The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC) has made no bones about the problems it has with some of the games offered on Nickelodeon’s AddictingGames.com website. Now that Nick has removed some of the titles in question, the CCFC is showing no sign of letting up.
The organization wasn’t pleased with either the content of some of the games offered—stating that “The games at Nickelodeon’s AddictingGames.com have it all: lechery… gratuitous violence… and even animal cruelty”—or the manner in which Nick linked to the content from “every page” of its websites aimed at pre-schoolers such as NickJr.com and Neopets.
Nickelodeon did remove links to some of the questionable titles on the NickJr.com page, but the CCFC wants parents to “keep the pressure on” the network by submitting a form letter that urges Nick executives to “finish the job” and “stop promoting violent and sexualized games to children.”
Among the games the CCFC wants removed are Nancy Balls (“A woman could be the next Speaker of the House. That takes balls.”), Torture Chamber III, Highway Pursuit (“Shoot those jerks [cops] who want their money back.”) and You Da Sperm (“The game's soundtrack is a moaning woman”), whose link appears dead at the moment anyway. More examples of offending games, in the CCFC's opinion anyway, can be found here.
Comments
Re: CCFC Claims Small Victory Over Nick, Looks to Win War
While I do not normally agree with CCFC, I think they have a point this time around. To their credit, they do not seem to be calling for the shutdown AddictingGames.com. They seem to be going for removing links going from Nick's various 'small child safe' sites to the not 'small child safe' site, which as a parental tool makes sense.
If a site is going to market itself as 'kid safe' then it should live up to that claim.
Re: CCFC Claims Small Victory Over Nick, Looks to Win War
Really it would have been smarter to pull the link from their shinny happy people sites and leave the games alone, and even keep the link on the not so shinny happy site back to the land of butterflies and lollipops.
Re: CCFC Claims Small Victory Over Nick, Looks to Win War
Which oddly enough is exactly what the CCFC's form letter is asking them to do.
Nick seems to have the option of decoupling the sites, or making both sites kid friendly. This intermediate step they took borrowed from the second solution, but was not enough.
Re: CCFC Claims Small Victory Over Nick, Looks to Win War
So they got an inch, and are going for the full mile. They got a few games removed, and are now looking to get the site shut down completely.
Re: CCFC Claims Small Victory Over Nick, Looks to Win War
I've seen nothing to suggest that CCFC aims to have the site shut down.
Andrew Eisen
Re: CCFC Claims Small Victory Over Nick, Looks to Win War
I just don't trust them to stop there. Almost no one stops short of a total gound burn.