So because some people don't/can't understand it, the argument has merit? I'd hope we were going for a higher level of reasoning than lowest-common denominator consensus.

To be honest, most of the gamers in that mindset are moving to the consoles, and I really don't have a problem with that. I have been enjoying the recent round of indy-style games immensely, and hope the trend continue.

Some of my favourite, non-graphically intense recent games:

• Alien Swarm
• World of Goo
• Braid
• Osmosis
• And Yet It Moves
• Plants Vs. Zombies

For 3d games, Half-Life 2's Source engine is the sweet spot. From then on, graphics have been good enough, and what makes a game "good" is the gameplay.

Well ... that's exactly what I meant! If R18+ is a lower, not an upper, limit then by definition there can't be anything Refused Classification.

I'm more pissed off at our government and society than pretty much anyone I know, yet where could I move? Every country seems to be fucked in their own special way

I believe the idea of an R18+ rating is that everything which is now considered "Refused Classification" just becomes "R18+" ... i.e. it's a lower, not an upper, limit to content

One effect of not having an R18+ rating means that there is immense pressure on the classification board to be very liberal with the 15+ rating, as companies spend millions of dollars making these games. This actually increases the chance of young kids seeing inappropriate content!

The trouble is, we've never really had any privacy - it's just been harder to find stuff out. Whereas you used to need a private investigator, you now just use the internet. Nothing really changed, just finding stuff out has (and will continue to get) easier to discover about people.

I don't really care about this too much - if the only obstacle to Bad Things happening is this some flimsy old-school notion of "privacy", we need to do some thinking.

Don't bet on it. I don't think Australia is intrinsically more inclined to being censored than other first-world, democratic countries - the majority of people are so scared of child porn trafficking that they will be OK with internet censorship as soon as their politicians find it politically convenient to bring it up.

Oh god ... this... 95% of the time I couldn't even work out who was in what position in the action scenes.

But, as you say, war DOES have a unique property that it makes it easy to justify development.

Yes, it would be great if we DIDN'T need war to get that. Many things would be great if human nature weren't what it is.

Check out this great essay (under the "Money Is Not Wealth" section). About the best explanation I have seen.

Why get annoyed at human nature? That seems ... self-defeating to me.

Piracy is a fact of life. If you don't want your game to be pirated, make it solely multiplayer through servers you control - but even then, bright people will crack your server protocol's and create their own implementations of them.

Really - if you don't want to get pirated, don't create copyright works!

I don't get why people single out THIS as a flaw like it won't be broken within a week of the game being released, and after that it's effectively as if it had ALWAYS had it!

Basically .. yes. The necessity for court proceedings means too many people know, and if it happened to a public figure it is too profitable for media outlets to ignore. Sad reality of the world we live in.

The trouble is - Valve have a history of putting out really really awesome games. They do this by meticulously honing every single detail to perfection. By forcing them to change the game, our censors have forced us to play a game that isn't as good as Valve tried to make it.

The sheer fucking ARROGANCE of the concept of a ratings board playing a game and then banning it is what I find the most disgusting. I don't want to play a 95% version of L4D2 because some people in my country decided that, while THEY weren't harmed from playing it, would DEFINITELY cause harm to others who can't help themselves.

It's not just bloodthirst - purely from a gameplay perspective, to have a good FPS you NEED a good visual response to a hit in order to be able to move to the next target. It's all part of that large bag of things that make a FPS "feel" right, along with things like acceleration speed and jump height. If you get the little details wrong, everything feels wrong.

Though, even if it WAS pure bloodthirst that made me want the game left as-is, why would that mean anyone in the country stop me from playing whatever the fuck I want? Leave me the fuck alone.