Crave responds to Baby Pals DS Islamic message complaint

Earlier this week a story broke concerning an Islamic message in the DS game Baby Pals. An Indiana mother called Rachel Jones (henceforth ‘Indiana Jones’) was alerted to the message by her daughter, who clearly heard the words, “Islam is the light” whilst taking her virtual child for a bath.

Aside from the fact that this is a fairly innocuous sentiment – I spent my childhood tolerating much more forceful statements about Christianity – its existence is also unproven.

Indiana Jones complained about the same message coming from a doll a few months earlier. We understand that she now routinely listens to all of her children’s toys for religious propaganda.

We contacted Crave for a response. They didn’t send us one, but they did send one to Game Politics.

"In creating the Nintendo DS game “Baby Pals”, the game developer Brain Toys / InXile used sounds files to simulate the life like baby noises and babbling. The sounds are publicly available for license. It is a recording of a 5 month old baby babbling non-intelligible phrases. In over 200 hours of testing the product, no recognizable English words or phrases were discernable.

The sound in question of this babble may sound like the words night, right or light, but it is only coincidence as the baby recorded was too young to pronounce these words let alone a whole grammatically correct phrase.

We at Crave Entertainment and InXile regret that there was any misinterpretation of the baby noises and in no way have intentionally put any words or phrases into the baby sounds.

We hope this eases any concerns and fans continue to enjoy playing the game."

So, as any reasonable person already suspected, the message was either an extraordinary phonic coincidence or an Islamophobic hallucination - or more likely something between the two (there may be a babble that sounds approximately like “Islam is the light”, but it could be interpreted as dozens of different English phrases.)

The fact that the audio samples are licensed does give some credence to Indiana Jones’s claim that two toys have uttered the statement, however.

Or rather, that two toys haven’t uttered it in exactly the same way.

Update: Here's a video, gravely reporting that the game has an E rating, making it suitable for children, though we're struggling to identify which word in the phrase, "Islam is the light" is unsuitable for minors.

In fairness to Indiana Jones, it does sound quite a lot like "Islam is the light."

But it's not.