Books, movies, television, and music—they’re for the adults in the room. Games? They’re for the birds, specifically those of the Angry variety. That’s the message of Apple’s draconian App Store policies that routinely reject games that broach topics deemed too controversial or serious, all the while giving free rein to “more traditional” forms of media. Apple is perceived as a progressive, forward-thinking company, but on this issue, they’re out of touch.
On an Apple device, it’s easy to consume media about, for instance, the institution of slavery—as long as it’s not a video game. A casual search on iTunes or iBooks using “slavery” as a keyword turns up dozens of relevant results. There are two ways of experiencing 12 Years A Slave—either by streaming last year’s award-winning film or downloading the original 1853 memoir by Solomon Northup. Scroll down a little further and you can download a 19th-century screed called The Right Of American Slavery that features such chapters as “The Barbarism Of The African Race.” It opens with a paragraph that would make Donald Sterling blush: “The vestiges of barbarism characterize the African, in his normal state. The latent principle of cannibalism, lurks, in dormant energy, within the very core of his being and constitutes a prominent characteristic of his animal existence.”
But say you’re in the mood for something more interactive and a bit less absurdly racist. Perhaps you want to play a fair-minded educational game about the history of slavery. Sorry, friend, you’re out of luck. The App Store only contains what amounts to books or pamphlets in app form or barebones maps of Underground Railroad sites. This isn’t due to sheer coincidence or a lack of interest on the part of game developers. Earlier this month, Apple slammed their heavy hand against a Dutch educational game called Weg Naar Vrijheid (Road To Freedom) because of what the company deemed “insulting content,” according to a Dutch news site. No, Weg Naar Vrijheid is not a playable version of The Right Of American Slavery. The so-called “insulting content” appears to be an unpopular devotion to historical accuracy.
Weg Naar Vrijheid was funded by Amsterdam’s city council to mark the 150th anniversary of the nation’s abolition of slavery. The game is designed to teach Dutch children about the realities of slavery. Players inhabit the role of an 18th-century slave bought by a rich white man in Ghana and forced to work on a sugar plantation in Suriname. The game was hosted on the educational site Slavernij & Jij (Slavery & You) since February, but it didn’t attract controversy until it later hit Apple’s games marketplace. Some users complained about the fact that characters in the game were punished by a black slave driver with a whip instead of a white slave owner. Pepergroen, the game’s developer, explained that the creators initially wanted more exchanges between slaves and the white owners, but their research found such extensive interaction historically inaccurate. Apple yanked the game shortly thereafter. A Google translation of a report by the Dutch newspaper Volkskrant mangles the grammar but gives us a broad idea of Apple’s rationale for rejecting Weg Naar Vrijheid: Its content is supposedly “libelous and insulting” and will draw “objection” from “large groups of people.”