He is a TWAT.

Hell, I'm glad I live in Britain rather than Australia. Sorry, Aussies, but you have it in bad with your dictatorship wannabe government, but I hope you continue protesting 'til you win.

omg, how can this guy believe the words coming out of his own mouth? if someone cant differentiate between a video game and reality, that person is needs a pshchiatric evaluation. to cop out and use video games as a scapegoat for the decline of today's morals, values, and ethics is ludicrous. censorship is being wrongfully applied to video games with this guy at the helm of law in Australia.

So, according to this idiot, 1 - 2 out of every 100 people are likley to jump off a bridge believing they can fly because they've seen it in a videogame??? Well in that case he must know some very dim - witted people. How in the hell did this senile old fart get into a position of such power? Just because this guy's been dropped on his head a few too many times doesn't mean that everyone else is as idiotic as he is.

what a fucking idiot

"Atkinson also claims that gamers were a minority interest and trying to impose their will on the greater population".

This is true. Good for you Mr. AG. These games would be considered "entertaining" if you were a serial-killer in training I guess. So you want to dress up and play cowboys and indians? Why not be a real man, serve your country; go to war, tell us how "entertaining" it is then fellas..In war you only get 1 life

Are you being sarcastic? If you are being sarcastic I find you're sense of humour tasteless. If you are not then I am going to assume that you have actually played a video game and that you know about all the different types of video game such as the violent Tetris that involves fitting shaped blocks into other shaped blocks in order to train a serial killer. Maybe you have even heard of the ungodly Pong which is a 2D version of table tennis. This one is used to train (don't say I said this but..) *people who can think for themselves*....Shocked? I know I was when I was told about that.

What is your problem with war games anyway? If it's a choice between a virtual character dying and a REAL PERSON DYING IN A REAL WAR then give me the virtual death because funnily enough GAMERS DON'T WANT THE WORLD TO DEGENERATE INTO SOME HELL-HOLE. That is why we use VIRTUAL worlds to wage war in. Nobody dies. I respect the armed forces and their commitment, but I think you have to wake up to the reality that games are better than your suggestion of joining the army because games do not lead to anyone being killed. So what if a few bits of data are exiled to the "digital dead pile"? Are you telling me that this is the same thing as a real person coming home in a real coffin, leaving behind a real family with real grief? If you are a decent person, and I very much doubt it as you seem to be quite the war monger, then your reply should be something along the lines of "I'm so sorry for causing sh!t and encouraging young men to travel to other countries, kill people and come home in a box after having their lower torso blown off by an IED".

Personally I will always support war games because every gamer who is playing a war game is not out getting killed or killing other people. If everyone in the world who was considering violence sat down and played video games instead of killing people then murder, rape, terrorism etc. would all disappear because in the virtual world you just press restart and it's as if it never happened. The real world has real consequences, the virtual world does not. Take your "Be a real man" crap elsewhere, it's not welcome in society. If *you* were a real man then *you* would not be encouraging other people to go and fight wars, you would actually be big enough to say "No war. We want something else instead".

P.S. Who are you to talk about fighting in WW2!? You weren't there so you cannot say that fighting in it did anyone any good. Yes they stopped Hitler and I respect them for that but at no point in time should you talk about wars like that if you weren't there. If you have any respect for the veterans of those wars then you will post an apology.

What's the matter, Chris? Are mommy and daddy too poor to buy you that games console you've been crying for so badly so you resort to turning your sadness into hate for the videogames you can't afford? Go back to your cheap little trailer park and stop making a retard out of yourself. Videogames are the best - selling medium of entertainment, there are hundreds of millions of gamers in the world and you say that they're all "Serial - killers in training."??? If that WERE true then inbred hicks like you would be in a lot of trouble............

You mean a war like the 2nd World War? The one in which we all banded together to fight against a bunch of fascists who wanted to tell other people what to think?

It's pretty obvious which side of that war you would have been fighting on, chris.

when a person sets themselves a goal to do something and protest its in the "good of society" but is too blind to see what their doing is going against what they say they dont want to do is when you cant trust them.
he says he does not want a R18+ because than "kids" could get their hands on said games.
well
1 i did not know 18 year olds are considered to be kids.
2 there is so many pirated games, kids will ALWAYS have access to these games no matter how old they are.
3 hes doing EXACTLY what he says he wants to avoid.
he says hes doing it so kids cant get their hands on said games, so instead of bringing a R18+ rating he slaps a MA rating on fear 2, call of duty MW2, assassins creed 2, borderlands, ninja gaiden sigma 2, ninja gaiden 2, L4D and so on.
if you ask me neither of those games are suitable for peoples under the age of 18, so he is doing EXACTLY what hes trying to avoid.
and hes to arrogant to realize that.
hes a typical old coot, set in his ways and absolutely IMPOSSIBLE to convince otherwise.
heres a news flash for ya MR attkinson.
where in 2009, almost 2010 not nineteen diggidy two!
we are the only country in the world with this issue, for christs sake who would of thought a country founded by criminals would be so strict on games?
i think the reason why hes doing this is quite obvious.
in his electorate theres allot of conservative old coots, and he knows R18+ rating in = him out of a job.
so hes just using this "wont someone think of the children" excuse to cover his own a$$

It seems that Michael Atkinson can't tell fantasy from reality. Perhaps Australia needs protection from their own attorney general.

The fact that Atkinson can make statements like "trying to impose their will on society" without realising the hypocrisy says everything you need to know about him as an individual. For him to make such an allegation without any recourse to empirical evidence undermines the validity of _every_ statement and action made by him in the role as State Attorney General; he was _not_ put into that position to impose his will on society!