Apple Just Says Yes To iPhone Smoking Game

ZosX sends along a puff piece from Wired's Brian X. Chen: "Apple on Monday approved Puff Puff Pass, a $2 game whose objective is to pass a cigarette or pipe around and puff it as many times as you can within a set duration. So much for taking the high road, Apple. The game allows you to choose between smoking a cigarette, a cigar, and a pipe. Then you select the number of people you'd like to light up with (up to five), the amount of time, and a place to smoke (outdoors or indoors). And you're ready to get right on puffing."

Comments

Good

[C0R1D4N]

I would prefer Apple not to choose my morals for me.

Re:Good

[icannotthinkofaname]

The app was approved but with an Adult rating: Apple rates Puff Puff Pass 17+ for “Frequent/Intense Alcohol, Tobacco, or Drug Use or References.”

And they don't have an "18+: There Might Be a Nipple Somewhere in This App" rating? What makes this sort of adult material different from other sorts of adult material, aside from the developer agreement?

Re:Good

[fractoid]

The point (on here) is that Steve was really proud / pretentious / narcissistic that they do exactly that. He takes a swipe at others for being lowbrow.

Mr. Jobs has made an entire career on pretension. There's a reason that Apple evokes so much rabid zealotry from the otherwise computer-agnostic arty types. Just look at the way he boldly announces products' limitations and disabilities as strokes of design genius (and then later, even more astoundingly, announces re-enabling basic functionality as 'groundbreaking new features' - witness the iPhone's recent addition of multi-tasking, and the "you can't fit a netbook in your pocket" campaign with the release of the iPhone and iPod Touch, then the backflip to "bigger is better" with the release of the iPad). In the art world, you can go an awfully long way on "you're just not insightful enough to understand the vision", and these schmucks don't realise that it doesn't carry over into technical areas.

Re:Good

[xQx]

I disagree. The problem is Apple is making moral decisions about which applications to allow on the iPhone. The App Store is only a problem because it is the only way developers can sell their products to customers with the iPhone.

The real problem is: developers and their customers are no longer free to make independent decisions about what is acceptable and unacceptable trade, and the people who are making the moral decisions were neither elected nor accountable for their actions!

Re:I don't get it

[cgenman]

Tangent: Hardly any retail games in the US contain passing references to rape at all. I challenge you to list even 3. Illicit drug use is somewhat more heavily referenced, but hard to pull off in terms of actual player usage. See Heavy Rain's excellent and horrifying withdrawal sequences.

On topic: The name of the app is "puff puff pass" and features "phat beats." That's no more relating to legal substances than "The Little Black Book" app was about celibacy. This is clear glorification of smoking pot. Even taken at full face value, glorifying an age-locked activity the causes cancer runs directly counter to the "family safe" rulings at the core of this mess.

None of this is to say that I personally believe the app should be banned. But rather, this being approved is a symptom of how broken the app store approval process has become. And how desperately in need of revision the whole process is.

Re:I don't get it

[cgenman]

Good Memory! There is Phantasmagoria (early 90's) and Custer's Last Stand (early 80's). There is also a rather disturbing underground MMO called SocialoTron, that makes me fear for humanity.

The messed-up asian Hentai games like RapeLay haven't really seen a US release, certainly not a retail one, so they don't really count. The aforementioned MMO also isn't retail, though it has a US release.

In games in the west, any sex at all is considered controversial. Mass Effect's sex scene was probably the most visceral sex scene in modern gaming. Which is to say, it didn't show any bits, or any penetration, or really anything that couldn't be shown on post 9PM television. It was also incredibly controversial, and drew out a media firestorm. God of War, a game where you attempt to evicerate gods one at a time with giant claw-hooks of death, had their one sex scene off-camera. Grand Theft Auto, famed poster boy for how gaming is destroying all societal values, had their sex off camera. Source-of-all-evil posterboy Pyramid Head from Silent Hill gets as far as dry humping some mannequins through his clothes. Heck, Gologo 13 the NES title contained the incredibly controversial cut scene where two people hugged, then a curtain in their apartment closed.

There were a couple of bad sex-based games that pornographers experimented with in the financial boom at the end of the 90's. None of them went anywhere, as they were considered poison.

Sex really doesn't exist in games. There is some underdressed female protagonists, and some games have mechanics where people have children. But sex proper is basically verboten. Rape? In games? You'd have to admit that people have sex first, and that is still taboo.