UPDATE: See comments that clarify that my understanding of this was not quite accurate.
I saw on the news this morning that someone had released a small game for the iPhone platform in which the player would calm down a crying and screaming baby by shaking it. Apple pulled the game from its application store when they realized the abject stupidity of it. Don’t take me to be a Jack Thompson fan, nothing could be further from the truth!, but this is simply irresponsible. There are (apparently) lots of people who are somehow unaware that shaking an infant can easily result in severe trauma or death. There are not people who are unaware that the actions taken by the protagonist of GTA4 are less than wise or virtuous.
Perhaps this could be a new opportunity for serial killers: convincing large numbers of other people to take actions that they believe to be safe but are actually quite dangerous.
In all fairness the game made it clear that you were essentially killing children in the game. More to the point if the group that raised a stink over this game had just kept their mouths shut no one would even know it existed.
AND ANOTHER THING!!!
Apple needs to stop being so restrictive about the things it approves for sale in it’s stores. I’m not talking about this game specifically but there has been an inordinate amount unnecessary censorship on the AppStore for the iPhone and it’s getting ridiculous.
Comment by Mykroft — April 23, 2009 @ 2:27 pm
Ah, I just read an article that made this clearer and came back to update my post. So this is actually exactly the kind of thing that our ol’ buddy Jack complains about. The TV news made it sound (to me at least) that the result of shaking the baby was that it would be peacefully calmed. In this case it is fairly repulsive, but not worthy of censorship.
Comment by chadhogg — April 23, 2009 @ 3:13 pm