A game has been pulled from Apple online stores and Google Play after it faced a huge backlash over claims that the app was racist.
60,000 people signed a petition to get Survival Island 3: Australia Story 3D removed, because the game encourages players to kill Indigenous Australian characters, rewarding them with weapons and food when they kill the Aboriginal people.
As reported by the Mail Online, the game had been available from December 15, but the petition was set up yesterday (Friday) claiming that the app “promotes racism and negative stereotypes of Indigenous Australians”.
Survival Island caused controversy after screenshots emerged showing players pointing a bow and arrow at two men holding spears, alongside a large warning reading ‘Beware of Aborigines’.
The petition was set up by Gadigal woman Georgia Mantle, who wrote on Change.org:
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. This app is another colonialist frontier and continues to exploit the deaths of many Aboriginal people without regard to the trauma that it instigates.
Communications Minister Mitch Fifield has now questioned how a game like this could have been offered for sale on major websites without any issues being flagged up far earlier.
In a statement, he said:
I am appalled that anyone would develop such a so called ‘game’ and that any platform would carry it. I have asked my department to provide advice on the circumstances of its release and to review and advise in relation to any other games by the same developer.
Seriously, at what point did developers Nil Entertainment think was okay?
