Parents are crying foul over an iPhone app called Baby Shaker.
The aptly named game challenges (ab)users to “See how long you can endure his or her adorable cries before you just have to find a way to quiet the baby down!” And the only way to silence these little angels (god willing) is to vigorously shake them until adorable red Xs cover their eyes… ‘awww who’s a dead baby, yes you are, yes you are’ (video below).
Marilyn Barr, founder of the National Center on Shaken Baby Syndrome (and known baby sympathizer), condemns the game, “Not only are they making fun of Shaken Baby Syndrome but they are actually encouraging it. This is absolutely terrible.”
It no more encourages child abuse than the Grand Theft Auto franchise encourages Grand Theft Auto. Oh, and what do we have here: Payback, a GTA clone for the iPhone! And while Apple apparently doesn’t have a problem with gamers carjacking people then running them over with their own car for extra points, they’ve removed the much less graphic Baby Shaker for supposedly violating their Terms of Service.
But perhaps with some slight tweaking Baby Shaker can play nice. They could simply change the premise from shaking the baby to rocking the baby to sleep, and market it as a teaching tool for first-time parents. Of course if some people choose to intentionally lose, the company can hardly be blamed for that. Everybody wins! (well except for the dead babies of course)
This completely stupid application will probably only gain in notoriety because of all this and be downloaded a million times from other
sources.
I’m sure that whoever approved this for sale at iTunes will surely be fired. As well they should.