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A PAKISTANI VIDEO game based on a Taliban school massacre of more than 150 people, mostly children, in the country’s northwest has been removed after triggering a social media uproar, with critics blasting it as tasteless.
The game, called Pakistan Army Retribution, was released by the Punjab IT board on Google Play, and invites the player to step into the shoes of a soldier shooting extremists in the hallways of a school.
It is inspired by Pakistan’s deadliest ever insurgent attack that saw nine Taliban gunmen storm a school in Peshawar city, shooting students and teachers in cold blood and occupying the school for hours until they were killed by the army.
The December 2014 assault shocked Pakistan, already scarred by a decade of attacks, and emotional ceremonies marking the anniversary were held across the country last month.
But after an article lampooning the game in Pakistan’s most widely read English language newspaper Dawn on Monday, social media users lambasted its makers for exploiting the tragedy.
“Distasteful”
“Bizarre and distasteful,” user Shaheryar Mirza wrote.
“Play the APS game on Android, kill the bad guys, empathy and good taste in one go,” wrote Fasi Zaka, referring to the Army Public School that was targeted in the grisly attack.
The Punjab Information Technology Board, a government body aggressively promoting digital innovation in the central Pakistan province, offered a mea culpa on Twitter.
“The APS game has been removed. It was in poor taste,” its head Dr Umar Saif wrote.
“Thank you for highlighting this mistake. We have made the amends.”
By this afternoon, the game was no longer available on Google Play.
Umar Saif / TwitterThe APS game has been removed. It was in poor taste. Thank you for highlighting this mistake. We have made the amends.
— Umar Saif (@umarsaif) January 18, 2016
© – AFP 2016, originally published 6.13pm
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It says in the article, “step into the shoes of a soldier shooting extremists” so doesn’t that mean that there’s a specific enemy & not just shooting at random children? I only ask because the headline suggests that all you’d have to do in the game is shoot at random children.
“A PAKISTANI VIDEO game based on a Taliban school massacre of more than 150 people, mostly children,”
Mostly male children. They went in there with a hitlist of boys to kill as they were the sons of army officers.
130 schoolboys were killed.
Same thing in Africa. Boko Haram kill the boys and often burn them alive.
Vinnie , I missed your comment I was so irate. Well said.
How come when the children killed are boys its almost always omitted from the article. These children were boys, targeted because they were boys and sons of military personnel. If they had have been girls it would have been plastered all over this article. The same whitewashing of male victims occurred with the reporting on kony. He slaughtered 100s of boys and enslaved more but that was seldom mentioned during the reporting on that evil monster. Author, change this article. Boys were murdered , not just children.
Thank you for highlighting this mistake .
Bat
sh*t
Crazy
You’d be wondering what the mindset of the devs were. “Hmm…how can we make the mass murder of children fun?”
Am I dreaming?????is this real life?????????
Please call it the Google play store in future as that’s what it is
The anonymous pos who wrote this article is unlikely to change the wording. But people are taking account of your biases.
have your say