By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Writer
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation is promoting a children’s game designed to teach children how their carbon footprints are harming the planet. Called “Planet Slayer,” experts say the game is more accurately called “Final Exit,” because it appears to encourage suicide.
According to a press release by Steven W. Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute (PRI) and Colin Mason, PRI’s director of Media Production, the state-funded game is a colorful flash site that begins with a cartoon called the “Adventures of Greena.”
“Greena is a peace-symbol-sporting, midriff-baring heroine who looks as if she would be more at home at a Rolling Stones concert than in modern Australia,” Mosher and Mason write. “Not your average superhero, Greena careens through the cartoon chaining herself to trees, freeing chickens from cages, and saving bunnies from slavering death at the teeth of her dog, Schpinkee.”
Children are soon introduced to the “Planet Slayer Game” where they use a mini-space ship to save the earth by shooting down incoming environmental threats. The game ends with an image of Greena, once again chained to a tree, and crying out “Never surrender!”
“The heart of the website is a ‘Greenhouse Calculator,’ which supposedly calculates how big of a carbon footprint you have,” the release states.
The results othe calculations are displayed in the form of three pigs. The first pig represents the average person’s footprint, the second pig represents the player and the third pig represents the “green” ideal. Depending on how the child answers the question, the second pig grows or shrinks to show how much of a “greenhouse hog” the player is.
“The site also calculates how many years it will take for you to “use up” your “share of the planet,” the authors write.
When Mason took the test, his pig swelled up to a huge “greenhouse hog” and then exploded, leaving behind a pool of blood and bones. Over this gruesome scene appeared the words, “You will use up your share of the planet in 13.2 years.”
In other words, this is when he should die.
“Up until June, the game told kids that they should take the ‘Greenhouse Calculator’ quiz to ‘find out when you should die!’ Then, once they had answered the lifestyle questions, they would be bluntly informed that ‘You should die at age 4.8 (or 10.6, or 12.5).'”
Perhaps in response to complaints from parents, the version now available on the Internet asks only “Are you a carbon hog?” and then tells us by what age we have used up our “share of the planet.”
“Regardless of this change, the implication is still clear. If you have used up your share of the planet, the logical next step is to remove your bloated carcass from its surface,” the authors write.
“This is exactly what the image of the exploding hog still suggests. Does ‘Planet Slayer,’ then, promote suicide? Does it promote population control? What is to be done with the millions of people who have long ago used up “their share of the planet?” What are they to do with themselves?”
Even more disturbing is another lesson being taught to children in the video, that it is bad for the environment to earn and spend a great deal of money. “No matter how eco-friendly I made my other answers, whenever I indicated that I spent over $100,000 last year, my greenhouse hog swelled to hideous proportions,” Mason writes.
But the game offers a way out – by investing money in environmental groups and causes.
“As I gave away more and more of my money to environmental groups, my pig became the size of a mouse and floated away. The program gleefully informed me that ‘at this rate, you could live forever!’” Mason wrote.
He concludes with a final question: “What are we to think about the promise of the website that if you give enough money to the greenies, you will have eternal life? And they say that radical environmentalism is not a religion . . .”
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