Earlier today, Australia's largest video game retailer, EB Games, delivered forty-six thousand submissions to the federal Attorney-General's department supporting their recent discussion paper around creating an R18+ classification for video games. EB Games collected submissions in all of their stores across Australia, as well as online, and in just two weeks it collected the staggering number of favorable statements advocating such a classification for 18+ video games.

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I wanted to take a moment to post an update on the issue I wrote about earlier regarding Valve's swear-word filter on their forums. A short time after I posted the original article, the filter itself was edited and "gay" was removed; unfortunately this appears to be a Pyrrhic victory.

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"With Rockstar Games releasing The Ballad of Gay Tony, will Valve ever include a gay character in any of their games?" That was the gist of a thread created on the official Steam forums several weeks ago. Innocuous question or not, however, the thread itself was quickly locked and hidden from public view by one of Valve's volunteer moderators, a fate that almost every other discussion of LGBT topics on the official Steam forums ends with, as well.

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South Australia's Attorney-General Michael Atkinson has long stood in the way of efforts to gauge public opinion on whether or not Australia should have an R18+ classification for video games, but finally it looks like the federal government has decided to take things into their own hands. Residents of Australia can submit a comment to the Commonwealth government on the topic of the R18+ classification, the first time that public opinion has been solicited directly on this topic.

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