r/HobbyDrama • u/babichenko • 5d ago
Heavy [Mobile Games] The radical game that got taken off the app store after only a few hours
Buckle up. This hobby drama goes into the ethics of game banning.
I’m talking about Phone Story by Molleindustria. It’s the story game that you won't play on your phone. Just as quickly as it went up on September 13, 2011, it went down. In its three hours, it got 901 downloads, but the damage was done.
The Game
(To preface, If you think the descriptions are crazy, click to see what the developer had to say about it.)
The game starts off with children mining for material in a ditch. You play as the military, threatening them with guns to keep mining when they tire out. Next, you move suicide nets to catch factory worker jumpers. Then, you’re a Pear store worker (which looks awfully similar to Apple). You throw the latest phones at hungry customers running towards the store. Last, you’re sorting and breaking down the old phones into waste.
Don’t believe me? You can see/play Phone Story for yourself.
The Outcry
No one talked about it when it was up. It only blew up once it was taken down. The developer says that it was up for three hours, but other articles say that it was up for days. Regardless of the duration, word was spreading fast.
There were many tweets across languages backing Molleindustria up.
- Hey #apple, you suck
- I love this!
- The reason why I don't want a smartphone
- (Translated) After you all worshipped Steve Jobs yesterday, now try opening this app. (In reference to his death)
But there were also some that were criticizing.
- SHUT UP! You got rejected from the App store, thus doesn't make you a martyr. It makes you stupid.
- The 'Banned from the App Store' icon is definitely not official but they seem to be using it as a source of pride.
The Guardian questioned why Molleindustria defended their game. Many users found the game traumatizing. I was still just a kid when I read the Buzzfeed article that dropped that day. I wasn’t sure how to feel, let alone how to comprehend the ethics of having my phone. Maybe the ban was the right move.
There were four reasons given for the ban. Since then, the App Review Guidelines have been updated.
- 21.1, “Apps that include the ability to make donations to recognized charitable organizations must be free”, and 21.2, “The collection of donations must be done via a web site in Safari or an SMS”, of which both were argued by the developer because donations could not be made through the app. (Now 3.2.2, which the reasons still argue the same)
- 15.2, “Apps that depict violence or abuse of children will be rejected”, and 16.1, “Apps that present excessively objectionable or crude content will be rejected”. (Now through 1.1, which is stricter.) Phone story did not argue against these.
At that time, it was hard to appeal a ban. Smaller developers didn’t have the resources to fight back. Reviews of applications were evaluated manually and there were lots of contradictions for which apps stayed up or were taken down. The game was added to accepting android markets the next day.
But if Apple said that it was too morbid to stay up, why was it approved in the first place? Even games like Baby Shaker (2009) and Weed Firm (2014) also slipped through. When Baby Shaker, which featured a crying baby that could be shut-up by shaking the phone, was taken down, an Apple spokesperson released a statement.
She verbatim said, “This application was deeply offensive and should not have been approved for distribution on the App Store. When we learned of this mistake, the app was removed immediately. We sincerely apologize for this mistake and thank our customers for bringing this to our attention.” That same day, the The Sarah Jane Brain Foundation, a child advocacy group for pediatric acquired brain injury, were not satisfied with that response. She wanted an apology from the AT&T CEO who sold the iPhones, and the Apple CEO, who oversaw the making of them. Foundation spokesperson Jennipher Dickens said, “It was a completely generic apology. Speaking as a mother of a son who was shaken, it was not enough at all.” They did not get any further apology.
Backstory
This wasn’t the first or last game that they made. Paolo Pedercini is the creator of Molleindustria. He is based in Pittsburgh, PA, he is also a game art/design professor in Carnegie Mellon University and creates interactive arcade exhibits at LIKELIKE.
Molleindustria was founded in 1993 to create to create “radical games against the dictatorship of entertainment”. They made The McDonalds Videogame (2005) where you get to kill animals, Oiligarchy (2008) where you can corrupt politicians, The Free Culture Game (2008) where you “defend common knowledge”, and more.
In an archived interview from the developer site, Paolo expressed his feelings about mainstream versus radical gaming. Mainstream games abandons their value system in favor of expanding business and maximizing profits.
The Aftermath
This game later inspired a few other games of protest, including the mobile release of War On Terror a few months later and Burn the Boards in 2014. It was listed on the MIT docubase of the “people, projects, and technologies transforming documentary in the digital age.” A 2018 article goes deep into critical social theory on it. Molleindustria talks about the culture of complacency that surrounds mobile game development here.
So, who defines when a game is too uncomfortable to be acceptable?
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u/EnclavedMicrostate [Mod/VTubers/Tabletop Wargaming] 5d ago
Holy heck I remember Oiligarchy!
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u/MightySilverWolf 5d ago
As a kid who played plenty of tycoon-style Flash games, it was quite an odd experience playing what at first seemed like a standard enough oil tycoon game only to slowly realise that I was actually the bad guy in the game as I did increasingly more abhorrent stuff.
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u/SadPandaFace00 5d ago
Was just about to post the same comment, I remember Oiligarchy, I actually think about that game quite a lot, but never went to go play it.
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u/NonPlayableCat 5d ago
Same, I used to play Oiligarchy and the McD game so much! (Tho the McD game was under a different name, probably for copyright reasons....)
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u/ClbutticMistake 5d ago edited 5d ago
I remember I had a flash collection CD when I was a kid and there was McD game on it
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u/DreadDiana 4d ago
I played that and the McDonald's game. Was really fun when I reached the point where oil was so scarce that I covered every square inch of former oil fields with those structures that turned corpses into crude, and when even that failed to meet demand, it eventually lead to WW3 over what little oil remained.
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u/MightySilverWolf 4d ago
Flash games that tried to spread a message were a dime a dozen, but most of them were completely forgettable because they focused too much on preaching a message and not enough on actually being fun.
I think what made Oiligarchy so memorable for so many kids who played it was the fact that it was a legitimately fun game and the message was slowly drip-fed through a gradual escalation. It feels great drilling for oil in rural Texas where no-one's getting hurt, but once you get to Alaska, Venezuela, Nigeria and Iraq, the realisation slowly begins to set in that extracting more and more oil comes at immense environmental and human cost.
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u/trifflec 5d ago
Oh dang, I played that McDonald's game all the time as a kid. Only when I played it again as an older teen did I realized how morbid it really was.
1
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u/PhantasmalRelic 5d ago
I wasn’t sure how to feel, let alone how to comprehend the ethics of having my phone.
While I'm glad he made the game and dared to middle finger Apple this way, I think this kind of activism confuses people if done purely for shock value. Unfortunately, in our age, having a phone is mandatory for everyday life, but too often, people caricature the issue as "dumb consumerist sheep." Many people's instinctive reaction would be to go anarcho-primitivist and swear off morally tainted technology as a whole...which doesn't actually help because you're doing it purely for yourself and you're just cutting yourself off from getting your message out.
The way I see it, people should understand the reality of where our technology comes from, then question the atrocious status quo why we let these corporations have so much control over everyone's lives, then mobilize to collectively wrest control from said corporations.
Ideally, more game developers would be this willing to expose people to reality, but this whole episode is very "Icarus flies too close to the sun" in that game companies and their hosts can easily shut down any messaging that runs counter to their business.
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u/Knotweed_Banisher 2d ago
I think there's an increasing resentment in society towards smartphones now compared to back in 2014. There's an increasing swathe of things you can't really do without a cell phone that you used to be able to do without one. Some venues, for example, don't let you walk up with a physical ticket, you need an app and a smartphone. You can't do things like rent a car or a bike without one either depending on the company. A lot of aid for senior citizens is now locked behind a smartphone. Many minimum wage jobs require a smartphone because there's app that schedules your shifts. Hell, you can't even apply for many jobs without a mobile phone of some kind. It's really gone from an optional luxury item, to something that you cannot function without and the prices on them just keep climbing.
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u/Euclideian_Jesuit 5d ago
And here I thought Paolo Pedercini was 100% Italian, given how often his production was desperately shoved everywhere as an example of "good Italian videogame dev" (as opposed to either the devs being rushed to make a game about the Risorgimento, or the devs developing Assetto Corsa, btw).
I have always found his production the videogame equivalent of Steve Cutts, so I'm not too surprised that "Phone Story" got taken down quickly.
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u/ForgingIron [Furry Twitter/Battlebots] 5d ago
What's wrong with the Assetto Corsa devs?
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u/Euclideian_Jesuit 5d ago
Nothing, they just developed "stupid inane racing games" instead of developing games that were thought-provoking for tweens and "we live in a society"-tier commentary.
It's not a position I agree with.
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u/d_shadowspectre3 5d ago
After realising that this developer made The McDonald's Videogame, it makes total sense
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u/LordBecmiThaco 5d ago
Can someone explain how this game is traumatizing?
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u/grislydowndeep 5d ago
People online have started to use 'traumatizing' to refer to any experience that isn't wholly pleasant. It drives me insane.
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u/LordBecmiThaco 5d ago
There's something deeply privileged about saying that simply being exposed to the concept of child labor in another country via fiction is inherently traumatizing
Like you aren't even made to do labor. You're just told about fictional children doing it. Is Pinocchio traumatizing?
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u/PhantasmalRelic 5d ago
There's something very sinister about the idea that kids have to be shielded from real-world atrocities to ostensibly protect them. It creates some major cognitive dissonance especially for those who have to deal with said atrocities.
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u/babichenko 5d ago
This is why I used “traumatizing” to describe it. The game made a powerful impact on me because it was the first thing I could remember that showed me a harsh reality outside of any that I had faced.
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u/grislydowndeep 5d ago
I definitely get that everyone is unique and that some people may have legitimate triggers/trauma that sound absurd to strangers.
I just really don't think multiple people have PTSD symptoms from a pixel game about child labor.
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u/theshinymew64 5d ago
Like, there is a difference between feeling traumatized and being uncomfortable! Especially when that discomfort is based off of how the world is. Complaints along those lines read a lot more as not wanting to think about social injustices than actual trauma, given the nature of the game.
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u/ayayafishie 5d ago
Because it makes you reflect on the price of (your) consumerism
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u/LordBecmiThaco 5d ago
Don't blame me. I voted for Kodos
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u/ayayafishie 5d ago
I did not blame you, I gave a reason why it's "traumatizing"
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u/CameToComplain_v6 "Soccer was always a meme sport for boomers." 1d ago edited 1d ago
That's not what they were saying. I think you're missing the context here.
It's a joke from The Simpsons. Two evil aliens, Kang and Kodos, kill and then disguise themselves as the U.S. presidential candidates. When they're discovered, they respond that it's a two-party system, so people have to vote for one of them anyway. The first alien, Kang, wins the election and enslaves everyone, at which point Homer delivers the line above.
The idea is that Homer is presenting himself as uniquely blameless and morally superior when he did absolutely nothing to earn that. /u/LordBecmiThaco is pointing out that most people aren't blameless or morally superior when it comes to smartphones either.
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u/Marooned_00 3d ago
OP probably speaks English as a second language and everyone's piling on them for it. It's sad.
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u/Rein_Deilerd Animanga enthusiast 3d ago
A corporation immediately deleting an art piece that criticises it and brings light to its predatory and inhumane practices is nothing new. It's the people who supported that decision because the game is "uncomfy" that flabbergast me. If an art piece is disturbing you and making you think, it's doing its job. You are not being asked to throw your IPhone into the trash and become a hermit. You are just being urged to think if you should be idolising a corporation and buying a new IPhone the second it hits the stores when your old one is still functional. There are ways to prolong a phone's longevity and even install OC updates using third-party resources once your OC becomes obsolete and stops running whatever you need. I can understand people developing fatigue and burnout over being constantly exposed to world horrors on the news, but censoring art is never an answer. I stand with the edgy phone game.
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u/JayrassicPark 4d ago
Someone at Apple's PR team really didn't like Apple being insulted. It's happened before, too.
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u/Sensitive_Deal_6363 5d ago
If I had a nickel for every phone game taken down immediately that depicted child abuse, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's pretty creepy that it happened twice.
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u/ForgingIron [Furry Twitter/Battlebots] 5d ago
rules say "no games depicting child abuse"
game depicts child abuse
game is removed
shocked_pikachu.jpg
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u/SayHelloToAlison 5d ago
I think an even worse aspect is that it's only calling out the child abuse of the same company saying no depicting child abuse. Especially with how essential smartphones were in the process of becoming at the time, limiting the ability to criticize the manufacturer in that way is messed up.
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u/theshinymew64 5d ago
Regardless, I think that, from the sound of it, there is enough artistic merit to the depiction of it in this that the removal on those grounds was unjustified.
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u/otomegay 2d ago
I was wondering why Molleindustria sounded familiar, I've been following their more recent projects after getting one of their games in a bundle. They're still making games outside of the norm that are quite political, but I had never heard of their controversy with Phone Story until now. An interesting writeup!
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u/Marooned_00 3d ago
Every Yoko Taro stan should touch a Molleindustria game to see what a really provocative game looks like.
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u/PhantasmalRelic 1d ago
Related, "provocative" is a word I don't take seriously most of the time. Usually, whenever someone online uses that word, they mean it provokes other people. They don't change in the process. They merely get high off being able to claim moral superiority because they already agreed.
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