An Australia politician says that the recent DayZ ban has made their country the “laughing stock of the world.” And he’s not wrong.

Australia has a history of being a little cautious when it comes to video games. Various games have been banned for sale in Australia for various reasons, including Hotline Miami 2, the Postal series, Saints Row IV, State of Decay, South Park: The Stick of Truth, and The Witcher 2. Other games, such as Left 4 Dead 2, GTA3, or Fallout 3, had their bans lifted when the developer changed the game for sale locally or had the ban overturned on appeal.

You can see the common themes here have to do mostly with violence and explicit material. The recently released stand-alone version of DayZ was banned for an entirely different reason: weed.

In DayZ, the action-survival game where you scrounge around for weapons and materials to survive the zombie apocalypse, there’s a health item you can find that’s essentially a joint. It’s medicinal, which means you actually regain health and don’t have a sudden and inexplicable desire for Doritos, but that’s a problem for the Australian Classification Board. Because weed is portrayed as a beneficial thing and not the illegal substance that it is, it got DayZ banned.

DayZ
via Steam
DayZ

Nevermind the fact that there is a growing amount of scientific evidence to support the medicinal use of weed, and many countries around the world are legalizing weed after decades of a misguided war on drugs. Games in Australia cannot encourage drug use for any reason, and that’s that.

RELATED: DayZ Will Be Modified Worldwide In Order To Lift Australian Ban

Liberal Democratic Party member Tim Quilty took the time at a recent parliamentary meeting to point out what everyone else is thinking: that Australia's strict video game rules make them look like "a wet blanket."

"Australia is once again the wet blanket and laughing stock of the whole world," said Quilty. "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 noted that DayZ developer Bohemia Interactive will actually remove the offending reefer in the worldwide version of the game rather than not have DayZ sold in Australia. But the fact that Australia has forced a game to change just makes the whole country seem like “that guy” who tries to get the music turned down “before the cops show up.”

(via PC Gamer)

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