The game encouraging players to 'rescue' an anorexic woman by throwing cake at her.

by Kahla Preston April 10, 2015

Image: A still from the Rescue the Anorexia Girl app.

The internet is a pretty great place most of the time, but occasionally you’ll encounter something in your travels that makes you despair. Take, for instance, the mind-meltingly awful app Amazon and Android have just pulled from their online stores.

Named “Rescue the Anorexia Girl”, the animated game urged users to “become a real hero” by throwing cake, pastries and sandwiches at the image of an anorexic woman whenever it popped up on screen. If a food item missed the woman, her weight would drop even further until she was dead.

So, in sum, the developers of the app have taken a life-threatening eating disorder that currently affects 53,000 women and men here in Australia alone, and turned it into fodder for an “amusing game” (their description, not ours) to entertain bored office workers.

How did this sickening app go on sale in the first place?

"Anorexia is a serious disease and fatal if not cured in time. When you have anorexia, the desire to lose weight becomes more important than anything else," a description on the cached version of the Amazon app page reads, in what seems to be a weird attempt at sincerity.

"A girl from new Rescue The Anorexia Girl Free game has started to renounce meals and even tasty cakes cannot save the situation. But now you have come, brave hero and you can save her. We believe in you!"

Another description of the game, shared by a dismayed Twitter user, implores: "Skinny girl needs your help to become fatter! Feed her with different goodies... the thing is that anorexia girl may not want to eat all these yummy things. Weird! That's why you are to feed her."

It's hard to understand how this game, marketed by SmartTouchmedia, was even conceived in the first place, let alone approved for public consumption. The lack of sensitivity and empathy is staggering; it grossly oversimplifies a medical condition that can be extremely difficult for sufferers to overcome.

The game's icon (left) and product description.

"I'm horrified by the fact that someone one would even create an app like that. Anorexia is very serious mental health condition and the mortality rates are quite high as well," says psychologist Pinar Karabulut, who specialises in the treatment of eating disorders.

"We're trying to develop better attitudes in terms of approaching people who are suffering from eating disorders, and we're making progress But something like this is not helping at all, but making it a lot worse."

Even the mere suggestion that the cure for anorexia is to eat more undermines the complicated nature of the illness, and the various emotional and environmental factors that can trigger its development. Although anorexia is an eating disorder, food is only one aspect of it.

Anorexia is more than just food.

"Anorexia is not about food. There are a lot of underlying reasons that lead to the condition developing in the first place... throwing a cake so that [the character] can eat and put on weight is a very simplistic and inappropriate way of looking at this condition in general," Ms Karabulut says.

"We don't ridicule depression. We can't ridicule anorexia nervosa either."

Both Amazon and Android pulled the app from their sites after it was widely condemned by social media users and campaign groups. A spokesperson for Amazon told UK website The Independent, “All apps in the Amazon Appstore must adhere to our content guidelines and the app in question is no longer available from our store.”

Let's hope we don't see anything of its kind again.

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