Maturity, Madness, and 'Mass Effect'
Where are these people getting their copies of Mass Effect? I've seen several accounts of the game, and they seem to be completely divorced from the title I played for hours and hours. While I enjoyed a well-written, mature science-fiction action-RPG, it seems that radio pundit and columnist Kevin McCullough and FOX News anchor Martha MacCallum played an explicit interactive sex simulator.
This picked up steam a week ago, when McCullough claimed in a Townhall.com column that Mass Effect offered "customizable sodomy." I'm not quite sure what "customizable sodomy" is, and can only speculate that it involves the option of spinning rims, a spoiler, and an extended warranty.
To his credit, McCullough apologized for the utterly incorrect observations he made about the game. Many, many gamers sent him feedback about the column and how wrong he was about the game, and McCullough admitted that he was "misinformed on at least two points of substance in [his] original column." (The original column has been pulled from Townhall.com.)
Now FOX News has picked up the Mass Effect ball and run headfirst into traffic with it. Yesterday, Joystiq posted this interesting clip, hosted on GameTrailers. According to Martha MacCallum of FOX News' Live Desk, Mass Effect includes "full digital nudity," and "the ability for the players to engage in graphic sex."
I've played through Mass Effect twice (once as a Paragon-themed Infiltrator, and once as a Renegade-themed Soldier), and I've seen absolutely nothing of the sort. Yes, the game has sexual content, but it's the sort of sexual content you'd see left in a movie on basic cable. Through the entire game, you get exactly two chances to engage in sex, once near the beginning for assisting an NPC with a social problem, and once near the end as the culmination of the game's romantic subplot. In both cases, the "sex scenes" last for less than a minute, and contain all the explicit content of a PG-13 movie. There is no frontal nudity and absolutely no interaction during the activity itself. In fact, in the background during MacCallum's piece on FOX News, the first sexual interlude is played in its entirety.
I wouldn't recommend Mass Effect for children, but not because of its scant sexual content. It's not a good game for kids because of mature themes of violence, genocide, and backstabbing politics. It's rated M for mature for a reason: because it's meant for adults to play.
Children are no longer the biggest consumers of video games. According to the Entertainment Software Association, 71.8 percent of gamers are 18 or older, and the average age for gamers is 33 years old. When a video game is rated M, it's not rated so with a wink and a nudge. M-rated games are for adult gamers who make up the majority of the gaming population. The kids who played Nintendo and Sonic 15 years ago are still gaming, and they're now 15 years older. Video games are not being marketed to children simply because they're video games. M-rated video games are no different than R-rated movies. They're intended for adults who want to enjoy mature content, whether that content is violence, sex, or dialog with swearing and big words. They are not meant for children.
Many of these misinformed antigamers claim that mature video games can be played by children easily, and that parental controls are useless. A few years ago that argument might have had merit, but not anymore. Even technologically illiterate parents can easily set parental controls on their kids' Xbox: just turn the Xbox on, hit right a few times, and go into the "Family Settings" menu. From there you can set the Xbox to only play games rated T (for Teen) or lower. Once you set that, you can then set a passcode (one that hopefully your kids won't be able to guess) to make sure your kids can't change it. Unless they're console-hacking wunderkind, they won't mystically crack your code with their preternatural electronics abilities. It's as simple as that. Every major video game console has such a setting, and it's incredibly easy to just click it on. If you want to play an M-rated game, just enter your code and play.
It's 2008, a good two decades after the NES made video games popular across the country. Media outlets should make at least a token effort toward researching how video games have changed in that time, and they should seriously look at a games like Mass Effect and systems like the Xbox 360 before they make wild allegations about prurient content and lax parental controls. Times have changed.
Penny Arcade, definately a game player oriented comic, had a really funny cartoon about the original post. It basically said that the author did the follow-up post because of the incredible page views he received from the original.
There has never been any true correllation between video games, TV and real life violence. Yes, there are studies that show that TV tends to make viewers less sensitive to violence, and can cause short term agression. I'm sure, eventually, there will be studies to link video games to violence. All you need to do is look at all of the teenage shooters that have been said to play "violent video games" that were nowhere near as graphic as current games.
Mass Effect is one of the first "Mature Adult" role playing games that features any kind of "true" romantic option. The focus on the game is the story. This is more akin to an adult's version of "The Legend of Zelda." 1 Main bad guy, lots of friends to help take his minors on, and you get to see the universe at the same time.
As with everything else, it comes down to the industry listing the proper ratings on the games, and parents being "informed consumers." But, this is America, so why would we want to take responsibility for ourselves and our families?
Anecdotal evidence, certainly, but in my interactions, nearly 100% of the children I work with play videogames. They might not be the newest games, or what we call "good games" but be it some Barbie DS game or Guitar Hero, nearly every single kid actively plays and talks a bout video games on a regular basis. Moreover, nearly every single one of them owns a console and a handheld. Even at a charity event I worked this christmas for kids whos parents are in jail (suggesting that these aren't the most affluent kids in the world) many of them asked for and recieved video games as christmas gifts.
80% of gamers being adults is pure crap. Now, they may PURCHASE MORE GAMES. That's incredibly likely, since they have jobs. I know I purchase about 10 times the games I purchased as a child. But that does not mean I play games LESS than I did as a child. Quite the contrary, with the neighborhood borrowing system that exists between children...
Now handhelds, however, are a different story. With two college aged exceptions, no one I know over the age of 14 owns a DS or PSP.
Maybe we have it backwards here?
In many ways, Europe is going through the crime problems we did back in the 1960's and much of the debates there remind me of the debates here forty years ago. Hopefully, they'll come to quicker solutions than we did.
Regarding displays of sex, the US will always react with more inhibition. It is and always has been a very religious nation, especially compared to the currently weak faith in modern Western Europe. Plus, the US has maintained it's total fertility rate at the replacement level for three decades now. That means there's a lot more parents here with kids than in Europe with it's rapidly declining birth rates. So there's always going to be a large pool of people uncomfortable with too much overt sexuality in public life and would like some restraint.
- THANK YOU!
- by Squirrel1081 January 25, 2008 11:09 AM PST
- I've been practically begging Tom and Molly to cover this story in the Buzz Out Loud since Tuesday, but they keep ignoring my freaking post!
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