The Australian Sex Party has congratulated the federal government on releasing draft guidelines for the classification of R18+ computer games. Sex Party President, Fiona Patten, said that the move would bring Australia into line with other western democracies and stop large amounts of violence from being crammed into the MA15+ classification where young teenagers were currently accessing it.

More importantly, she said that the creation of this new category would have far reaching effects for censorship reform in Australia and could herald significant policy shifts within the current enquiry into the federal Classification Act being conducted by the Australian Law Reform Commission.

“Under the new draft guidelines, high level depictions of sexual activity will be allowed as long as they are simulated and not real, she said. “The vast majority of computer games are simulated and do not use ‘real’ or ‘actual’ footage from films or still images but the levels of fantasy and imagination are often way above what would normally be in an X rated film”.

The Apple dictionary definitions of ‘simulated’ are ‘reproduced by simulation’ and ‘not genuine’. Synonyms include ‘replicated’, ‘pretend’, ‘virtual’, ‘cyber-‘ and ‘computer-generated’. These definitions all clearly define the new R18+ computer games guidelines.

“If ‘simulated’ depictions of high level sexual activity could soon be legal in computer games, the government should consider amalgamating the two upper adult categories of R and X”, she said. “Simulated sexual depictions of penetrative intercourse are extremely real these days and with the use of enhanced CGI, Fractal Geometry and other simulated design programs, the differences between R and X will be merely academic and of little consequence to the majority of users of the two categories.”

She said that in the online environment, the difference between R and X ratings meant nothing as both of them required adult verification for access.

“Already adult actors are making their own erotic computer games to go alongside their films. It is completely insane to require that the simulated depiction be rated differently from the real one when they will look almost identical”.