For the most part, I would like to believe the Apple employees in general have pretty good heads on their shoulders. If anything, you would have expected some open-mindedness from a company that claims to be dynamic and innovative in nature. Sadly, the opposite is exactly what we’ve experienced from the folks at Apple.
No one will argue that last presidential election is historically insignificant. In many different ways, the entire election campaign, from the primary to the final election result, has meant something special to most of us. In honoring this special occasion, we at RightSprite decided to create a commemorative iPhone game that is both family friendly and light-hearted.
We’ve selected one of the most popular genres — match three puzzle — and gave it an election theme. Instead of matching 3 jewels in a row, you would match 3 voters of the same face to get the points. You are able to select an avatar and you will share the same board as the computer component. Now, we are fairly cognizant of the fact that some people may feel more sensitive about the topic, so we deliberately made cartoon versions of the candidates and removed the names. We balanced gender by having 2 male and 2 female candidates. We also made sure that there are two “blue” avatars for the Democrat party and two “red” avatars for the Republican party. Finally, in lieu of catching all the election hype and try to cash in on it, we decided that we would launch the game after the election is over and make it free.
We submitted the app last week, and last night we got a courteous reject email from Apple. Why? According to Apple, our application contains “obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, etc.), or other content or materials that in Apple’s reasonable judgement may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users.” To fix this issue, Apple suggested that we should “remove the caricatures of public figures from the application.”
After taking all the precautions, my initial reaction was that I found this to be exceedingly offensive. Other than the game is loosely themed politically, there isn’t an objectionable thing the application I can think of. Would it have been less of a caricature if we had used real photos? I think not. And, what if we had accessorized the candidates with glasses or mustaches? Would that have been any more respectful?
There is no doubt that the when players pick up this game, they will immediately make that association between the avatars in the game and the current events. Indeed, this is what we intended to do as the game itself is a commemorative piece. Without the avatars, the application is really nothing more than a mediocre rehash of a match three game.
Many of us have heard about and read the horror stories about submitting applications to Apple. We had up to this point been blissfully unscathed by the Apple AppPolice. Our streak has now run out and we have our own cautionary tale for other developers out there. Hopefully you’ll sense Apple’s logic in the censoring of our caricatures and be able to avoid making our mistake in your own apps. In the meantime, we’re back to the drawing board and we will keep you posted. Comments welcome.