Tux, the Face of Terror

Scott Hardie | June 26, 2019
Erik Bates asked me a private question that, with his permission, I'm answering publicly because it amuses me.

His question: Why is this penguin with some plastic wristbands around it the representative image of Terrorism in the goo game?

My answer: I honestly have no recollection. And yeah, it's a really bizarre choice. :-)

I do remember this much. Years ago when I was trying to turn Funeratic into a business, I needed public-domain images that I could use without paying for them. Flickr had a wide variety of such images and a filter to make finding them easy. That's where I got all of the category images at once, except for a few recent additions. And that's why some of the category images are kind of weird and off-point, like Cartoons and Religion, and my personal favorite, Hoaxes, because I couldn't find anything truly representative and I had to approach the image search from a different angle. I should probably revise all of the category images soon, just to freshen them up a bit after all of these years.

I do remember adding that Terrorism category to the game, since it needed to be split off from Crime. But I cannot recall whether that split was before or after I collected that big batch of Flickr images.

My best guess is this: I couldn't find a decent-quality public-domain image on Flickr to represent terrorism, or perhaps I found images of racial stereotypes like Muslim men that I found distasteful. So, I grabbed the closest possible thing I could. A cartoon penguin would be racially inoffensive, and the bands wrapped around it might vaguely resemble strapped-on bombs, I guess? I must have figured that most people wouldn't recognize the character. (It's Tux, the Linux mascot.)

Now that I look at it again, I really have no idea how I made any connection between that image to terrorism. :-)

Incidentally, if you want to see some other funny and weird choices that I had to make when getting free images from Flickr, check out the Attributes, Defects, and Skills pages in Gothic Earth, which are full of them. Some of my personal favorites: Heavy Armor, Invisibility, Mind Shield, Super Strength, Telekinesis, Low-Powered, Nemesis, No Sense of Humor, and Persuasion.

Erik Bates | June 27, 2019
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Samir Mehta | July 22, 2019
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