The new iPhone game Phone Story hits awfully close to home — the game concerns itself with the real-world costs of creating a smartphone.
It charts a course from Coltan mining in the Congo to the horrendous manufacturing workers’ conditions that led to the notorious Foxconn suicides, continuing through commercial release and planned obselescence driven by a culture of “want”. The story concludes by depicting the environmental and human toll of unchecked eWaste.
Molleindustria, the studio behind Phone Story (as well as other politically charged games like McDonald’s: The Game and Leaky World), pledged to give all of the money that they made from sales to “organisations that are fighting corporate abuses”.
Phone Story launched this morning, and two hours later it was pulled from the App Store by Apple. Molleindustria has now posted a new page on their site, saying that Apple banned their product for the following reasons:
Phone Story was pulled from the iTunes App Store on Tuesday September 13 at 11.35am, only few hours after its official announcement.
Apple explained that the game is in violation of the following guidelines*:
15.2 Apps that depict violence or abuse of children will be rejected
16.1 Apps that present excessively objectionable or crude content will be rejected
21.1 Apps that include the ability to make donations to recognised charitable organisations must be free
21.2 The collection of donations must be done via a web site in Safari or an SMS
Moleindustria states that “We contest the violation 21.1 and 21.2 since it’s not possible to make donations through Phone Story. Molleindustria simply pledged to redirect the revenues to no-profit organisations, acting independently.”
Molleindustria says that they are considering coming up with a new version of Phone Story that “depicts the violence and abuse of children involved in the electronic manufacturing supply chain in a non-crude and non-objectionable way.”
Of course, it is probably not possible to depict such a thing in a non-objectionable way — that’s the point. Kotaku has reached out to Apple for comment, and will update this post as the story progresses.
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