Students Demand Answers for Game That Promotes Killing Indigenous Australians
From Halo to Call of Duty, dozens of violent video games require players to find weapons and kill the bad guys to win. But many feel a mobile game that encouraged players to bludgeon indigenous Australians to death went too far.
“Beware of Aborigines!” appeared on an image used to promote the game titled Survival Island 3 in the Apple store, The Guardian reports. For AU$4.49, users could attempt to survive in a virtual Australian outback, fighting off dangerous animals and acquiring additional weapons after successfully killing an indigenous person.
“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,” reads a Change.org petition started by Georgia Mantle of the group Students Support Aboriginal Communities. She also noted that the game treats the historical genocide of indigenous Australians as a source of entertainment. Between 1778 and 1900, Australia’s indigenous population was reduced by 90 percent after British colonization.
Today, indigenous people are one of the most marginalized groups in Australia, facing lower rates of employment and educational achievement. Nearly 20 percent of nonindigenous Australians admitted that they discriminate against the indigenous population, according to a 2014 survey conducted by mental health organization Beyond Blue. That includes telling jokes, refusing to hire an indigenous person, or changing seats if an indigenous person sits next to them. Even more respondents said they get unfair governmental assistance (42 percent) and are sometimes lazy (37 percent).
“Selling games that promote racism and negative stereotypes of Indigenous Australians is not acceptable,” Mantle wrote in the petition description. More than 80,000 people agreed and signed it. By Saturday, both the Apple App Store and Google Play had pulled the game from their lineup. Mantle considers the campaign a victory—although she’d still like an explanation as to why the game was available for purchase in the first place.
“We [have] yet to receive a statement from either the Apple App Store or Google Play, which I find disappointing as this is not something that can just be swept under the rug,” Mantle wrote in an update on Saturday. “I hope that these companies can acknowledge why this game was so problematic to ensure that nothing like this happens again.”
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Original article from TakePart
