Apple rejects the notion that games are the place for comment

http://media.edge-online.com/wp-cont..._apple_top.pngWhy does Apple hate videogames so much? The gatekeeper of the walled garden that is the iOS games store is routinely geekslapped for turning down games it deems too edgy. A couple of months ago, a WWII naval game was rejected for featuring the Japanese flag. More recently, Apple rejected Littleloud’s Sweatshop HD, a blackly satirical and highly enjoyable game of labouring in factories to make clothes for corporate retailers. According to an interview by Pocket Gamer with Littleloud’s Simon Parkin, “Apple removed Sweatshop from the App Store last month stating that it was uncomfortable selling a game based around the theme of running a sweatshop. Apple specifically cited references in the game to clothing factory managers ‘blocking fire escapes’, ‘increasing work hours for labour’, and issues around the child labour as reasons why the game was unsuitable for sale.”You might think that those should count as reasons why the clothes made in sweatshops are unsuitable for sale, not why a rigorously fact-checked game about the phenomenon should be denied a place in Apple’s own sales channel. Evidently, the truth is worse than it would be if Apple just hated videogames – at least that would imply a passionate negative engagement with the medium. Instead, Apple simply doesn’t understand games. According to the App Store developer guidelines, Apple thinks of games and apps in general as different from “books or songs, which we do not curate”. This is a particularly odious usage of that self-regarding modern buzzword ‘curate’, which generally implies that on the Internet everyone is their own private museum director. For Apple, curation means slamming the profit-door in the face of apps and games that attempt to rise above their station. “If you want to criticise a religion,” Apple advises, “write a book. If you want to describe sex, write a book or a song, or create a medical app.”One obvious rebuttal to this dummkopf’s idea of electronic art is that videogames based around social commentary – newsgames, critical games, and so forth – have been around for longer than the App Store. But I would like here to insist on a more general point, which is that it’s impossible to make a game – or even an app – that doesn’t contain some social, cultural, or political commentary, whether it is made explicit or buried implicitly in the aesthetic decisions, or what Ian Bogost calls the game’s “procedural rhetoric”.

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