Questions of whether interactivity heightens impact -- undertaking violent acts in a computer games as opposed to watching a violent movie -- were also raised, as well as issues surrounding the 'reasonable person' basis for classification.

There seemed little disagreement with a comment by the IMI's Dr Rowan Tulloch, one of the debate's organisers, who said: "I think one of the really unfortunates things about the whole R18 debate is it's distracted from a whole lot of questions that the games industry should be asking itself about what sort of content we want.

"And we're having a debate around this kind of somewhat trivial issue... so we can get past it. But this kind of trivial issue around classifications instead of exploring some of the really problematic sides of gaming. So some of the horribly misogyny, thinking through issues around violence, propaganda, all that kind of stuff. We're getting stuck in this cycle in talking about it purely form a policy perspective... rather than thinking at a kind of societal level of what we want from this medium and what kind of social consequences this medium will have."

Other participants included Zahid Gameldien from the Classification Board; Paul Hunt, former deputy director of the Classification Board and deputy CEO of the OFLC; and Dr John Martino from Victoria University.