Words of Replicant Jesus

I often wonder if this world is screwed up or if I am just screwed up. Cue the recent Mass Effect “Sexbox” debacle and the ensuing balanced and fair discussion on Fox News. It seems once again mass media gets video games completely “right” and that we gamers are ruining the world, can’t tell fiction from reality, and we all want to rape women and murder complete strangers.

Awesome.

Sarcasm aside I am just so tired of this bullshit media getting their facts completely wrong and people watching this crap and believing it wholesale like it is gospel truth. Mass Effect is an awesome, I really enjoyed it, I enjoyed the story, the character interaction, and the presentation; is there a subplot where you woo a paramour? Yes there is. Is it an integral and central part of the game, no it isn’t; as was noted in the Fox News spot by Geoff Keighley.

This whole debacle is a side story in a thirty hour plus story, a sidebar that can be completely avoided if the player so chooses. A sidebar that the player actively has to pursue, but instead our media decides to focus on the more salient and obviously controversial aspect of nudity, of which is tastefully done and no more nudity then what you could see on Heroes or Grey’s Anatomy.

Maybe we are such a sexually repressed culture that the notion of sex in a digital element that is associated with “children” despite the evidence that many gamers are in the late teens to mid twenties, and games are marketed to target this demographic is just too much for America or the mass media/public to handle.

Or maybe we are all just fucking doomed.