But, once again, this is just too stupid to ignore.
It seems the country is in an uproar over an iPhone game called NRA: Practice Range, allegedly funded by the National Rifle Association itself (though it was developed by MEDL Mobile). In the game, you shoot at targets in both indoor and outdoor shooting ranges. All of the targets are inanimate objects. Some of them move, some of them don't, but as far as I can tell without buying the app (and according to what I've heard from those who have), none of them bleed. Even so, everyone is pretty angry about it, either because of the timing of the application's release or simply because so many people have never seen a gun in a cheaply made video game before.
Anti-gun activists and half the journalists in the nation have been attacking the NRA relentlessly for whole month, and this game only made it worse. Personally, I don't care about the NRA, because I don't own any rifles, and I don't care much about this game, because I don't own an iPhone. But it's hard not to notice when the media collectively goes off the deep end and drowns in its own frantic panic-mongering.
I'll just post a nice example that caught my attention earlier today. An opinion piece on NY Daily News, creatively titled Simply app-alling, calls the game "truly sickening" and — echoing the words of NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre as he criticized the developers of violent video games — "callous, corrupt and corrupting." It is slightly ironic that an NRA-branded shooting game has appeared so soon after LaPierre uttered those words in his ill-informed attempt to redirect blame for shootings from guns themselves to violence in media (i.e., from one scapegoat to another)... but only slightly.
LaPierre, it would seem, has a problem with violent games, and NRA: Practice Range isn't violent. Literally no violence occurs. So while the untimely release of this game is somewhat ironic and even a bit distasteful, given the context, it certainly isn't an example of "disgusting hypocrisy, profiteering and irresponsibility."
I don't see how it's disgusting at all. It might actually be one of the least violent shooting games ever released. It makes Duck Hunt look like a nightmarish glimpse into the mind of a mass murdering psychopath.
cute little ducky... BANG
In fact, Duck Hunt would serve as a much better training tool for an aspiring spree killer, since it's played by aiming a plastic gun at the television. Meanwhile, NRA: Practice Range is played by making smudgy thumb prints on a touch screen. If we're going to write about disgusting, appalling, "truly sickening" games, we should probably start with something that actually involves killing, even something as mild as this wholesome Nintendo classic, rather than railing against the one game in which nothing gets hurt.
Somehow, though, I don't think Duck Hunt is soon to be the target of any political poo-slinging. I'd have mentioned instead a few of the many games in which shooting virtual people is the goal, but if today's journalists are so horrified and offended by fake target practice in a fake shooting range, then learning about a game in which you blow fake people's brains out might send the lot of them into a catatonic state. On second thought, that would be pretty nice. I should send them some gameplay footage of Max Payne.
