Smuggle Truck immigration game under fire

Source: Reuters

An iPod and iPad application that makes a game of the perils of sneaking across the US-Mexico border has drawn the ire of activists for immigrant rights.

In Smuggle Truck, due for release next month, a lorry bounces along a cartoon desert highway and sheds men, women and children as it hits bumps and hops over canyons.

Developers say the game – the aim of which is to keep the people in the lorry as they speed through the borderlands – takes a satirical swipe at the US's broken immigration system. Each year hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants are arrested as they try to sneak across the rugged south-west border from Mexico, and hundreds perish making the trip.

"Smuggle Truck was inspired by the frustration our friends have experienced in trying to immigrate to the United States," Smuggle Truck's developer, Boston-based firm Owlchemy Labs, said in a statement posted online.

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/feb/10/smuggle-truck-game-developer-immigration