Games, art, and censorship in the App Store
Are games art or not? In disputes on this topic, many copies have been broken. Moreover, many, arguing about this, come to a different, indeed, philosophical question: what is art?
A friend of mine, a professional art historian and a tour guide in one of the leading St. Petersburg galleries, claims that today art is everything that we “take out of the ordinary” or, roughly speaking, put behind the window.
Fabio Viale “Marble” (photo by johnspade)
However, in this context, it is not entirely clear how one can talk, for example, about literature as art.
In any case, there is another approach to the concept of art: this is something that is endowed by the author with a certain meaning.
That is, a novel about Martians with only shootings is so, fiction. But a novel about aliens from Jupiter, in which the image of aliens is a metaphor for a white man who exterminated Indians in North America, is an art, because it raises important social topics.
And if you approach games from this side, it turns out that Apple is against art in the App Store.
Censorship in the App Store
According to Pocket Gamer, the other day the Cupertino company removed from the App Store the Sweatshop HD game created by Little Loud and dedicated to hard labor.
Sweatshop HD
The plot of the Sweatshop is as follows: there are super-sneakers that everyone dreams of, which diverge in gigantic editions.
Overseas, these sneakers are made in terrible conditions and for pennies are real slaves. The player runs one of these small factories.
The goal in creating the project, according to Little Loud, was to draw the attention of young people to the problem of labor in developing countries, so that people would think about who and how sews clothes coming to us, including from India and China.
And such a game, which can be safely classified as art, was removed by Apple with the wording: “it is wrong to sell a game exploiting the theme of slave labor” (now the project can be found at this link).
About the true reasons
It seems to us that it’s not just the subject matter, but also the critical message of Little Loud. Already in the screensaver of their project, it is clear that during the development they were not thinking about clothes at all. Most likely, they were inspired by a whole series of scandals last year at Foxconn enterprises manufacturing iPhones. The press, we recall, then accused the Chinese company of harsh working conditions and low wages, as well as the use of underage labor.
At the Foxconn factory (Telegraph)
For Apple, such irony on the part of developers could be a real slap in the face, so it’s not surprising that the company withdrew the game from the shelves of its app store.
Do you want to criticize religion? Write books!
For Apple, however, it is no longer uncommon to delete and, indeed, controversial projects on the topics raised. For example, not so long ago, the strategic game Endgame: Syria, covering the current conflict in Syria, was withdrawn from the App Store.
Endgame: Syria
Such, unfortunately, is the company’s policy, which boils down to the following lines:
In conditions of such censorship, it can often be really difficult to raise significant topics in games. And not all developers are interested in this. Today, after all, they talk more and more about money, about promotion methods, about the convenience of management. And this is also correct, but it also shows that mobile games at this stage are still more “about craft” and not “about art”.
But when the benchmark does change, developers will have the strength to overcome censorship. In the sense that they will begin to raise important topics allegorically, and not “head-on”, as the guys from Little Loud did.
