‘Survival Island’ Pushes Racism in Video Games To Far
Author: S.A.
Video Games push the boundaries on acceptability regularly, often forcing gamers to conform to new norms yearly. However, the question when enough is enough must be asked, and recently seems to be answered. This answer has been shown recently in the form of a poorly designed video game called Survival Island 3: Australia Story.
Beware…Aborigines?
The problem with the mobile game that seems to be throwing people up in arms, and rightfully so, lays in the fact that the games main objective lays in surviving the Australian outback. This is done by hunting animals, growing or foraging for plants, and fighting/killing indigenous people.
That’s right, your main enemy is the indigenous people of Australia, and you must kill them all to survive.
The games actual description informs gamers on this objective, stating the following: “Beware of angry animals, especially if you don’t have any weapons. At night they are really dangerous, try to hide somewhere. Hunt animals or grow plants – you have to eat something. You also have to fight aboriginals – you invaded their home!” As if this wasn’t a blatant enough jab at a whole group of people, the very act of killing an indigenous person rewards players with more weapons and food.
This horrid gaming app quickly stirred up more than a few individuals. This caused Georgia Mantle, an indigenous woman, to start a quick petition to have the game removed from the app store. Overnight the petition had found 20,000 signatures gathered, and seeing no sign of stopping. Upon hitting 84,000 signatures the game was removed from the app store, however an apology has yet to be issued by actual developers.
Mantle has issued the question on why app stores would allow such a blatantly racist game to be placed on the store to begin with, and rightfully so. These types of games should be filtered and viewed before placement on their stores and yet seem to be placed on with little to no question.
The app store will likely be under fire for quite sometime due to this blunder, and the developers of the game are up for review on all previous and future endeavours. That said, let this be a lesson to other individuals. Though gamers of today seemingly have endless patience for what comes out in the consumer market, there is a line and it should not be crossed.
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