Last Thursday’s significant new amendment to the classification system in Australia, which now allows for automated, cost-effective classification for digital and mobile games, represents the long-awaited arrival of some of the 43 classification system fixes proposed by the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) almost three years ago

“ The IARC tool that’ll be used in Australia has already been tested by the Classification Board... There’s been very, very little in the way of discrepancies.

“ Under our legislation in Australia it will be for digitally-distributed games.

Technically every game released in Australia is required to be classified by the Australian Classification Board (ACB), but until now an overwhelming number of small, digitally-distributed games are not. The ACB rates an average of below 800 games per year, but there are many hundreds of games released every day on the iOS app store alone. The system very literally could not keep up, and it hasn’t been able to for many years.This new legislation will allow for digitally-distributed games, such as these and other digital-only games, to be classified using an online tool hosted by the International Age Rating Coalition (IARC) rather than going through the Australian Classification Board itself. The IARC rating tool is an online questionnaire where developers answer a series of questions about content. Based on these responses the IARC tool assigns the most appropriate rating from various territories around the world, and digital storefronts automatically display the correct rating information for each territory.“We’ve been part of the organising group and the working group for this for about three years,” Interactive Games and Entertainment Association (IGEA) of Australia CEO Ron Curry explains to IGN. “It started off with an idea from the ESRB, which is the industry-led classification scheme in North America, and PEGI, which is the similar scheme in Europe, who realised there needed to be some way of doing digital content.”Curry explains that the IARC tool poses a series of questions to developers about their game’s content, and the tool then matches their responses to various sets of country-specific criteria.“So the ESRB criteria is in there, the PEGI criteria is in there, Brazil is in there, Australia’s in there,” says Curry. “It started with quite a limited number of questions but, of course, as you try to nuance for each territory so the questions get wider and wider.”“But we’ve tried to develop it so there’s a minimal amount of questions. So, is there nudity? No. Okay, that’s all you need to know. Now, is there nudity? Yes. Then the questions will roll on from there, depending on where those sensitivities sit in different territories.“The IARC tool that’ll be used in Australia has already been tested by the Classification Board, so we’ve run some dummy games through it. We’ve used the Classification Board and said, ‘What do you think this should be?’ and then we’ve used the developer, saying, ‘Well, you plug it in, and you see what you come up with.’ There’s been very, very little in the way of discrepancies, and the ones that don’t match, the developers usually end up with a higher classification, because they tend to be overly sensitive to what they’re putting in.”“Obviously, humans are better at nuance and context, but if we’re talking volume sometimes you need to trade off a little bit,” says Curry. “Let’s trade off a bit of nuance, a little bit of context, in order to get volume and speed, cost-free and friction-free.”Curry confirms the automated IARC tool costs nothing for developers to use. In comparison, the fees for having a game classified by the Classification Board itself range between AUD$890 to AUD$1210 depending on the supporting material developers supply with their application, and up to AUD$2460 if the board needs a representative of the developer to demonstrate the game in person “At the moment, the industry is funding it,” says Curry. “It’s being used in the US at the moment and there’s no cost involved.”What’s interesting is that, in the lead-up to this amendment finally passing the Senate, the tens of thousands of digital games that were being released in Australia without being officially classified weren’t ever in real danger of being penalised for breaching the law.“Back in about 2010, 2011, we were having this conversation with the government and they realised there was this big hole; there was this difficulty in how do we deal with online games or digital games?” says Curry. “And that was at the same time as they were looking at doing the ALRC review into classification.”“So what the government actually did was that they introduced a Bill… back in 2011 that actually said that for a period of two years there’s pretty much a moratorium on digital games, or online games. We’re gonna set them aside. That was for clarity. It said that, ‘Yes, they should be classified, but via this Bill we’re actually not going to classify them because of all the difficulties associated with it.’ And the ALRC was coming up.“That Bill never actually passed. It got to the Senate and we got into election mode. However, because the Bill had been introduced that became, I guess, the rule. Everyone realised what the government was trying to achieve by introducing the Bill but it just got stuck before the election. So everyone said, well, ‘That’s the intention of the Bill; let’s all just roll along with that intention.’”With the ALRC’s proposed reforms first coming to light nearly three years ago, Ministers agreeing on several of the proposals way back in April 2013, and the amendment finally passing just last Thursday, it’s easy to grow frustrated with the time scales at play here. Curry, however, remains positive.“I think the encouraging sign is when the Minister introduced the Bill, and when he announced it had passed, he said this is the first tranche of changes,” says Curry. “If we look at the history we know how difficult it’s been to change anything in classification, particularly given that we need each state and territory to agree. Every year there’s another state or territory that’s had an election so the committee that meets generally needs to be refreshed.”“Certainly the Commonwealth Government has realised the difficulty of getting reform when you have to work through that level of complexity. So I think the aim would be, how do we first remove the complexity? And then let’s start legislating appropriately.“Now this legislation that we just had passed needed to get the approval of all the states and territories, and after they all approved then it had to get drafted, and then after it’s drafted it has to go back to them to make sure they agree and then it has to go to the Commonwealth Government. So the process is extremely painful and long. But the government has committed to longer term reform, they’ve committed to looking at the ALRC recommendations, and certainly they are underpinned by having a national scheme – not a scheme that’s controlled by the states and territories.”At least for now, the amendment relates to digitally-distributed games only. Even if a publisher was to release a game digitally, via Steam for instance, any hard copies of that game (or ports to other platforms that would be sold by a brick-and-mortar retailer) would need to be rated by the ACB.Curry stresses this is a pilot program, however.“I guess somewhere down the track if we can say the efficacy of this tool is accepted then we would say, ‘Okay then, if it’s good enough for digital product – and we know that that’s going to be the main way of distributing product – then therefore why isn’t it suitable for a boxed product?’” he says.“But for now we’re comfortable with where it sits.”Curry concedes there’s a little more work to be done on this new legislation; another new change is that certain game modifications should no longer require separate classification, providing said content is unlikely to change the original game’s rating.“What do we mean by modifications?” asks Curry. “Is it a map pack? Is it a new character? Is it a new level? How do we define it so everyone’s clear on it?”Beyond that, the IGEA’s main aim now is to see the broader ALRC proposals are implemented, including the ALRC’s recommendation of greater role for industry in classifying content.“We need to look for wholesale reform,” says Curry. “Generally what we’re looking for is a system that is industry-led and national; not what we’ve got now.”

Luke is Games Editor at IGN AU. You can find him on IGNor on Twitter, or chat with him and the rest of the Australian team by joining the IGN Australia