Gamers4Croydon disbands Down Under

Gamers4Croydon--the fledgling political party initially set up to take on then South Australian Attorney General Michael Atkinson and his anti-gaming stance--is no more. In a post on the party's official site, founder David Doe has disclosed that Gamers4Croydon will soon be disbanded, with moves already in place to deregister the group as an official political force.

In his post, Doe says that Gamers4Croydon had "run its course as a party." He continued, "But all good things come to an end, and it's time to pass the torch on to people with the resources and experience necessary to bring the change to bear politically. Having successfully been a part of removing one of the largest roadblocks to classification reform in this country, we feel that Gamers4Croydon has run its course as a party. As a result, we are in the process of de-registering the party."

Gamers4Croydon ran several candidates in this year's South Australian state election, and while it failed to win any seats, it did get good support, polling as much as 3.6 percent of the total vote in the seat of Croydon alone. The party was specifically set up in 2009 to try to oust Michael Atkinson, the man many gamers felt was the main block to the introduction of an R18+ classification for video games in Australia. While the party did not win against Atkinson, it did achieve its aim, with Atkinson quitting his post as attorney-general shortly after the election.

"We didn't win any seats, but we certainly exceeded our pre-election expectations by a large margin. We put political pressure on and helped unseat an attorney-general (who was oddly absent throughout the ALP's 2010 campaign). We (along with others) helped raise public awareness of the classification debate by getting on mainstream radio and television and outlaying the facts as they are, rather than as they are perceived or often portrayed," Doe said.

While the former party will not be having any representatives at the upcoming federal election, Doe did endorse the Australian Sex Party and the Greens as being deserving of gamer votes, saying that they were "the closest aligned to us ideologically."

For more on video game classification in Australia, check out GameSpot AU's Aussie Games Classification FAQ feature.