The nation's chief censor has admitted that trying to ban inappropriate content in films, computer games and pornography was a losing battle in the digital age.

The outgoing director of the Office of Film and Literature Classification, Des Clark, said the difficulty in restricting content across borders meant that consumers would increasingly have to decide for themselves what was appropriate.

"It seems to me that if you have this global stuff where you're not able to harness it, what comes into play - for instance with online gaming - is that you have protocols established by users . . . it's not something that government is necessarily able to regulate," Mr Clark said in an interview.

"I suspect there's a whole lot of intuitive classification that happens."

Mr Clark said technology allowed people access to "strong and controversial content that was not available or easily available beforehand", and that self-regulation was part of the pathway to reconcile local and global values.

Mark Finn, lecturer in media and multimedia at Swinburne University, questioned the relevance of national standards in today's world.

"Bodies like the OFLC are set up to administer national guidelines, but we live in an age where national borders are increasingly porous," he said.

As a result, any attempts to clamp down on user-generated content - such as sexual or violent modifications for popular video games - were a particularly fruitless exercise.

"The OFLC is constructed on a premise to slap a sticker on something," Dr Finn said.

Mr Clark singled out interactive video games and movies as a target of the OFLC. "The classification system is particularly sensitive to interactivity, and rewards for interactivity. Whether it involves sex or violence, if people are rewarded for inappropriate activities, like drug taking, killing, we look at that much more harshly."

The video games industry is big business with sales worth $925 million in 2006, approaching the sums spent on other forms of entertainment like DVDs.

After seven years as head of the OFLC, Mr Clark will step down in April. He addresses the International Ratings Conference in Sydney today.

Source: Australian Financial Review