Monday, October 25, 2010

Treehackers

This arrived in my inbox today. Since my friend Eddy explicitly says he's putting it in the public domain, here you go. Feel free to make this happen, share, repost, or whatever!
Lunch-time conversation with colleagues turned to the idiosyncracies of the Mac App-store's guidelines on acceptable content - and how to work round them.  Apparently depictions of violence against animals or people are out; but no mention of plants.  Nor are your enemies allowed to be any identifiable real-world cultural group; but apparently nothing prevents *your* side from being one.  So we concluded that you might be allowed a hyper-violent video game in which the enemy is a force of triffids and ents defending the forests from evil loggers who've hired you as a mercenary to fend off the mobile plants while the loggers go to work raping the rain-forests.  Since it's common "knowledge" that the nazis all ran away to hide out in South America, *our* side can safely be jack-booted thugs with hakkenkreutz insignia.  We just have to be careful not to have any of them being killed horribly; so the ents and triffids must be killing humanely, thereby further driving home the "you are on the side of evil" message.  Make it sufficiently over the top, I suspect it could actually be very popular, just for subverting all the silly censoriousness (not just Apple's) about violent video games.   Remembering that some on this list have contacts in the gaming industry, I hereby dedicate this silliness to the public domain.  As to this mail's subject: despite its similarity to the word "tree-hugger", especially when pronounced, it'd be more faithfully translated as lumberjack - or "tree-hacker".   Eddy. 

3 comments:

Kate Fosk said...

You know, funny as this mail is, it has never made much sense to me why recreational fantasy murder is considered a normal playtime pursuit -Kate

Kate Fosk said...

Though I find it easier to put up with for detective stories (recreational virtual murder) ..but then I think it is solving the puzzle which is interesting to me, and really I would be happier with a different puzzle.
-Kate

Kate Fosk said...

.....and..just to be even more contradictory...I am much more accepting of violence so long as it is funny.....Kate