House of the Dead: Overkill in Trouble Down Under

If you’ve got a Wii and haven’t yet picked up House of the Dead: Overkill, I suggest you do. After all, who doesn’t like shooting zombies with a friend? Australians, that’s who.

To be more specific, an Australian parents’ organization isn’t happy with the MA15+ rating awarded to the game by the country’s Office of Film and Literature Classification. Angela Conway, Director of Pro Family Perspective told the Melbourne Herald-Sun she was concerned about the level of “sexually aggressive violence” and “aggressively violent language”.

The game recently broke the Guinness World Record for most swearing in a video game with 189 instances of the word “fuck”. Having played the game myself, I’m not surprised that this is a record!

By means of comparison, Wikipedia has a list of films that most frequently use the word “fuck”. HotD: Overkill would sit in the lowly 50′s, were it a movie and not a game. At the top of the list is Fuck, a documentary on the word itself, featuring 824 uses – the equivalent of 8.86 per minute. Unsurprisingly, the Australian ratings board awarded the film with a classification of R18+.

HotD: Overkill could not be awarded with the same rating however, because MA15+ is the highest possible for games. Many games that would be awarded an 18 in the UK are subject to censorship in Australia, in order to keep the rating down.

Conway is calling for a review of the level of violence allowed by the MA15+ classification. I suggest that instead she lobbies for games to take their place alongside films in Australia, with an extension of the ratings system up to R18+. Many games that are not suitable for 15-year-olds are perfectly fine in the hands of law-abiding adults, and the rating should reflect that. HotD: Overkill is an 18 in the UK, so why not in Australia?