Drug-dealing game on the iPhone...Just Say No

This week the red-tops have rounded on Underworld – an iPhone game that simulates the drug dealing experience. The application, which was due for an imminent release, allows players to experience the greasy netherworld of life as a small-time pusher trading cannabis and ecstasy to impressionable young teens.

Quoted in pretty much all the reports is a mother whose daughter tragically died from a heroin overdose. Not unreasonably, she’s condemned the game and is affronted by it. Also fighting her corner is the drug treatment charity Addaction. A statement from the charity opined that the although the game “may be intended to be light-hearted, it only serves to trivialise a very important issue.”

Naturally we’ve been here before. GTA, for instance, wasn’t shy of controversy and nor was Rockstar games’ follow-up Bully. But at least those titles had some elements that meant you could defend them and argue that they weren’t without some merit or some sort of moral standpoint. Bully, for instance, actually set you against playground menaces. Meanwhile, for all its faults, GTA was a fantastically realised virtual world and crucially came with an 18 certificate to keep it out of the sticky fingers of minors.

However, in the case of Underworld, what is there to stand up for? Certainly not the gameplay. It’s just a tarted-up trading sim that is unspeakably moribund and tedious. So, in a desperate attempt to garner sales, developers A-Steroids have tacked on a paper-thin drug theme. Depressingly it will probably work. But the really saddening thing is that it’ll be the games industry and gamers that get demonised as a result.

Make no mistake, the likes of Underworld will give games enthusiasts and the industry as a whole a bad name. By cynically targeting adolescents with an immature worldview, A-Steroids is dragging gaming back to the dim and distant time when arcades were seen as akin to the Cantina bar from Star Wars. A place lest we forget that Obi Wan Kenobi described as “a hive of scum and villainy”.

What’s especially disappointing is that mobile phone gaming is in many respects a bold new frontier. Especially in the case of the iPhone and LG handsets, whose accelerometers could usher in Wii-style motion sensitive games and bring games on mobiles to a new mainsteam audience. Underworld on the other hand seems to want to take us back into the bad old days.