Haven’t seen a crossover like this since Alien vs Predator!!

10 years ago today I registered the domain “darkgate.net” and started up this humble website.

Wow, that’s a long time… yet it seems like only yesterday I was racking my brain trying to come up with a domain name that sounded “cool” but wasn’t already taken. Then I stumbled upon “darkgate.net” and went “Bah, that’ll do”.

Wonder if it’ll still be here 10 years from now…

I keep reading this article over and over. It seems to be a fairly logical argument from a person who obviously doesn’t have any love for gaming (nor an irrational fear of it).

This particular paragraph really gets me, it’s something I hadn’t though of until this guy put it so plainly:

Indeed, it is curious that so many pro-status-quo arguments revolve around the impact on minors, as this implies scepticism of not just the proposal at hand, but the entire structure of the classification system. While the protection of children from disturbing and/or inappropriate content is indeed a valid consideration, the very purpose of classification and ratings categories is to serve this concern. The fact of a minor’s possession of a game that had been deemed inappropriate for his or her age range would not represent a failure in the guidelines; it would represent a failure in the application of the guidelines. A rejection of a classification category based on lack of confidence over the correct application of the criteria can only imply a rejection of classification schemes as a whole.

Surely, if people like Atkinson campaign against R18+ games because they don’t trust the system to stop these games from getting into the hands of minors, then their problem isn’t with the games… it’s with the classification system ITSELF.

They don’t trust the system, and if that is the case… we’re having the wrong argument.

On a side note, I noticed that Modern Warfare 2 has received an R18+ rating in every other country apart form Australia. Here, it got a MA15+ rating, but really/probably should have been banned in Australia because we don’t have an R rating.

But how can you tell the Australian retail games industry they won’t get the opportunity to sell the greatest selling game OF ALL TIME? All that revenue is going to go to overseas sites like amazon, dvd.co.uk and play-asia. You just can’t… so you give the game a MA15+ rating instead!

So now Mum is at the game store and little Johnny the teenager is begging her for Modern Warfare 2 since all his mates have it and it’s the most awesome game ever. She picks it up, reads “MA15+” on the label, and probably think’s it’s appropriate for little Johnny and pats herself on the back for being such a good parent.

Only in Australia.

Trying out a new wordpress theme. Looks a lot cleaner than the old one that I made. Like the white background, makes reading the text easier.

Although that’s not usually a problem since I don’t blog enough!

EDIT: OK, so I’ve spent most of the day editing the theme, making it work with the slurper and vice versa. Phew, so glad I’m not a web developer. I remember when CSS first became popular, I remember how awesome it was and I converted my site’s HTML to use it for just about all the “style” my site had. Now CSS just seems so complicated, it hurts my feeble brain!