Australia Just Says “No”

To videogames about graffiti.

I’m still amazed that this even happened. Usually it’s countries like Oz, America and Canada that lead the pack with an easy-going, tolerant, fairly liberal attitude, while Singapore acts like a prudish stick in the mud.

This time around, Singapore is allowing a game, called Mark Ecko’s Getting Up to pass its censorship standards and enter stores, while Oz has given the game an adult rating, effectively–if not technically–banning it from the country, since while adult rated games are legal, stores as a matter of policy don’t sell them. I’m still trying to figure out what made a country as progressive as Oz suddenly decide that this game was too corrupting an influence. Meanwhile, Singapore, which has been trying to promote creativity anyway it can–including holding graffiti contests and exhibits–can’t shy away from legitimizing the game, but ironically, the game itself is about toppling government, which falls under the very loose censorship laws here and could potentially make it proscribed material, in the same way that Naked Lunch was illegal here for many years.

Man, things are getting all topsy turvy. Singapore more liberal than Australia, I never in a million years would have imagined it…