Getting Picked On By The Government

Thursday ended up taking a turn for the strange when I got a call from the GameAxis editor who is currently IN FREAKIN’ JAPAN, because HE got a call from the MDA, otherwise known as the Media Development Authority of Singapore. In a nutshell, they are the censorship guys and are the ones responsible for making Playboy, Cosmopolitan (At least until 2004), Kill Bill Volume 1, and the Grand Theft Auto video game series illegal in Singapore. To make a long story short, a video game for the Xbox 360 called Saints Row was schedule to go on sale in Singapore because it had an “M-Rating” and then mysteriously failed to show up at retail outlets on the dates that said retailers had promised. When consumers asked why, the retailers told them that the MDA had banned the game. I made a post about this on the GameAxis blog when it seemed we had found a loophole. It seems that this kind of irriated the MDA since what they were telling retailers was not the case at all, and ended up with phone calls to GameAxis to first track down the editor, who then threw the ball at me, since I was the one that wrote the post. After being very logical and asking questions of the MDA rep (who, in all honesty, I think was expecting a cowed and subservient panic-stricken Singaporean, not a Canadian who told him, “okay, so explain this to me, ’cause it doesn’t make ANY sense…”) I was required to make a SECOND BLOG POST in order to make the MDA look better. Unfortunately the information they told me to relay does anything BUT make them look sensible and better.

Sigh… Bureaucrats… They really should expose themselves to reality once in a while then they might actually avoid embarrassing moments like this.