I’ve been trying my best to keep from discussing the whole Kevin McCullough Mass Effect fiasco, but I actually have something meaningful to say.
For those who are unaware, Kevin McCullough is a columnist for townhall.com who recently wrote an article on the sins of mass effect and how, “With it’s “over the net” capabilities virtual orgasmic rape is just the push of a button away.” Essentially the guy rants for three pages about how Mass Effect is a terrible sinful game that lets the player have sex with anyone in any possible fashion, which is a complete and utter lie. In Mass Effect, there are three people you can have sex with, a man (only for female players), a woman (only for male characters), and a female alien (for both). The player can have sex with only one of these characters per play-through, and only once with that partner. To top it off, the sex in question is a thirty second clip of shadowed characters moving about with some heavy breathing. It is extremely low-key and surprisingly tasteful, it is even clean enough to be shown on youtube (which does not allow any sexual content). Honestly, watching basic TV for half-an-hour at two in the afternoon will show you more than Mass Effect does. The icing on the cake, is that Mass Effect is a mature rated game, meaning only those seventeen or older can purchase it.
My big problem with this isn’t that Kevin McCullough is conservative, or religious, honestly I think TV has gotten absurdly sexual since I was a kid (although I do feel that if a kid is old enough to understand what’s going on, they’re old enough to see it). No, my problem is that Kevin McCullough simply didn’t do his research. If you are a PAID columnist, I expect at least one hours worth of research on your subject. If Kevin McCullough had spent five minutes looking up Mass Effect, he would have realized that only a couple of sentences in his three page tirade contain any factual information. Columnists, I understand video games are the new thing, and that they’re an easy target to pick on, but please, do your research.
The video game industry is just that, an industry, it is a group of people’s livelihood, and spreading lies and in fact, libel. I checked the comments on Mr. McCullough’s rants (he made an apology that was really an attack on gamers in response to criticism about his first article) and of the three hundred or some comments on each, only two were from people responding to the fact that McCullough had lied. The rest of these three hundred comments were all in praise of McCullough and from parents who had bought Mass Effect for their children “without realizing what it really was”. These are three hundred people who now feel that the game industry is for all intents and purposes a porn industry directed at children.
In the end though, it’s not just Kevin McCullough, people across the world have no idea what the game industry is like, what video games really are. People across America are lied to regularly about violence and sex in video games, if you don’t think so, go read the next article on video games that the New York Times publish, then go online and look up for yourself the information that the article reported and see how wrong they are. Don’t like the New York Times? Then how about NPR, I mean, it’s a very liberal, politically correct radio station right; they cover stories carefully, to make sure that they don’t get a single fact out of place right? Then think carefully on this, when interviewing Joseph Staten (the lead writer for the Halo series) on his recent novel, and New York Times best seller, Contact Harvest (a Halo novel), NPR’s Chana Joffe-Walt asked, “Do gamers read?” Yes, a reporter asked a video game writer, when interviewing him about his recent novel based on a video game, which was a best seller, if gamers read.
Please people, one hour of research before you go ruin the reputation of game developers and gamers, that’s all I ask.
-Cory Ragsdale (Written On Wednesday 1/16/08)
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