In space, no one can hear you scream. And in "Starfield" (opens in new tab), no one can hear you have sex. That's because, according to the Australian Classification Board (opens in new tab), the body that rates video games and other entertainment media, you can't have sex in that dark space.

Starfield is rated R18+ in Australia, meaning "restricted to adults due to content that may have a high impact on viewers." This rating is due to the use of drugs in the game, which the Commission considers to be "high impact" and the highest rating.

The violence in Starfield is considered "high impact," enough to warrant a rating of MA15+, but the game's themes and language are "medium impact," meaning that it is "mature" but legally accessible to those under 15.

In other words, somehow simulating drug use is worse than blowing up a guy's face with a shotgun while dropping F-bombs at the top of your voice. What are they smoking down there?

As for sex, Starfield is clean: according to the Australian government, there is no sex at all. There is, however, a "very mild shock" nudity scene, so you might see some ankle flashing or something amidst the gunfire, death, and dismembered corpses. (Video game ratings are always a bit touchy: killing someone with a brick would probably fit within the "teen" rating (or its international equivalent), but exposing even a few seconds of skin would prevent major retailers from even putting the game on their shelves.

But even by its standards, Australia has always been a bit touchy. For years, the country was notorious for banning even mildly "mature" video games because of some quirks in the Classification Board's rating system. Perhaps it was the outdated impression that "games are for kids." Whatever the justification, the end result was that, since no proper rating existed, anything beyond those guidelines would not be rated.

Australia added an R18+ rating to games in 2013, hailed at the time as the end of the country's preference for bans. It slowed the speed of game bans, but definitely did not stop them: in the last few years, games such as DayZ (open in new tab), Disco Elysium (open in new tab), and RimWorld (open in new tab) have been banned. All of these bans were imposed for the same reason as Starfield's R18+ rating: drug use, and the presence of "Rocky Mountain Moongrass" nearly got Wasteland 3 banned. Developer inXile Entertainment chose to cut the grass to avoid that fate, and other bans were eventually overturned on appeal.

Starfield is currently scheduled for release on September 6. We have contacted Bethesda to confirm that there is no interstellar intercourse and will update if we hear back.