An Australian politician did not hold back a speech about DayZ..

Australia has banned DayZ because of in-game drug usage. The ban includes digital sales, so the game is not available on Steam either without using VPNs. Tim Quilty, a member of the Liberal Democratic Party (as well as the Victorian Legislative Council), claims that the ban happened because Bohemia Interactive, the developers, wanted to add cannabis as a healing item in the game (and cannabis is banned in the country – instead, you can use morphine to shoot yourself…). It didn’t happen because of the ban.

„What makes this ban especially absurd is that Australia has an R18+ classification for videogames… refusal of classification should be reserved for illegal materials, things like child pornography and snuff films that should never have been created in the first place. It should not be used for zombie survival videogames. Sadly, the developers of DayZ have caved. Australia is once again the wet blanket and laughing stock of the whole world. It’s an embarrassment that we obediently let our government treat us like children. While the rest of the world is legalizing cannabis, we are banning representations of cannabis in videogames,” Quilty said in the Victorian parliament. If there’s the new age rating, why not use it?

All of this could have been avoided if Bohemia followed Bethesda’s example. In Fallout 3, morphine has been renamed to Med-X, and nothing happened at the end of the day. If Bohemia would have followed this example, there would be no ban. Quilty has a point: more and more states in the US allow legal sales of cannabis (for medical purposes), which helps their financial standings (as the sales are official and not on the black market…).

Source: PCGamer