New games legislation: written by the uninformed, influenced by lobbyists

Minister for Home Affairs, Brendan O'Connor, today released the proposed Guidelines for the introduction of Australia's new adult category for computer games. The release has something of a triumphalist air about it but the reaction from the games community, which has been waiting over ten years for this to happen, is muted to say the least. Why? Have unelected, moral-outrage, lobbyists really influenced government policy?

Those who have been following the argument, will note how a large chunk of the release is spent placating the hysterical, ultra-conservative family groups who have railed at the notion all along. It says,
The amendments reflect concerns expressed by the public, stakeholders and governments about the draft Guidelines.
Bans on violence, sexual violence and drug use have been strengthened at all levels.
"Games with high impact violence that is, in context, frequently gratuitous, exploitative and offensive to a reasonable adult will not be permitted in the R 18+ category," Mr O'Connor said.
"And I want to make it clear that sexually explicit games, or games with very frequent and unduly repetitive strong and realistic violence, will not be classified under the MA15+ category."
This may be dismissible as politics and paying lip service to the think-of-the-children brigade (actually the last part is very reasonable), but what of the legislation itself? Is it strong policy based upon rigorous research and does it demonstrate a strong understanding of the subject matter?
No. Not at all.
In fact I'd venture that it was written and discussed almost exclusively by people who don't regularly play modern video games and then subsequently passed to the outraged lobby groups for approval. If the latter didn't happen, it reads like their outraged allegations have been foremost on the legislators' minds.
For years, ultra-conservative, pro-censorship lobby groups have cited "research" which shows that playing video games is more harmful than other media. But when the lobbyists appear in mainstream media they typically get given a platform, soap box, some embellishing video/audio packages and are allowed to espouse their "research" unchallenged.
The problem is that just about every single piece of this research is... well... bollocks.
I've yet to see a single study that is a) scientific and b) compelling. I've seen many biased, try-hard articles which try desperately to sound scientific. But when they ignore all the glaring evidence to the contrary, or draw outlandish, partially-related conclusions from their results they lose every semblance of credibility.
If anyone wanted to do an actual scientific study, they'd have to get thousands of kids from all walks of life from all over the world and isolate each group into various subgroups which are then only allowed access to one type of media for some ten years or so.
Until then I'll just rely on my own scientific training and personal observations of playing video games with my friends for the past 30 years and with my nine-year-old son and his friends for the past few years. That is: there is no significant difference in playing games as watching violent films, TV shows, Nerf Guns, watching violence on the news, violent cartoons, Laser Tag, and running around playgrounds shooting each other with sticks.
A government literature review concurs that the "research" is not reliable, and yet the new guidelines shamelessly pander to unelected lobbyists.
For an unknown reason, the guidelines revolve around "impact". Games that have too much "impact" are to be banned. There is a spurious description of what "impact" is and how much is too much:
One eloquent phrase follows thusly, "Assessing the impact of material requires considering not only the treatment of individual classifiable elements but also their cumulative effect. It also requires considering the purpose and tone of a sequence."
This is followed by,
"Impact may be lessened where reference to a classifiable element is verbal rather than visual. For example, a verbal reference to sexual violence is generally of less impact than a visual depiction. Also, some visual impacts have less impact than others: for example, an incidental depiction may have less impact than a direct one. Some depictions in computer games may have less impact due to the stylised nature of computer generated images."
At no point anywhere are we told what is wrong with "impact". Imagine banning films because of impact? Who made this up? I've been playing games for thirty years and I've never once remotely had an issue with "impact". What evidence did the writer base this on? The global games and computer industry has striven for years for games to become like interactive cinematic movies. The more impact, the better.
I should reign myself in a bit here. To be fair, when dealing with kids, separating different content into different age ranges using impact can make sense. But the problem is that the new legislation is being formed because of the discussion about what adults are allowed access to in Australia...

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Nick Ross @'ABC'