Well said. As a possible alternative to encouraging Mr Atkinson to move on, the Queensland Government is considering allowing "refused classification" games to be considered as R18+ within that state. There is a e-petition available here: http://www.parliament.qld.gov.au/view/EPetitions_qld/CurrentEPetition.aspx?PetNum=1346&lIndex=-1

The associated wordage is:

Queensland residents draws to the attention of the House that the Classification of Computer Games and Images Act 1995 is currently out of step with the wishes of the electorate. Your petitioners, therefore, request the House that it be amended to permit computer games to receive the R18+ classification when they have been refused classification under the Commonwealth Act.

This might be a shorter term solution if they could make it work - head up to Qld for a weekend of sunshine and some grownup videogame purchases. Kinda like Canberra and porn...

Obligatory quote:

"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the program, so if you write the program as cleverly as you can, by definition, you won't be clever enough to debug it. "

You have to be very careful with sonic systems and creatures like bats and flying foxes. There are arguments afoot here in Australia that many sonic systems are waayyyyyy overpowered, causing bats to freak out and drop their young, or fall straight out of the sky and hurt themselves. Although technically this is a deterrent, it isn't really a good thing for the bats, which is the main point of the system. It might be like trying to keep humans away from an area by blasting our optic nerves with a near-blinding psychedelic lightshow and being a little miffed when the human falls over backwards in shock, tumbles down a hill and breaks their legs. Whoops.

Well said. An additional important point (IMO) is that WoW is many games in one, all interconnected. Depending on your personal preference, you can spend time questing, pvping, raiding, crafting, building faction reputation, trading on the auction house, doing achievements or even metagaming with item stat spreadsheets and talent combinations.

All of these mini-games give rewards that help other mini-games. If you spend the time building up your crafting skills, you can make weapons or armor, and that helps with raiding. Some achievements give flying mounts, which make questing and gathering faster and easier.

The interconnectedness is another level of design magic, I think. Don't like pvp? Knock over those dungeons. Don't like raiding? Quest away. Plus, when players are sick and tired of raiding, they can spend a few hours in the arena, or just toddle around doing some quests and earning some gold.

It's as if in real life, when you were sick of playing football with your friends, you could go home and chop wood so that next time your football skills would be a little bit better.

Let me guess, you a have a friend named Tyler Durden?

That's not a bug, that's a RIAA-approved feature!