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Last week, two Australian retailers pulled Grand Theft Auto V from their shelves in response to a petition decrying sexual violence in the game. What I found interesting about the situation wasn't so much the news itself as the curiously strong reaction it drew, lighting up Twitter feeds and comments sections, including ours. The first GamesIndustry.biz story on the situation drew nearly 100 comments, the second pulled in about 50.

Compare that to the zero comments that greeted last month's news that Indian obscenity laws would prevent Dragon Age: Inquisition from releasing in the country. So what's the difference? Why are people so upset about two retailers choosing not to stock the poster child for controversy-courting games, but evidently apathetic about a billion people being denied the option to play another game held in almost universally high regard for vaguely defined obscenities? (Interesting side note: Grand Theft Auto V is readily available in India.) For an industry so vocal about even the faintest shadow of censorship, we're pretty damn complacent when it comes to the genuine article.

"As far as censorship goes, this may be the least harmful, least effective strain of it you can find."

Yes, Grand Theft Auto V is a hyperviolent game, and its removal from some retailers is censorship of a form. Not the government-mandated, legally binding form of censorship, or the sort of censorship that will actually keep interested people from finding and buying the game, but it is a private institution removing one route of access to a title because it objects to the content within. And yes, Target Australia and K-Mart Australia are well within their rights to do that. As far as censorship goes, this may be the least harmful, least effective strain of it you can find.

Compare that to the situation with Dragon Age: Inquisition in India, or the industry-approved censorship that has shaped the console and mobile markets for years. Apple in particular has been heavy-handed with what sort of games it allows on the iPhone and iPad, deciding that people who use its products shouldn't have access to educational games about female masturbation, games that use nudity to help get across a worthy message, games based on current events, or titles that criticize sweatshop production methods and smartphone makers like Apple in particular.

"We view Apps different than books or songs, which we do not curate," Apple says in its App Store Review Guidelines. "If you want to criticize a religion, write a book. If you want to describe sex, write a book or a song, or create a medical App."

And if that weren't enough to show how little Apple values freedom of speech, just a few lines later in the guidelines, the company is nakedly threatening those who run afoul of its policies--those whose speech it has already silenced--to stay silent.

"If your App is rejected, we have a Review Board that you can appeal to," Apple says. "If you run to the press and trash us, it never helps."

"How many of the people furious about the Grand Theft Auto V situation own iPhones? How many developers see the company's behavior for what it is and then support the platform anyway?"

My problem isn't so much that Apple won't let these games on its virtual shelves. Like Target Australia and K-Mart Australia, Apple is a private company and can choose what products it will offer through its store. My problem is that this is accepted by the industry as a whole. How many of the people furious about the Grand Theft Auto V situation own iPhones? How many developers see the company's behavior for what it is and then support the platform anyway? How much of the principled outrage we have seen this week doesn't apply to Apple? How much is rationalized by thoughts like, "But it's a really cool phone..." or "But it's such a large potential audience..."?

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The Portrayal of Women in Gaming/Game Censorship
Hey guys a new video for you all I hope you guys enjoy, the following below is a summary of what my point is - The point I was trying to convey in this video is that gender bias shouldn #39;t...

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The Portrayal of Women in Gaming/Game Censorship - Video

JK North Korea Censorship Media
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JK North Korea Censorship Media - Video

When staffers at GitHub first saw the email from a Russian agency claiming dominion over the internet last month, they didnt take it seriously. GitHub operates an enormously popular site where computer programmers share and collaborate on code, and to the Silicon Valley startup, an email requesting the removal of a list of suicide techniques from the site just didnt seem believable.

But GitHub is a place where you can post almost anythingnot just code. On a handful of GitHub pages, someone had indeed cataloged the pros and cons of different suicide techniques (with the pistol, the drawback was Time: From the fractions of a second to several minutes if bad aim). And the Russian agency was dead serious about wanting to take these pages down. Last week, after GitHub failed to remove the links, its service was blocked in Russia.

The outage lasted only a day, but it holds broader implications for US companies hoping to do business in Russia. Call it a minor skirmish in Russias larger battle to build a Kremlin firewall around the internet. Today, the Russian government is trying censor individual pages served from overseas, but a recently passed law could eventually prevent foreign internet companies from reaching Russia unless they set up computer servers inside the country, a setup that would leave them very much at the mercy of the local governmentand not only in terms of censorship.

Its a battle that threatens to put Russia on par with Chinaa world power whose people experience a downgraded and closed online experience. Unlike China, however, censorship on the Russian internet is a relatively recent phenomenon, says Eva Galpern, a global policy analyst with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. For a couple of decades, theyve actually had a relatively free internet, she says.

That all changed in the summer of 2012a year after Moscows streets were rocked by protests. Thats when Russia created the Roskomnadzor.1 Over the past two years, the agency has built out the muscle and infrastructure to take down anything it doesnt like. It administers a central blacklist of blocked sites, used by Russian internet service providers to manage the Kremlin firewall.

We should inform you that the URLcontains information which has been recognized by Federal service on customers rights protection and human well-being surveillance (ROSPOTREBNADZOR) as prohibited on the territory of the Russdan Federation, read the email the agency sent GitHub on October 21.

In March, the Roskomnadzor cut off access to websites run by Putin critics Alexei Navalny and Garry Kasparov. But its been harder for the agency to vaporize the instantly forkable GitHub suicide pages. Since news of GitHubs one-day outage went public last week, hundreds of new pages, including virtually identical content have sprung up on the website. The agency did not respond to WIREDs request for comment.

Ostensibly, the Roskomnadzors blacklist is there to keep what Russia considers to be dangerous content from the internetthings like suicide instructions, drug cookbooks, and information about terrorist organizations. But critics see it as a first step toward shuttering dissent. What we have discovered, of course, is because there is no accountability for who gets added to this blacklist, says the EFFs Galperin, they blocked pretty much all of the major independent news sites.

At the same time, says Andrei Soldatov, an investigative journalist who runs the website Agentura.Ru, the governments long-term goal is to force companies U.S. companies to move their online operations into Russia. This year, the State Duma passed a law that would force foreign companies such as GitHub, Google, and Twitter to use servers located within the country when storing data from local users. Its set to take effect next year.

If their servers are in Russia, that would mean even stricter censorship for U.S. companies. But, as Soldatov explains, it would also open these companies to surveillance by Russias Federal Security Service, known as the FSB. The more likely outcome is that, if Russia clamps down on U.S. companies, some just wont play in the country. Indeed, the Wall Street Journal described the situation as a near-impossible challenge for US-based firms that have millions of Russian users but generally store data on servers outside the country.

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Russias Creeping Descent Into Internet Censorship

China is in a league of its own when it comes to online censorship. The government has long gone to great lengths to cleanse Chinese cyberspace of topics it finds objectionable. Even so, party official Lu Wei stands out for imposing unprecedented restrictions on Internet activities in the Peoples Republic.

The new Internet czar of China recently paid a visit to the US. And Lu had a packed schedule that included plenty of high-level meetings in Washington, which has taken an increasingly harder line toward China on matters of online censorship and computer hacking.

The meeting that attracted the most attention,though, was probably Lus visit to Mark Zuckerbergs office in Silicon Valley.

When Lu showed up, the Facebook chief executive just happened to have a copy of the Chinese presidents book sitting on his desk. Xi Jinping: The Governance of China is a weighty compilation its more than 500 pages in English of speeches and commentary by Xi, written with a heavy dose of Marxist jargon familiar to anyone who follows the Chinese Communist Party closely.

Mr. Lu is basically an old school propagandist, says Paul Mozur, who covers the Internet in China for the New York Times. And the book by Xi, as Mozur describes it, is the prime propaganda text thats been put out by President Xi Jinping.

Apparently, Zuckerberg told Lu that the Chinese presidents book is helping him and his staff at Facebook better understand socialism with Chinese characteristics. Mozur says he verified this account with someone who attended the private meeting.

Facebook has been blocked in China since 2009, leading to some instant criticism of Zuckerberg on social media for his perceived attempt at currying favor with the Chinese government.

The episode might be concerning to lots of Facebook users, says Mozur. Xis book doesnt hide the Chinese presidents skepticism toward the value of online freedom. Censorship and control over the Internet is a key element of Chinas goals for the future, is a message that comes through clearly in the book, Mozur says.

As the man in charge of implementing Chinas national Internet policies, Lu has made his own mark. He has singlehandedly presided over ... an unprecedented crackdown, Mozur says. Thats in a place where, already, the censorship regime and blocks were already [among] the most sophisticated and strict in the world.

It is easy to see why Zuckerberg would want Beijing to lift the ban on Facebook. China has more than 600 million people online and more than 40 percent of the global growth in the tech industry will come from China alone next year, according to Mozur. The big American tech players know they have to secure a place in the China market if theyre going to continue to grow.

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China's Internet censor-in-chief gets a warm welcome at Facebook headquarters