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Comment by joakleaf | Hacker News Reader

Apple sells these products (and takes a 30% cut), so they have some responsibility for what they are selling. They don't want to offend anyone, so they made a list of rules. Their review team interprets rules literally.

We may shake our heads when it comes to WW2, but it is really a grey area.

What if the game was depicting a war between present day religious or political groups? What if it was a game between heterosexuals and homosexuals? What about a racist theme?Would that be OK?

Certainly, some people would be offended. So where do you draw the line if you don't want to offend anyone with the products you sell?

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I don't even closely consider this a grey area, unless you consider everything a grey area.

This isn't a disputed current-day event. This is historic, and we're not even dealing with some (even remotely) controversial topic like say concentration camps here.

If you're gonna reject apps that might remotely, possibly, offend some tiny portion of your customers, you might as well just shut down.

Hope this was a mistake by a single employee.

However I think books and movies are different from games.

Games aren't purely informational; one inhabits them..

As you do any good book or film.

My Great-aunt didn't make it out of the camps. WW2 isn't a gray area by any honest interpretation.

Gray area in the sense that it actually offends some people whereas most people just shake their head.

The Russians weren't the enemy in WW2. In fact, their contribution greatly affected the outcome of the war.

Axis and Allies are good names if someone is being historically accurate.

They started out as enemies of the Allies, then they became enemies of the Axis powers when they changed their allegiance. And when they were pretending to be friends of the Polish people under Nazi rule, they intentionally failed to show up as promised to help out with the Warsaw uprising so that the Polish uprising leaders would die and not get in the way when they instituted communism in Poland (I saw the new "Warsaw Rising Museum" this past summer). Brings to mind the phrase "with friends like these, who needs enemies?" But to set clearly set the record straight, the Russians were indeed the enemy at some point no matter which side you were on.

The Soviet Union was always a US ally during the period of the war in which the US was a combatant. With 26,000,000 or so dead, [1] it is hard argue that they put any lower value on lives in Warsaw than its own citizens.[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties_of_the...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shtrafbat#.22Trampler.22_mine-...

Russia definitely did not promise to help out with Warsaw uprising and actively discouraged it. Uprising was a coup by Polish leaders to liberate Warsaw before Russian army arrives to be in a better negotiating position after the end of war. Soviet Union was under no obligation to help anti-soviet elements to fight Germans - enemy of my enemy is my friend is true only up to the point.

I don't know that you can back up your first sentence. I'm pretty sure the museum in Warsaw claims that they did plan to work together. Also, the museum shows part of a TV show from after the war which served as Soviet propaganda. The TV show rewrote history to say the Soviets fought alongside them. My Polish friend is in his mid-30s like me and explained how they were still showing this old TV program when he was a child in the 80s. Now he knows it was a lie.

Tell that to the Poles, the Finns and other nations that were invaded by the Russians. Only after Germany invaded Russia, Stalin decided that they are an enemy that should be dealt with.

"greatly affected" is a bit of an understatement.

I think you're sensationalizing this. This is a 1942 battlefield game attempting to depict historical accuracy.

Would preferred if they were best friends in this war game and shot rainbows at each others?

If this game was a Wikipedia article, it'd be tagged as saying that it doesn't have a neutral POV. Who do you think the Russans, Germans and Japanese thought were the enemy? Certainly not each other.

The U.S.S.R. was on the side of the Allies (U.S., Britain, France, et al.), not Japan and Germany.

At the end. U.S.S.R was on the side of Germany for years during WW2. [1,2]

After all, they enjoyed invading Poland with Germany, massacring quite a few Polish folks. [3,4]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germany%E2%80%93Soviet_Union_r... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pac... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Blokhin [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Poland

Sorry "depict historical accuracy". Seriously? It is a game, it doesn't depict anything accurately.

I don't find offensive, but I can that people would; I don't think a WW2 game is particularly amusing for the people who fought in the war and saw their friends die.

Really? Would you think that those people would also be offended by mentioning the war[1], making fun of "Mr. Hilter"[2] or the idea of Kamikaze Scotsmen[3]?

Also, it is a fact that most games only let you play as one faction that usually have some very bad luck[4][5][6], be them real or not.

[1]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfl6Lu3xQW0

[2]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlmGknvr_Pg

[3]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Es0t50H44IE

[4]: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/02/20

[5]: http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2011/11/04

[6]: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2003/10/22/

Sure, it's a gray area. But do you think Apple would reject a game depicting the Roman Empire fighting of the Huns? Or the Aztecs vs the Inca? Or is that OK, because we're not familiar with a current group of people that strongly identifies with any of these "enemies"?

I feel like historical content should get a free pass for some of these rules. They'd still have to make a judgement call to decide if this is a racist or otherwise offensive game though.

For instance, a historical game like Europa Universalis[1] allows you to kill, oppress or convert tens of thousands of Muslims or Christians, but that doesn't make it an offensive game. A game like Ethnic Cleansing[2] only allows you to kill dozens or hundreds of people would probably not be allowed though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_Universalis_IV [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_Cleansing_(video_game)

How is a game different to any other art form?

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