At 11:07 AM today, CNET reported that Apple had approved the iPhone Baby Shaker application. Two hours and 18 minutes later, an update reported that the iPhone could no longer be used to simulate baby torture.
Specifically, the “game” was this:
The object of Baby Shaker is to stop the incessant crying of an infant pictured on screen by violently shaking the iPhone, at which point two red “x” marks appear over the baby’s eyes. “See how long you can endure his or her adorable cries before you just have to find a way to quiet the baby down!” reads the sales pitch for Baby Shaker.
Personally, I consider this behavior to be horrifying… on the part of Apple, that is. Because I believe that people should damn well be allowed to buy and sell this application.
Here’s the obvious argument against:
Jennipher Dickens, who founded a nonprofit organization in 2007 after her son Christopher was injured from being shaken by his father, brought the new application to our attention…. “As a mother of a child who was violently shaken at 7 weeks old, causing a severe brain injury, and the founder of a national organization for Shaken Baby Syndrome prevention, I don’t have to tell you how much this horrifies me!!!” she wrote in an e-mail.
The argument for:
If Ms. Dickens is trying to prevent shaken baby syndrome, then why is she preventing the distribution of an application that clearly demonstrates that shaking a baby can kill it?
I’ll go out on a limb and suggest that the kind of people who find this kind of thing amusing, and who share it with their amused friends, are exactly the same kind of chowderheads who, two weeks after becoming an unplanned parent, might inflict devastating injuries on their child through sheer ignorance.
Much better to ban a tasteless joke, and shut down any possibility of viral information-sharing. Just so long as no one is offended, which is the important thing.
Is there something to be said for not encouraging or reinforcing a dangerous behavior for fun?
I remember once playing a computer game where I was doing really badly and switched to just hitting as many traffic cones as I could on each turn. At the end of that week, I felt drawn to the traffic cones along the NJ Turnpike – they seemed to go on for miles, all perfectly spaced. I had to remind my overtired college student brain of the difference between games and reality.
New parents operate in a constant state of exhaustion, uncertainty, and frustration. I would argue that the aforementioned chowderheads in this state are not going to think “Don’t shake the baby, that’s bad, it killed the iPhone baby.” It seems more likely that some fragment of memory is going to whisper “just shake him a little, he’ll stop” without it being a conscious thought. I don’t think parents who shake their babies are doing it for fun or with a clear head. They don’t shake happy babies. Muscle memory would kick in with the anger and frustration of dealing with a tiny screaming creature who never seems satisfied.
Better to reinforce a perfect bounce-sway or putting the screaming baby down someplace safe while you regain your composure. But I don’t know how to make that funny.
You know, I think I’ve killed well over 150,000 Nazis since I started out on my Apple //e, and yet I’ve somehow never had the urge to bonk a real German on the head.
I get what you’re saying, Janice, and I don’t mean to discount it. But it seems to me that if SBS is common, it’s because there’s already a widespread perception that a) shaking an adult is a kind of “acceptable” violence which doesn’t cause actual injury, and b) a complete failure to understand that babies aren’t built the same way.
Beyond that, there’s a huge difference, I think, between your traffic cone experience and the iPhone simulation. Driving games work because it’s very easy to simulate the 2D windshield view, and it’s perceptually similar to what you’ll see when actually driving. But the Baby Shaker starts with a flat baby weighing a few ounces, which you shake one handed — there’s nothing similar in sense perception to the real-life event.
I’d be opposed for this reason to a similar “joke” involving a baby doll, a sound chip, and an accelerometer. That’s an actual training simulation. The software isn’t.
It seems to me that different people use/process video games very differently. Myself, I find the shaking baby app horrifying and can’t imagine wanting to even pretend to shake a baby to death to kill it.
I have a ten-year-old son, and having parented him through infancy, I certainly understand the impulse to shake a baby hard, and had I not been educated that you aren’t supposed to do it, I might have. Parenting can be extraordinarily frustrating and I’m not at my best when chronically sleep deprived.
But, I also watch how my son, and other people, process the world, and I see that for some people, shaking a baby onscreen would likely be a satisfying way to handle an urge and to work their way through that urge in a way that doesn’t hurt anyone.
I haven’t seen the app, so I don’t know exactly how it portrays the baby – subtleties could matter here.
Does Apple have a rule about games not portraying the death of babies? It would be good if the App store had clear rules.
I would submit that someone who would shake a baby would do so whether they saw an iPhone app about it or not.
Also, I think baby shakers break down into two groups of people: the emotionally unstable who are willing to hurt their baby, and the uneducated who don’t know that shaking a baby can injure or kill it.
I’m all for free speech, and I’ll note that the iPhone demographic and the new parent demographic overlap pretty significantly. If this application educates just one parent about the dangers of shaking babies, it’s probably worth it. And, if Ms. Dickens’ protest and eventual success in banning this application gets it enough publicity (cf. CNET.com) to educate just one more parent, then that’s a good thing to.
The world will survive without one more iPhone app…
Point of note: Jeff – the CNET link you provide above provides a screenshot of the app, including the baby and the two red X’s over it’s eyes.