DayZ ban makes Australia 'laughing stock of the world', says politician

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'It's an embarrassment that we obediently let our government treat us like children.'

(Image credit: Bohemia Interactive)

An Australian politician has said the country's decision to ban DayZ over in-game drug use has made it look like "the wet blanket and laughing stock of the whole world".

Tim Quilty, Liberal Democratic Party member of the Victorian Legislative Council, said the "absurd" ban was triggered by Bohemia Interactive's plans to include cannabis as a healing item. The developer hasn't yet confirmed which in-game item fell foul of the Australian Classification Board, but players can use morphine to heal and the game files mention cannabis, which is illegal in Australia. 

"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," he said in the Parliament of Victoria on Thursday, referencing Bohemia's decision to change the game worldwide because of the ban. "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."

You can watch his speech below.

Bohemia hasn't said how it plans to change the game to comply with the Australian rating system, but as Fraser pointed out it might be as simple as changing item names, in the same way Bethesda switched morphine to Med-X in Fallout 3.

Samuel Horti
Samuel Horti

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.