstances.”

Once again we touch upon the crux of the argument: this is not about granting access to explicit material, it is about allowing adults to make their own decisions. You say that you are prepared to accept this infringement upon the liberty of an adult in order to protect children, despite the fact that this discussion and its potential outcome has no relevance at all to children.

“[...] There may be games some people consider too violent for M.A. 15+ but the solution is not to create a classification to permit even more violent games in Australia. [...]”

This kind of blanketing of the ratings system does not serve the best interests of parents or young children. I would say, and many would agree with me, that the OFLC having to shoe-horn games into a smaller number of classification categories would only serve to make decisions more difficult which would lead to a higher rate of poor decisions. Essentially, games which should receive an R18+ style rating may indeed be passed as MA15+ even though there are elements of said games which are not suitable for this rating. An example recently discussed is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2: during one scene the player takes on the role of a terrorist who is participating in an attack upon a commercial airport and has the option to kill innocent civilians. The fact that killing civilians is not required to fulfill the mission objectives is relevant, but despite that, this type of gameplay scenario really is better suited to adults.

“It is up to members of the Classification Board to apply the Guidelines correctly and not to try to defeat the Guidelines because they disagree with the outcome of the deliberations of elected officials in a democratic rule-of-law society.”

Your lack of confidence in the OFLC is well-known after your interview with the Peter Mares of the ABC recently. Your approach to this is confusing. You say that the OFLC does not make correct decisions, as you admitted that the MA15+ rating of Modern Warfare 2 was inappropriate. Your criticism of the OFLC is unfounded: it is similar to asking a carpenter to produce a smooth wooden surface without using any high-grit sandpaper, or asking a painter to draw fine lines without a fine-tipped brush. Without the correct tools, neither the OFLC nor the carpenter and painter can do their job properly. Your argument here is circular: ‘the OFLC makes incorrect decisions with the current ratings system, therefore the OFLC will continue to make incorrect decisions with a new ratings system’. You are committing a logical fallacy.

You mentioned in your letter that recently the game Left 4 Dead 2 was given an RC rating. A resubmitted version in which much of the violence and gore was removed has been approved by the OFLC at MA15+. Do you know that the majority of Australian gamers who play this game today are actually playing the RC version? This has been achieved using two popular methods: buying the overseas version (typically with a credit card, so under 18′s need not apply), or, using a small computer programme to modify the game to enable the restricted content. This programme was created by an Australian gamer who was unhappy with the OFLCs decision and wanted to get the “full” version of the game. Any child with five minutes to spare can download this programme and enable the banned version of the game. What is my point? My point is that parents who made their decision about buying Left 4 Dead 2 for their children based on the rating MA15+ have done so under a false pretense provided for them by OFLC; the OFLC has failed in this instance.

You repeatedly contradict yourself.

“[...] I am particularly concerned about the impact of this extreme content on children and vulnerable adults. […]

But then you go on to state:

“It is up to parents and responsible adults to ensure a game is appropriate for a minor whatever age he or she is.”

So, which is it? Can adults make decisions for themselves or not? Please note that “adults” and “parents” are not mutually exclusive groups as your language seems to imply.

“I am next up for election in March, 2010. The State District I represent is called Croydon. I would welcome advocates of R. 18+ computer games testing public acceptance of my policy by standing a candidate against me in that general election. I think you will find this issue has little traction with my constituents who are more concerned with real-life issues than home entertainment in imaginary worlds.”

The Australian public is rising to your challenge. A group called “Gamers4Croydon” is in the process of establishing a competing candidate for this very election. Frankly, I am appalled by your lack of candour. Attempting to trivialise the discussion makes an example of your ignorance; summarising your “reasoned and considered” position with one of the most ignorant and illogical statements I’ve yet seen made on this topic only serves to bolster the arguments against your position.

You have demonstrated several times in this letter your lack of understanding of the subject at hand. Let’s take a look at the language you’ve used throughout: “I believe”, “I am baffled and worried”, “I expect”, “I imagine”, “I cannot fathom”, “To my mind”, etc. This type of language indicates that you are following your personal beliefs which I have shown to be created through partial erroneous thought. Worryingly, your use of terms which directly indicate your lack of understanding are also common. If you really have so little comprehension of the topic, then how is it that you can consider yourself suitable for the position of advising on it?

Not only are your arguments logically flawed, your evidence is dubious at best. There have been so many studies conducted on the effect of violent games on children and young adults with none conclusively proving anything on either side of the argument. Your platform stands entirely upon a single study of dubious nature.

I sincerely hope that the Gamers4Croydon group are successful and the next election in the seat of Croydon sees you removed from office. Whatever the outcome of the election, your views as expressed in this correspondence and in news media are outdated and narrow-minded and your methods of enforcing said views are ham-fisted at best.

Yours sincerely,

An excerpt:

Daniel_K:

We are aware that you have been assisting owners of our Creative sound cards for some time now, by providing unofficial driver packages for Vista that deliver more of the original functionality that was found in the equivalent XP packages for those sound cards. In principle we don’t have a problem with you helping users in this way, so long as they understand that any driver packages you supply are not supported by Creative. Where we do have a problem is when technology and IP owned by Creative or other companies that Creative has licensed from, are made to run on other products for which they are not intended. We took action to remove your thread because, like you, Creative and its technology partners think it is only fair to be compensated for goods and services. The difference in this case is that we own the rights to the materials that you are distributing. By enabling our technology and IP to run on sound cards for which it was not originally offered or intended, you are in effect, stealing our goods. When you solicit donations for providing packages like this, you are profiting from something that you do not own. If we choose to develop and provide host-based processing features with certain sound cards and not others, that is a business decision that only we have the right to make.

Although you say you have discontinued your practice of distributing unauthorized software packages for Creative sound cards we have seen evidence of them elsewhere along with donation requests from you. We also note in a recent post of yours on these forums, that you appear to be contemplating the release of further packages. To be clear, we are asking you to respect our legal rights in this matter and cease all further unauthorized distribution of our technology and IP. In addition we request that you observe our forum rules and respect our right to enforce those rules. If you are in any doubt as to what we would consider unacceptable then please request clarification through one of our forum moderators before posting.

Phil O’Shaughnessy
VP Corporate Communications
Creative Labs Inc.

Forum Moderator
Creative Labs

Essentially, Creative has a bad history of customer support. Their driver packs typically provide less features than are advertised. Whenever a new operating system comes along (or in my case, even a new service pack for an existing operating system), Creative throw their hands in the air and shout “no!” — they refuse to support older products on new operating systems. At all.

Some of you might say, “fair enough” — but that’s not entirely the issue here. A forum member, Daniel_K, was packaging and releasing — for free — to the public updated driver packs that as I understand it were created using chopped-up existing driver packs. This was all fine and dandy until of course Creative stepped in and instructed Daniel_K to discontinue this activity, as apparently it was a breach of Creative’s copyrights.

It’s absolutely ridiculous; but you don’t need me to tell you that. You can read the thread here.

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Seeing as I’ve re-installed Windows (see previous post), I’ve needed to re-install all my drivers. This has been relatively easy, as everything on my motherboard is taken care of by a single installer from nVidia, and my video card is taken care of by another single installer file, both of which are easily accessible from the nVidia website.

However, Creative on the other hand don’t make things so easy. I have the pleasure of owning a Creative Sound Blaster Live! OEM, a sound card that apparently doesn’t exist in any driver package that Creative distributes from their website. Even though when I input the model number, SB0220, it tells me what my card is, and what driver I need, when I download the driver and try to run it, I get an error message saying something along the lines of:

Setup could not detect any Sound Blaster Audio card on your system.

Please ensure that your Sound Blaster hardware is properly installed before running this Setup program.

Setup will now exit.

Not only that, but using Creative’s autoupdate site is about as much help. None. It detects that I have a Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 card, lists the driver version as being very old, and promptly informs me that no software updates are necessary because I already have the latest version.

A big FUCK YOU to Creative, who DO NOT supply software for this sound card. Sure, it’s old, and sure, it costs $35 for me to go out and buy a NEW Sound Blaster Live! that does the exact same job, but how about I don’t simply because I SHOULDN’T FUCKING HAVE TO! AND FUCKING CREATIVE SHOULD SUPPLY THE PROPER FUCKING DRIVERS!

The driver version I managed to install from DriverGuide.com is 5.12.01.0252; this version is too old for me to install the Creative Play Center so I can configure my speakers properly. However, when I try to install any of the driver update packs, they all tell me that I don’t have any Creative Sound Blaster cards installed. At all.

Yet, I somehow managed to install some version of the drivers, those being a hackjob set I found on DriverGuide.com. I think they’re taken from the original installation media, but I can’t be sure. They do give me sound, but it’s pretty shitty. I bet ten bucks that I can’t get 3D or any kind of surround working, but I’ll see soon, when I install Counter-Strike later.

Update:

Wow! OMG! I found some drivers that have allowed me to update the version to 5.12.1.0290, the version that the latest driver patch says the drivers need to be before it works, however, guess what? NONE OF THE SOFTWARE I’VE DOWNLOADED FROM THE CREATIVE WEBSITE CAN DETECT THAT I HAVE A CREATIVE SOUND CARD INSTALLED! EVEN WITH THESE “UPDATED” DRIVERS THAT I’VE FOUND! HOLY FUCKING SHIT! I HATE YOU CREATIVE!

Update Two:

FINALLY I GOT IT WORKING! I was able to download an ISO of the original installation media for the SB0228 and SB0229 cards, slightly different from my SB0220, but IT WORKED! And it was all possible due to the dedication of the users over at the Creative forums and this thread in particular, where you will find a link to this site where you will find the original installation CDs for the Sound Blaster Live! and various other Creative products. So hopefully this rant of mine can help others in future who are having trouble installing their old Creative sound cards!

I’ll just put a few keywords here for Google: sound blaster live install driver oem original media trouble error