Apple

Genocidal Game Encouraging Players To Kill Aboriginals Finally Removed From App Stores

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A blatantly racist game that encourages players to kill Indigenous Australians and bludgeon them to death has been removed from iTunes and Google Play. The move comes on the back of an online campaign against its distribution.

The violent game called Survival Island 3 warns players to “beware of Aborigines” as players aim to survive in Australia by fighting animals, collecting food and making sport out of genocide, adding:

“You also have to fight with aboriginals – you invaded their home!”

Georgia Mantle, a Gardigal woman and student from St George, launched a Change.org petition on Friday evening after discovering the game via Twitter. Since posting the campaign she’s gathered over 84,000 signatures. Mantle demanded the removal of the game from its provider outlets such as iTunes and Google Play and a public apology from the creators.

The petition reads:

“The game shamelessly promotes the fact that you will ‘have to fight with aboriginals’ and uses warning messages like, ‘Beware of Aborigines!’ when Indigenous people appear on screen. The game portrays Indigenous Australian’s as violent and aggressive. As well as trying to promote the Indigenous characters as authentic representations of a diverse culture through the description phrasing, ‘Meet real aboriginals’.

“By shooting ‘dangerous Aboriginals’, this app makes us inhuman, it re-enforces racial violence, lack of punishment for white people taking black lives, it makes fun and sport of massacres and Frontier violence. This App is another colonialist frontier and continues to exploit the deaths of many Aboriginal people without regard to the trauma that it instigates.

“The profiting of historical genocide and introducing these genocides as entertainment completely disregards the continual suffering of our people.

“Sign this petition to take a stand against racism towards Indigenous Australians and to demand that this racist game be pulled with an apology from NIL Entertainment for its racist conduct. The App Stores that sold this app and its developers should be held accountable for not only promoting racism but profiting off it.

Killing Indigenous Australians is not a game!”

The repulsive app has since garnered international attention and outrage, with many people including human rights activist Bianca Jagger baffled how on earth the violently racist game was approved in the first place.

After it was announced that the game had been removed from iTunes and Google Play, Mantle said that she still demands an official statement of reply.

“While I think it’s great that the app has been taken down, I think there should be an apology and an explanation released by hosting sites as well as an apology from the game developer. Unless we get those, [racist incidents like this] will continue to pop up,” she told Fairfax Media.

The Turnbull government is also demanding an apology, with Communications Minister Mitch Fifield ordering a review of the game developer.

“I am appalled that anyone would develop such a so called ‘game’ and that any platform would carry it,” Fifield said to Fairfax Media.

The Racial Discrimination Commissioner Tim Soutphommasane has encouraged people offended by the game to make an official complaint. “It’s unacceptable to see such promotion of violence and hatred against Aboriginal people,” he said.

The game is at odds with Apple’s App Store Review Guidelines which includes gaming frameworks that enemies within a game cannot “solely target a specific race, culture … or any other real entity”. Who knows how this genocidal themed game slipped through the cracks?

Survival Island 3 was released way back on the 14 December 2015, but sadly it remains unknown how many people payed for and played the game, and how much was profited from the app which cost a pricey $4.49.

Good riddance.