Last week Fox News had a segment on “Mass Effect,” a role-playing game for the Xbox 360 released last November.
I have no qualms with Fox News getting into games, and I guess it just goes to show how prevalent gaming has become in recent years. What I do have a problem with is how they took one small aspect of the game and blew it out of proportion.
“Mass Effect” is rated “M” for “mature,” meaning that only those who are 17 years of age or older should be playing it. There is one scene in the game in which the player can have sex with another character – it lasts for about two minutes and is no more explicit than what can be seen on television (“Sex and the City,” anyone?).
Instead of playing the game, Fox News invited Cooper Lawrence, a developmental psychologist with a radio talk show to debate with renowned game journalist Geoff Keighley about the scandalous content of the game. Lawrence, who admitted to not even playing the game, criticized “Mass Effect” for the full-on nudity and pornographic sex scenes the game supposedly had, and how they were so detrimental to the development of the young adolescent boys toward whom the game is, according to her, marketed. The game will cause them to see women as purely sexual objects because you play through the game as a man, and of course, only young adolescent boys will play it.
Keighley was not given as much air time to talk about the game as Lawrence, but he defended “Mass Effect” by explaining that the scene is short, does not show full nudity, is not a scene forced into the game (how you play the game affects the story, including what scenes you see), and that you can play as any character you want, a man or a woman.
Of course, that wasn’t enough, as Fox News returned to the studio so a panel of people who know nothing about the game could continue to criticize it and label it as pornography.
As a long-time gamer, I’m used to games getting this kind of treatment. Often games are misunderstood by people who do not play them. I don’t like the undeserved criticism that games like “Mass Effect” get, but I can’t make people play the game and see for themselves that it’s not nearly as bad as it is made out to be.
So why am I writing this article? Because as the panel on Fox News “debated” “Mass Effect,” they said things that, to me, are outrageous.
The panelists lamented how they do not have time to pay attention to what games their children are playing, or what they are doing on the Internet. They also said that their children are not always supervised, so how are they expected to keep their children safe from such disgusting content as “Mass Effect” and its ilk? This is ridiculous. Games have ratings, just like movies. Consoles such as the Xbox 360 have parental controls that parents can set so the console will not even play games of a specific rating setting, and the controls are set by a password that only the parents will know.
And since when is it acceptable to let your child surf the Internet unsupervised? Or stay at home alone for “several hours at a time,” as one panelist commented? Both of my parents worked full time while I was growing up. If they didn’t work opposite shifts so that someone was always at home with my brothers and me, they hired a babysitter. Before video games even had ratings, my mother researched what content was in a game so she knew what we should and should not be playing. She strictly monitored everything my brothers and I did. Why aren’t these panelists doing the same things? Is it too difficult to raise their own children anymore?
Most of my fellow students at SMU do not have children yet. I hope that when you do, you think about these things and don’t leave your kids unsupervised and blame the rest of the world for not doing your parenting for you.
About the writer:
Amanda Richardson is a junior computer science major. She can be reached for comment at [email protected].
