Aw look, it's Phone Story, a fun little game where you produce things and catch things and shoot things at people! It's like Farmville AND Cut the Rope AND Angry Birds! Except that instead of saving your eggs or feeding your dinosaur, you're simulating the production of your iPhone — which means you're actually abusing workers and manipulating consumers in order to score your points.
The game has four parts:
- Mining minerals in the Congo, mistreating workers and contributing to Congolese war atrocities.
- Saving suicide leapers at a massive and mismanaged iPhone factory in China.
- Launching completed iPhones at rabid marauding customers, after first drumming up their slavering lust for the product.
- Throwing out the iPhone based on planned obsolescence schedule, thus generating toxic electronic waste.
Best part, by which we mean most abjectly depressing part: If you try to fail at any of your tasks, the game reminds you that it's too late to weasel out of this one, jerko. If you've got the tool to play on, you're already complicit.
Although now, even if you've got the tool, you can't necessarily play the game. Apple has pulled it from the iTunes store, we can't IMAGINE why. (It's still available on Droid, which — don't go patting yourselves on the backs now, nerds — is probably just as bad.)
