While the nation mourns the lives lost in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio, politicians and the media continue to find ways to insist that guns don't kill people, video games do. President Trump jumped on the bandwagon during his national address yesterday, condemning the "glorification of violence in our society. This includes the gruesome and grisly video games that are now commonplace." The sentiment is frankly outrageous, and has zero evidence to back it. The inevitable backlash began on Twitter, with the #VideoGamesAreNotToBlame hashtag, and quickly grew to include memers in the r/dankmemes community. As of yesterday, the informative memes (some include graphs) have been hovering at the top of the page. Here are our favorites.
candy crush
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By Unknown
The fact that it might have been built by Activision is also a nail to the coffin.
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Via CandySwipe
Open letter to King.com who wants to cancel the registration of the CandySwipe trademark.
Dear King,
Congratulations! You win! I created my game CandySwipe in memory of my late mother who passed away at an early age of 62 of leukemia. I released CandySwipe in 2010 five months after she passed and I made it because she always liked these sorts of games. In fact, if you beat the full version of the android game, you will still get the message saying "...the game was made in memory of my mother, Layla..." I created this game for warmhearted people like her and to help support my family, wife and two boys 10 and 4.
Two years after I released CandySwipe, you released Candy Crush Saga on mobile; the app icon, candy pieces, and even the rewarding, "Sweet!" are nearly identical. So much so, that I have hundreds of instances of actual confusion from users who think CandySwipe is Candy Crush Saga, or that CandySwipe is a Candy Crush Saga knockoff. So when you attempted to register your trademark in 2012, I opposed it for "likelihood of confusion" (which is within my legal right) given I filed for my registered trademark back in 2010 (two years before Candy Crush Saga existed).
Now, after quietly battling this trademark opposition for a year, I have learned that you now want to cancel my CandySwipe trademark so that I don't have the right to use my own game's name. You are able to do this because only within the last month you purchased the rights to a game named Candy Crusher (which is nothing like CandySwipe or even Candy Crush Saga). Good for you, you win. I hope you're happy taking the food out of my family's mouth when CandySwipe clearly existed well before Candy Crush Saga.
Read the rest of Albert Ransom's open letter here and support him by buying his game here.
