Apple’s App Store has rejected a game that allows users to explore the different factions, consequences and outcomes of Syria’s ongoing civil war, because it deals with a “real entity.”

U.K. game developer Auroch Digital launched Endgame: Syria as part of its Game The News project, which aims to get the public interacting with and reconsidering the concept of gaming, with politically and socially relevant topics infiltrating a medium usually reserved purely for fiction. The latter, says Auroch Digital’s creative director Tomas Rawlings, is a trend that we should not be afraid to challenge.

“Obviously games about war are nothing new, but a game about an ongoing existing war, I think that makes some people uncomfortable,” Rawlings explained in the game’s official trailer. “I get why, and that’s because with the very word game the association is fun and frivolous, and war is serious. People are really dying. But I see game as a term for medium if it’s more comfortable you could call it simulation, an exploration or an interactive guide. As a game designer I’m interested in the situation [in Syria] and I want to explore it, and the medium that that’s natural for me to explore it in is via a game.”

Apple, however, did not agree. Weeks passed after the game was submitted to the App Store, and eventually Rawlings found out it would not be accepted it did not abide by the store’s terms and conditions, which state that no game should “solely target a specific race, culture, a real government or corporation, or any other real entity.”

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Read also:

Apple rejects Endgame: Syria iOS game (The Guardian (blog))

Apple Rejects iOS Game About Ongoing Civil War In Syria (AppAdvice)

Apple rejects iOS game about the civil war in Syria (The Verge)

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