I tweeted about this but I am so enraged I can’t just leave it at that. 140 characters isn’t enough. You never shake a baby. You never do anything that would encourage someone else to shake a baby. That is not how you get a kid quiet… unless, of course, you’re an idiot. So please, someone tell me how it is at all entertaining to play a game where the only way to quiet the baby down is to shake it? Seriously, what is wrong with people?

I know there are all sorts of video games out there where people kill other people, rob each other, and even rape a mother and her two girls (though that’s been banned from most U.S. distributors) — and those all have their own issues attached to them, but I see no value at all in an application for the iPhone in which a little baby cries and the only way to stop him from crying is to shake the phone. When you’ve shaken the phone enough, the baby’s eyes get a big X over them. Apparently the purpose of the game is to “See how long you can endure his or her adorable cries before you just have to find a way to quiet the baby down!”

The 99 cent app for the iPhone has already been pulled but how on earth was it approved in the first place when, apparently, Apple has banned other apps for just using curse words? This is not only morally wrong… this is an application speaking to a generation of users and it’s saying “shake till they shut up.”

Update: And so with all of the outrage we finally get an apology from Apple where they say, “This application was deeply offensive and should not have been approved for distribution on the App Store…”  They’ve acknowledged their mistake, let’s just hope they learned from it.

Tweet  Print This Post

Tags: art & entertainment, family & parenting // Add Comment »