The ZRC has good friends in Australia, and we want them to know we’re not trying to pick on their government specifically. However, the fact remains that the politics surrounding the Differently Animated in Australia are, remarkably, in many ways even *less* congenial than in the United States or Europe.

We’ve previously reported on the Aussie government’s prohibition against, and prosecution of the screening of a Zombie pornographic film here on the ZRC blog. Australia’s history with Anti-Zombie media is fairly well known, and it bubbles up occasionally from the general culture in odd places, like, say, car modification show making an Anti-Zombie deathmobile, to cite one example we’ve had trouble with in the past, in addition to the more usual things like Anti-Zombie movies.

So Australia has issues with the Undead, and absolutely does not want you to see a pornographic film about them. How do they feel about grotesque Anti-Zombie violence? They certainly have no problem with it on film, illustrating the obvious double standard well with a movie like ‘Undead‘ from 2003, for example.

Now they’re reinforcing that message by seemingly abandoning entirely their censorship of violent videogames, so long as that violence is directed at the Undead:

When a violent videogame actually gets a rating in Australia, it’s newsworthy. That’s pretty sad. What isn’t sad, however, is that Dead Island managed to pull off this feat, allowing Australian gamers to join the rest of the world in some delicious co-op zombie battering.

Dead Island nabbed an MA 15+, the highest age restriction in the country, for its “strong horror violence” and blood. It somehow managed to get the rating in spite of the fact that Left 4 Dead 2 required content editing to get a release.

Yes, a game where you literally hack the Differently Animated to bits is ok by the official censors, but not a movie in which a Zombie has sex.

This does apparently represent something of a change in policy, as recently as 2009 ‘Left 4 Dead 2′ required extreme editing to be sold in the country, based on, surprisingly, violence against the Undead, though what the censors objected to as much as anything seemed to be the notion of corpses lying on the ground, not the actual mayhem. Odd.

At any rate, the official Australian policy now seems to be: violence against the Differently Animated is ok, miscegenation is not.

How incredibly offensive.

Tags: Social Justice, Videogames

This entry was posted by John Sears on Friday, July 29th, 2011 at 5:50 pm and is filed under Zombie Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.