You'd have to be living under, or perhaps through some marvel of geological engineering, inside a rock, not to know that the upcoming co-operative zombie murder festival Left 4 Dead 2 was recently slapped with a ban by Australia's much-maligned and highly controversial Classification Board (formerly known as the Office for Film and Literature Classification).

Citing the game’s "realistic, frenetic and unrelenting violence" the Board refused it classification, which effectively makes it a crime to sell, import, possess, or even absent-mindedly daydream about the game inside Australia’s territorial borders. When making their decision, the Board noted that the game’s level of violence resulted in it being “unsuitable for persons under 18 years” and as such they had no choice but to ban it.

Just over a year ago the original Left 4 Dead stepped out of the graffiti-covered safe house and into the deserted streets of the Australian market, armed only with a shotgun, a flashlight and an MA15+ rating. So why, a year on, has the very same Classification Board which passed the original game, deemed to block the sequel - a sequel that has actually been rebuked by its most hardcore of fans for being too identical to the first one?


Well, we may never really know. Speaking to games.on.net, the Classification Board would not reveal whether or not Left 4 Dead 2 was reviewed by any of the same individuals who reviewed and classified the original Left 4 Dead. The Board’s spokesperson also would not speculate on any similarities between the acceptable original and its controversial sequel, saying only that “the Board classifies each computer game on a case by case basis”.

Though the Board refused outright to provide games.on.net with any specific examples of what changes would be needed to bring Left 4 Dead 2 down to an MA15+ rating, the publicly released text of the Board’s Decision Report reveals a particular beef with the game’s melee weapons system. Newly introduced in the sequel, characters can now engage in active melee combat with zombies, rather than just giving them the occasional pistol whipping or desperate rifle-butt bludgeoning.

Melee weapons available in Left 4 Dead 2 for your zombie-dismembering pleasure include crowbars, axes, frying pans and of course that favourite bane of the undead, the chainsaw. The Classification Board notes that these weapons cause “copious amounts of blood spray and splatter, decapitations and limb dismemberment”. Left 4 Dead 2 has also ramped up its arsenal of guns as well, which the board notes “can cause abdominal wounds which can reveal innards, or even cause intestines to spill”.

All of these factors, along with the frequency and unrelenting nature of the violence in Left 4 Dead 2, add up to create what is in the Board’s opinion, “a playing impact which is high”. High impact violence is of course the exclusive domain of the adult under Australian law, which judges that people 18 years of age or over are the only ones capable of handling the obviously intense experience.

The only problem with this system, of course, is that adults in Australia have no place in the computer games classification system. Since the highest possible rating for a computer game in Australia is MA15+, if a game contains material that cannot be played by a fifteen year old, then nobody can play it.

In recent years this strange system has been pushed more and more into the forefront of the Australian gaming public consciousness, as high profile titles continue to receive the galling slap of classification refusal. Sadly enough, a well-worn routine has been established in which game developers either appeal the decision and hope to get through the second time, or give in and make minor cosmetic changes to appease the Classification Board. Sometimes of course, they just give up altogether and write Australia off as a viable market, leaving those of us here pondering exactly how many copies of the game we could smuggle into the country inside our stomachs. The fact that these banned games can also be purchased easily over the Internet at stores such as Play-Asia.com also isn’t lost on most of Australia’s gaming populace.

Fortunately in this case Electronic Arts, the publishers of Left 4 Dead 2, announced that they would be appealing the decision. The Classification Board confirmed to games.on.net that an appeal had been lodged on the 25th of September, and that the appeal would be undertaken by the Classification Review Board, an entirely separate body to the Classification Board proper.

When refusing classification to Left 4 Dead 2, the Decision Report noted that a minority of the board believed the violence to be merely “strong” in playing impact, and therefore suitable for an MA15+ rating. We can only hope that the Classification Review Board agrees with this minority opinion, as developers Valve have not yet announced if they would be willing to make any alterations to the game (though they did admit that they were feeling “pretty bummed” about the whole thing).

With the game’s release date just under two months away, any substantive changes at this point in production would doubtless be difficult, and would most likely cause unnecessary delays. Australia has already raised the ire of the international gaming community once by forcing the incredibly high-profile Fallout 3 to clean up its drug-addled act. Can it really afford to do it again with Left 4 Dead 2? Can Australian gamers really afford to have “nanny state loser” added to the list of kangaroo and convict-related epithets directed at them across the series of tubes that is the Internet?

While we sit and wait for the results of the Classification Review Board’s decision, we cannot help but feel frustration at a ratings classification system riddled with inconsistency and confusion. With recent studies showing the average age of a gamer in Australia at 28, and with 91% of people supporting an R18+ classification for computer games, why must Australians continue to put up with a system which treats us all like fifteen year-olds? Hopefully something can be done about this and soon, or gamers in Australia may be forced to turn to good old-fashioned voodoo for their zombie fix this Christmas.

Tim Colwill is the name behind the site www.r18games.com.au, one of the leading forces in Australia lobbying for a classification system that treats gamers like adults. For more information about helping to get an R18+ rating for games in Australia, visit www.r18games.com.au.