23 April 2009

An incredibly bad iPhone application


"Baby Shaker" is/was a game (?) which asked the participant to shake the baby to stop it from crying.

The 99-cent game, which showed black-and-white line drawings of a baby, had the description: "On a plane, on the bus, in a theatre. Babies are everywhere you don't want them to be! They're always distracting you from preparing for that big presentation at work with their incessant crying. Before Baby Shaker, there was nothing you could do about it. See how long you can endure his or her adorable cries before you just have to find a way to quiet the baby down!"

Shaking the motion-sensitive phone meant that the onscreen baby would get large red Xs over its eyes.

I have previously posted re the dangers of shaking babies. There's additional discussion at the Guardian.

It's clear from the red Xs over the eyes that whoever developed this application was perfectly familiar with the potentially lethal consequences of shaking a baby, but still thought it would be "funny" to market this. It wasn't developed by Apple, but the fact that they allowed it to be licensed and posted on their website is an incredible oversight (probably by a bunch of people who don't have babies).

6 comments:

  1. How is it any more bad taste than any of the 'games' in which we have to shoot innocent people.

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  2. Without trying to defend those games, there is one difference. Most people know that it is wrong to shoot innocent people. Many uneducated or unsophisticated people don't know that it's wrong/dangerous to shake a baby.

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  3. I have to agree with Ambuj here. It's in such poor taste it's comical.

    I was with my friends in the hospital who just had a baby. They had to watch a film we refer to as "Never, Never Shake a Baby." Asking him if it is OK yet to shake his baby has become a pretty awful inside joke. That doesn't mean I don't laugh at it however.

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  4. Lighten up, everyone knows the equation:
    baby + shake = bad

    The app is just playing on the fact that babies are really annoying. If I had a quid for every time I've wanted to thump someone's screaming kid, I'd be a very rich woman. Obviously I'd never act on the impulse to do so, but that doesn't mean the impulse isn't there. Might as well admit it, accept it and see the funny side.

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  5. wow.. it's amazing the human species made it this long with such selfish tendencies.

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  6. Whoever is playing that game is REALLY good at it.

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