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Ban This Game! (http://cokane.com/games/banthisgame/files/BanThisGame.zip) - Windows demo, 4.5Mb.

A game about censorship in Australia.

(http://cokane.com/games/banthisgame/screenshots/screenshot01.jpg)

It's pretty much finished. Let me know if it's too hard, if it's fun, if there's any bugs, if there's anything cool I should add to it. I'll be releasing it for Windows and Mac in the next few weeks.

My top score is 28 - can anyone can beat that?

The gameplay mechanics don't say much, but I'm glad you made this as a protest against the fucking police state that Australia is becoming. Best of luck to everybody down under.

Hi monoRAIL,

It's pretty hard to comment on the game itself, since it's a pretty standard hand-eye coordination game.  Given that this is the case, I'll talk about the role that games can potentially play in political discourse.

Games have been used as a medium for political messages for quite a while now.  Ian Bogost has a good overview and discussion about this in his book "Persuasive Games" (ISBN 0-262-02614-7).  The conventional approach is to take an existing game (like space invaders) and to re-skin it to fit the political agenda of its maker.  This is the approach that's taken by your work.

Unfortunately, I feel that this approach does a disservice to the medium.  The strength of interactive media is that they involve the user and allow the audience to learn through direct experience of whatever the author is presenting.  By putting forth the censorship debate as a skill and action game, you fail to explore the nuances of the issues that are involved.

Why has the Australian government taken this stance?  What are the possible outcomes of their actions?  How can the citizens of Australia oppose it?  None of these questions are addressed by your work.  An alternate approach, for example, is to place the player in charge of the censorship office and to examine the implications of their actions, in a Sim City fashion.  One possible outcome of universal censorship is a chilling effect in Australian media.  Why not explore the consequences of censorship more deeply?

In any case, you didn't set out to make a government simulator, so let's look at the work at hand.  What does it accomplish?

• It paints the efforts of the govenment in a satirical and mocking fashion.
• It communicates a few tidbits of information to the audience via the end screen.
• It conveys the impossibility of censoring everything - some things inevitably get past the filter.  In other words, censoring art is like juggling multiple balls at once.

I feel that number 3 is a good use of the medium, because it communicates the message through the metaphor of rules.  Other elements in this work could have been done through a non-interactive medium, like a cartoon.  I doubt that it will convince anyone who's undecided about the issue, so at best it's a way to gather publicity.  It's not any worse than other political games out there, but it falls short of the great potential that interactive works have in influencing the political discourse.  If you're interested in a more in-depth analysis, I suggest that you read Persuasive Games.

P.S. I just noticed that the animals on the coat of arms are blindfolded.  Clever.

@Alex: Whooah. And all that I was gonna do was go "Huzzah!" and raise my beer mug to the OP ( Australian here and missing out on things, how'd ya guess?).

That... raises a rather good set of points. As a gamer in Australia, this issue strikes rather close. I say. That's a really, really good analysis of the game. I haven't actually gotten around to playing it, but it does appear to fit the points very well.

Oh, right. Forgot what I came here for.

Huzzah! :beer: Great that this place and the problems haven't been forgotten!

I didn't know the Australians were worse than the Germans with their game censorship. Scary.  :screamy:

no offense, but this kind of POLITICAL GAME is not really effective if the gameplay mechanics aren't in any way related to the thing you're trying to say. this is just a boring arcade game that's made more unbearable by a hamfisted and slapped on agenda.

Thanks very much for the feedback everyone.

I realise this is a very simplistic game and doesn't go into much depth into the actual details of the issue, but that is deliberate. There are 2 reasons for taking this approach:

Firstly, detailed and accurate social-issue games are invariably boring. Government simulators, eco-games, feed-the-world games, they're all rubbish games and nobody plays them unless they have to (ie students forced to play them in the classroom, or people who already work in the field).

Secondly, the impact of a social-issue game is not a result of people playing it, it is a result of people talking about it. My experience with Harpooned is that while many people hear about such games, very few actually play them. Harpooned's trailers have had about 85,000 views on YouTube, and it was shown on G4 TV (I'm guessing another 100,000 viewers right there) and featured on NineMSN's news frontpage (perhaps 50,000 thousand more hits) however, it has only been downloaded 20,000 times, and in the last year only 2,000 new high scores have been submitted.

So less than 10% of the people who learn about the issue go on to play the game.
That's ok with me, because nearly a quarter of a million people who knew nothing about whaling learned something about it by seeing Harpooned - I don't really care if they play the game. Even if only 1% of them go on to do something about it, that's a big impact.

Having learned that lesson I am making this a much simpler game. My objective here is really to expose this issue to the public who weren't aware of it, not to make a brilliant game. While it may seem cynical to manipulate the media like this, I think it's an effective tactic. I'm quite capable of making a good game (I made Go Beryllium) but that takes a LONG time, and making this game more detailed/accurate isn't necessarily going to make it more effective as an information broadcasting tool.


That is exactly the result I'm going for. If a newspaper or large game blog like TIGSource or Kotaku picks up this game and writes about it then my time will have been well spent.

I'm pretty sure Germany is still worse. For example, the Australian version of L4D2 has the gore toned down, but I've heard that the German version even has the guns replaced with low-res CS models.

Actually very few games are banned in Germany, and even those put on the index as being restricted can still be sold, just not to minors. The only things that will 100% get your game banned in Germany is using Nazi imagery outside of a historical context, or holocaust denial. Most publishers voluntarily tone down games for German release to increase sales by getting a lower rating.

http://mag-murphy.net/2008-10-29/video-game-censorship-in-germany-how-it-works-how-it-doesnt

Australia however has no R18+ rating for games, because one conservative Christian senator (Michael Atkinson) is blocking it. This means that ALL adult games are unrated, and therefore unavailable for sale. Leisure Suit Larry is illegal in Australia!

Being Austrian (i.e. right next to Germany and speaking the same language)  I'm well aware of the german system and i actually see more as a back door to censorship (which is in and of itself unconstitutional in Germany) than anything. Having a game indexed doesn't just mean you can't sell it to minors, it also means you can't advertise it or have it openly displayed in stores, which means a massive loss in sales. The German rating system is basically a way of blackmailing publishers into censoring their own games.

It's bad enough when those from overseas repeatedly make such mistakes, but you actually live here. whats your excuse?

Oh, by all means "Huzzah!"  I just think that it would be irresponsible to stop there.  I find the wanton censorship vile and distasteful, but that's disconnected from my critique of the game.  If the game was about holocaust denial, I would make the same points.  The question is not whether people like us agree with the game, but whether it achieves its goals.

It's true that games that set out to specifically be "educational" usually fail.  I think that this is a consequence of the makers being polemicists first and game designers second.  A game has to be compelling before it can be educational.

That's a good point.  After my post, I was thinking about Harpooned and how it compared to the current game.  I think that it's effective primarily because of the novely and shock factor.  I expect that this will decline as interactive media become more mainstream.

At the same time, you can get the game's entire message by just watching a video of it.  There's no reason to actually play the game.  It would be interesting if you'd see different numbers for a game that actually examines the issue closely.  Maybe not.

In that case, I think that it would be better to judge this as a media manipulation effort than a game.  What I have to say in this case is pretty irrelevant, since the future will show its success pretty clearly.  One difference between this and Harpooned is that Harpooned had a much more jarring visual style - with all the blood and whale giblets.  I wonder if this will affect how well it's picked up by the media.

That's very sneaky! That way it looks like the publishers are doing it voluntarily and the government avoids responsibility.

Alex - Thanks again for the detailed reply. The point about Harpooned being successful because of its shock value is very true. This game is unlikely to reach the same level of media exposure because it lacks that shock factor. I'm banking on the fact that the issue of game censorship and internet filtering is quite popular in the media at the moment - perhaps that will be enough for this game to cross over from the game/internet culture websites into the mainstream media. Also when I released Harpooned 2 years ago Twitter and Facebook weren't as big of an influence on people's lives. It will be interesting to see if those outlets have any effect on spreading this game.

Like you said though, the success of this kind of effort isn't clear until some time afterwards.

Movius - sorry, Minister Atkinson, or more precisely, Attorney General Atkinson. If you'd bothered to play the game you'd see that I got it right in the game's introduction  ;)

By the way, I forgot to mention that what you're trying to do is really neat.  Most people don't consider games to be a valid medium for political expression, so any work in the area is laudable.  if you keep up what you're doing, I think that we'll see some really interesting stuff in the future.

I know you got it right in the game. However this game just perpetuates the "bawww It's only one guy stopping my r18 games" myth and continues to ignore that this is obviously something that the ALP heirarch has sat down and discussed, coming to a conclusion of something like, "We will do nothing to relax video-game censorship laws and we can easily lay the blame on one guy in the safest seat in South Australia."

Every article/game/rant/video/whatever that takes the 'moar liek AtKKKinson amirite guise' view instead of attacking the Labor party itself and those in charge of it will only end up harming the anti-censorship cause in the long run.

Alex - thanks, this is only my 2nd 'social issue' game so I'm learning what works with the medium as I go.

Movius - I agree with you, it's an over-simplification to say it's just Atkinson, but you have to make some simplifications when you want to make a point quickly. However I did include Conroy and his insane internet filter in the same game, to illustrate that the Australian Labor party is censoring Australian media in many ways.