Sugar-Coated Drug-Dealing Game Approved For iPhone

Pocket Gamer writes "Of course, Apple wouldn't allow such a salacious games as Dope Wars on the hallowed corridors of the App Store. What Catamount's done is sugarcoat its game (quite literally) and turned it into Prohibition 3: Candy Wars — a reskinned version of the exact same game."

Lots of controversy over what they let on ...

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a lot of discussion lately about what they do and don't let on the platform... http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20090120-apple-and-app-store-censorship-where-to-draw-the-line.html [arstechnica.com]

Re: !literally tag

[nog_lorp]

Incorrect.
To literally sugarcoat means to coat with sugar.
The alternative, to figuratively sugarcoat (i.e. the figure of speech) is to make appear more pleasant or acceptable.

lame pedantry

[Trepidity]

Yes, they did also do the figurative meaning: they changed their game from being about selling drugs to being about selling something else in order to figuratively "sugarcoat" the subject.

But they did so by skinning the game with sugary graphics, which seems pretty "literally" sugar coating to me, in that rather than merely figuratively sugarcoating their game with some arbitrarily less offensive graphics, the new graphics are, literally, images of sugar. That's not the figure of speech "sugarcoat", but the literal "a coating of sugar".

To quote the grandparent poster, "just because you're not actually pouring sugar over your fuckign iPhone doesn't make this use of sugarcoat (giving your gtame a candy theme) less literal". Perhaps you're going to argue next that a painting of a haystack doesn't "literally" depict haystacks, but only depicts them "figuratively", because it's not actually made out of hay?