Computer game/child porn news article

I read this in the news and thought it was crazy enough to share:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/06/01/3232865.htm

So there's a Nintendo game that is not being marketed in Sweden because of concerns it would be considered child pornography under Swedish law. It features three female characters "described as being under 18" years old, and the player can look up their skirts and take photos.

Yet the same game is for sale in Australia with a PG rating. (PG stands for "parental guidance", which means it has mild content and can be purchased by anyone.) The only difference in the Australian version of the game is that the age of those three female characters has been removed, so they now have no age.

So it could seem that according to Nintendo and the Australian Classification Board, the way to get around any child porn concerns is to remove the child's or character's age.

For goodness sake! I really wish authorities and people alike would stop being so hysterical about this kind of thing. It really gives me very little faith in the human race.

Won't somebody please think of the poor indeterminate age panty-pixels, lecherously violated all day long, GPU-cycle after cycle, LCD-dot after dot...
...bit by bit...
...bump-map after bump-map...

EDIT:
Wait.



Okay... I'm sorry, WHAT. This is child-porn? Okay... because? The ages of characters is described as under 18?

Right.
So to play devil's advocate here, would you be okay with REAL child-porn as long as the ages of the characters were described as above 18? Because hey, take a look at these virtual characters and tell me exactly what the problem is.

And yet if we want to look at an 18-year-old girl in a school uniform and with her genitals shaved to make her look prepubescent then that's perfectly fine.

This overreaction on the part of authorities really is as silly as them clamping down on children eating trifles that contain no alcohol whatsoever, simply because trifles normally contain some alcohol.

And another thing.

The controversy around Julian Assange should indicate that some of the laws in Sweden in this field, are _not reasonable_.

Alevi wrote:Because hey, take a look at these virtual characters and tell me exactly what the problem is.

Well I don't know about anyone else, but I have a problem with the purple-haired girl's costume and its lack of breast support. Any physical activity and she's going to be bouncing all over the place, not to mention the chance she could stretch connective tissue and suffer permanent sagging. Silly ageless girl.

Nothing that can't be fixed in 3D Studio Max or Maya

EDIT:
Also nobody tell Platypus about somethingawful dot com's review of awful hentai games

Like ever

Seriously, like others have stated, it sounds like they need to realize the real problem here. And it has nothing to do with being able to look up their skirts or their ages. Just look at their costumes and their breasts: I doubt any parent that wouldn't want their kids exposed to these kinds of images would give a dime about the character's ages, given the depiction of their revealing 'clothes' which might as well not be there in some situations. You can even see protruding nipples, so if they're worried about looking up their skirts making it any worse, they just need to realize the reality of the situation first.

Also....if this is able to be considered child pornography over there, I'd HATE to see what else they could consider child porn. Really? I guess the highly understated Rule of Rose wasn't marketed there, either.

EDIT2:
Well at the very least I learnt what "trifles" are. Sounds interesting, I may give it at try making one.

The game has now been pulled from the shelves: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/06/10/3241351.htm
It will have to reclassified for the Australian market. We don't yet have an R18+ (Restricted to adults only) classification for video games, so it's quite possible this game will no longer be sellable in Australia.

I love the Nintendo PR Manager stating: "They're not listed as underage, they're listed as no age." Another version of the game distributed overseas shows that the three characters in question are aged either 16 or 17, so I think it's hard for Nintendo to argue that the characters are not underage. Clearly they were designed as such, and blanking-out their age doesn't change this.

So for the latest in panty-perving female fighter games, Aussies (as well as the Swedes) may have to go overseas.