Age of the Geek

Australian For Outrage

     Australia.

     The land down under.

     An untamed outback where everything is poisonous and even the cutest critters would rip you in half if given the chance. A land where only the most rugged of the rugged can survive.

     They shave with machetes, they fish for sharks, and Fosters beer is their national currency. They don’t have time for any of our overly sensitive politically correct nonsense.

     Unless it’s about video games.

     Last week, Australia’s Target and Kmart retailers (both owned by the same Australian parent company, and neither affiliated with their US counterparts) removed “Grand Theft Auto V” from their shelves following a Change.org petition asking the company to withdraw the game due to “encouraging players to commit sexual violence and kill women.”

     Everything about this situation is stupid, starting with the fact that it is 2014 and we are still talking about “Grand Theft Auto.”

     This game has been generating controversy, and thriving on it, since 2001. Selling more than 150 million copies, it is one of the most critically acclaimed and financially successful video game franchises in history.

     And yet it remains the most controversial.

     In spite of its M for Mature rating, people have been screaming “Think of the children!” for nearly 15 years now. Everybody from Jack Thompson to Glenn Beck has decided that Grand Theft Auto will be the downfall of human civilization. (Or, at the very least, attempted to cash in on the people who believe such things.)

     It hasn’t stopped. Here we are, six games and 14 years after the first big GTA controversy, and people are still making petitions.

     And what a petition it is.

     “It’s a game that encourages players to murder women for entertainment,” the creator of the petition erroneously writes.

     The simple truth is that no game in the Grand Theft Auto franchise has ever “encouraged players to murder women.”

     Grand Theft Auto is an open world game. If you want to spend the entire game just cruising around in a car, obeying all the traffic laws and being careful to avoid hitting any pedestrians, you can do that. And if you want to go on a rampage through the city with a rocket launcher, steal a helicopter, and crash it into a building, you can do that.

     It “allows” you to kill women. It also “allows” you to kill men. Or not k ill anybody. Or kill everybody.

     Unlike the people behind this petition, the developers of Grand Theft Auto operate under the wacky notion that men and women should be treated equally.

     Now I’m typically as left wing as they come. I’ve certainly dedicated enough words in this column to pointing out the follies of those on the political right. But I’ll admit that there is a subsection on my side of the political spectrum that have gone completely off the deep end.

     These “Social Justice Warriors” have taken political correctness so far that it’s no longer sufficient to simply not buy anything they may find distasteful. They have to make sure nobody else can have it too.

     That this petition happened in Australia of all places is both stupid and yet not unexpected. In spite of their reputation for not being sensitive to the nonsense of us soft city folk, Australia has one of the most oppressively strict media regulations in the world. Video games are frequently either censored or banned outright by the government.

     “Saint’s Row IV,” another racy open world game in the same vein as Grand Theft Auto, was banned for several months before the developers could edit the game enough to get past Australia’s censors. The offending content was a mission involving aliens and a certain kind of probing common to abduction stories.

     Alien probing also caused trouble when “South Park: Stick of Truth” tried getting through the censors. The creators of that game responded by replacing any offending content with the image of a crying koala.

     “Grand Theft Auto V,” was not censored by the government. The game made it through one of the strictest media regulators in the world and that still wasn’t good enough for some people.

     Which brings us to the last, and probably dumbest part of this whole story. From what I’ve written, one might think that “Grand Theft Auto V” is a new title. It is not.

     Next-gen ports of the game put it back into the spotlight, but the game itself was released in September of 2013. It made more than $1 billion in its first three days of sales, making it the fastest selling entertainment product in history.

     Australia’s Target and Kmart retailers were more than happy to pull such an offensive game from their shelves, but only after it had already been on their shelves for more than a year. It’s an empty gesture at best and downright hypocritical at worst.

     I’d like to think that this kind of nonsense wouldn’t happen here in the states, but it’s becoming more and more plausible. Video games in particular have become ground zero for a culture war between the outrage junkies on the far, far, far left and everybody else.

     Travis Fischer is a news reporter for Mid-America Publishing and must be getting old if he's arguing with the left.