A video game that appears to encourage players to kill Indigenous Australians has been removed from Google Play and iTunes after an online petition attracted more than 50,000 signatures condemning the game.
The petition was started by Gadigal woman Georgia Mantle who raised concerns that it required players to survive in the Australian outback and rewarded them with weapons and food for killing Aboriginal people.
“What this is doing is making entertainment out of the murder of people based on their race,” Ms Mantle told the ABC.
“Why would you allow an app that is so blatantly racist and promotes racist violence to be hosted on your sites?”
Reviews of the game, Survival Island 3 – Australia Story 3D, in the Google Play store blasted the game as “glorifying genocide” and “horrific and disgustingly racist”.
The game appears to have been removed from the Google Play store, but was earlier available to download.
In the petition statement, Ms Mantle said the game promoted racial violence and negative stereotypes of Indigenous Australians.
She told the ABC the game included pop-up “warning” messages.
“You [could see] a screenshot of one of the game players which had an Aboriginal man in traditional dress with a bow and arrow being pointed at them from white hands with the words saying ‘beware of Aborigines’,” Ms Mantle said.
“I’ve [spoken] to a lot of Indigenous friends that I have through uni and everyone is not only disgusted, but also just completely gobsmacked that this game actually exists.”
According to the petition, the game “makes fun and sport of massacres” and violates the terms and conditions for developers on major app store providers, Google Play and Apple.
“By shooting ‘dangerous Aboriginals’, this app makes us inhuman, it reinforces racial violence, lack of punishment for white people taking black lives, it makes fun and sport of massacres and Frontier violence,” Ms Mantle said in the statement.
“This app is another colonialist frontier and continues to exploit the deaths of many Aboriginal people without regard to the trauma that it instigates.”
A spokeswoman from Apple said the app was not available in the iTunes store.
But a web cached version of the Apple iTunes webpage showed the game was available for purchase up until last week.
The iTunes app store showed screenshots of the game, including a warning for players to “beware of Aborigines”, while the description said “you have to fight with Aboriginals – you invaded their home!”.
Ms Mantle said any app store which sold the game was not only promoting racism but profiting from it.
The petition called for the game to be pulled from app stores and asked the developers to issue an apology.
The ABC has contacted the developers, Nil Entertainment, as well as Google for comment.
This post originally appeared on ABC News.
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Top Comments
I actually couldn't believe this story when I first heard about it. Not that I don't think there aren't racist people who wouldn't think of these things, but the fact that it was actually developed and sold and no one at itunes thought it might be a bad call to sell it?
Everyone knows that the only acceptable games are those where white men are killed. That is why there are millions of those and nobody gives a stuff. That is all fine.
I think you've completely missed the point. This game contained ignorant stereotypes of aboriginal people and their culture. Tog could apparently interact positively with them and you would be rewarded but it was extremely stereotypical and incorrect culturally. Or you could invade their homes and kill them. They were targeted because of their race this is unlike white men. Other killing type games definately have white men as their targets but by other white men.
You missed out orcs, elves and dragons........all also acceptable to kill in video games.
Seriously, it would of been interesting to play the game from the other perspective. Perhaps a level where you have to defend against the first fleet convicts. Each time you speared a thief - 1 point, a rapist - 2 points and a massive 5 points for a murderer. Stereotypes are fun no?