Video Game Shows Full Nudity and Sex, Claims Fox
No, no it doesn't, and what part of "research your story before covering it" do the big guns at Fox not get? They're talking about Bioware's sci-fi action-RPG Mass Effect, which depending on your in-game choices offers the possibility of viewing a brief, non-explicit, laughably indirect sex scene. Fox's Martha MacCallum barely talks about the game or the sequence in question, saying only (and wrongly) that "you'll see full digital nudity" and "the person who's playing the game gets to decide exactly what's going to happen between the two people." In logic circles that's called the straw man fallacy. In journalism, it's just called sloppy.
Check out the following clip, which contains some of the most facile and yellow journalism I've seen this year.
The unbelievably tacky and flatly fallacious headline: "SE"Xbox? New Video Game Shows Full Digital Nudity and Sex
You know, Mother Jones just ran an interesting commentary by Jay Rosen concerning the way the media resembles "a beast without a brain." Lots of legs and limbs and trampling skills, but nothing between the ears. When it comes to things like election results, for instance, it has no special knowledge, but it certainly pretends to by vacuously filling what it views as dead space with pundits mostly vamping off cue cards. No insight, no vision, no wisdom, and most importantly -- no accountability -- just the media equivalent of a bunch of high rollers blithely shouting in front of a craps table.
Now take the panel segment toward the end of the Fox clip where you have a bunch of people who've never even played the game sitting around making detached, not even marginally insightful generalizations about games. Check out the lineup of deep thinking here:
"Who can argue, possibly, that Luke Skywalker meets Debbie Does Dallas is a good thing?"
"There's a lot of grown men who love video games, let's be honest here."
"We live in a day and age where our children are not always supervised."
"I'm not sure why it didn't get an adults-only rating."
"This made me feel old watching this. What happened to Atari and pinball and Pac-Man?"
Sadly, only one guy at the very end half gets it when he says it's up to parents to monitor their kids.
If you can't even be bothered to do the sort of research journalism 101 demands, i.e. playing the game, or at least the sequence in question, then get the heck off my TV set and stop talking. What's happened that the media can trumpet baseless opinion to the masses and call it "news"? How many parents who don't know better (but who do get the "Debbie" reference) are going to assume Mass Effect, which has a brief, optional, and at best suggestively sexual sequence, involves a bunch of naked men engaging in hardcore porn with some singularly exploited female?
For the record, where's the criticism of romance novels with their ridiculously overdramatic and laughably graphic sex scenes? Available now, to any half-educated 10-year-old within walking distance of a bookstore. What about movies? The non-interactive scene in question in Mass Effect qualifies as "R" rated (PG-13 disallows sex scenes), perfectly compatible with the ESRB's Mature 18-or-older rating. Kids under 17 get into R-rated movies all the time. Even Juno, which got away with a PG-13 rating has a sex scene at the very beginning, i.e. a girl removing her clothes and unambiguously straddling a boy.
Why are we (and by "we" I really just mean Fox) even talking about this? Put implied sex in a book or a movie or a painting and it flies under the radar. Do it in a game, and because gamers are still viewed as this weird, slimy under-culture, it's worth six minutes and half a dozen clueless commentators.
UPDATE: Here's a link to the YouTube clip of the "sex" scene in question. At least YouTube gets it (you don't have to click on an "I'm over 18" link to give consent, because it's barely PG rated). If I thought it was even the tiniest bit more explicit than what you see any given day in a soap opera -- and in fact it's much tamer -- I'd post a warning. But since it's not, I won't. View (and yawn) away.
[Thanks, GamePolitics]
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Major rofl and uber amen. You've said everything that us gamers think. Next article, you should talk about Jack Thompson :P
hahaha what do people expect from fox? its completely conservative in view, and conservatives suck at getting information correct, ie. GW Bush and his ludicrous war to save his fathers name and in turn ruining it for generations to come. i say shoot them all and laugh at their dead bodies for being so stupid in the first place. people need to leave our pixels and polygons alone. seriously these people need to grow up and start picking on the real threat which is these ever-increasingly-risque and nudity filled movies in theaters, and the disney channel.
Funny. Could've sworn I made a post here...
Well, in any case, I still remember the post I made.
Typical isn't it?
Well, I wonder how long it'll take for them to realize that it's not a good idea to jump the guns, so to speak and make fools out of themselves?
I suspect it'll only be a matter of time before this happens, and once it does, what happens next?
This should be interesting to watch.
I sent this very email to Martha via Foxnews.com's "contact" link.
Martha,
I recognize that this may come across as a bit harsh but this is a harsh world with massive communication gaps............rather canyons................so I am adamant about alleviating that which instigates miscommunication to begin with.
Was your head up your ass when you reported on this? In the sand? What would compel ANY reporter, republican (as Fox News is) bias or not to skew the truth and sway in their favour simply to make a meritless point? Please tell me. Don't be offended by how I formed the question. Take it for what it is worth and that is everyone who heard this article and actually did the necessary research and especially those who enjoy gaming truly will be on my side and asking themselves the very same question at the beginning of this paragraph. Your reporting LIED...............blatantly LIED. No IF's, AND's or BUT's, you completely LIED, misled, did not tell the truth, tried to
It goes without saying if you can't hold them accountable then they say anything they want, right Bill and Hillary Clinton,or is it I did not have sex with that girl
Intolerant: Please calm down. It's just a story about a video game from an already-discredited media outlet. -Mark
For the record, I don't see any of this in terms of politics, and I don't see the news stations in terms of political affiliations (if any even in actuality exist). It's about nothing more or less than any of us being able to trust the information we're getting. The media has a sordid history of misrepresenting things it doesn't have any direct experience of. Video games are pretty easy to misrepresent because of their cultural stigma. Unfortunately the cable news networks probably look at the backlash in the gaming community and see it as something akin to fanboy-ism, instead of accepting that they pretty glaringly screwed up and issuing a correction of sorts.
games SHOULD have full frontal nudity in them. us boys 15-25 are always sexually aroused. would you want us to go out and have sex wildly or view porn safely in our homes?
why must people overeact to stupid things like this when innocent people are being killed overseas in a pointless war.
The media makes yet another half ass'd report on something it knows nothing about.
Wake up people. Seriously.
This has been going on since Vietnam.
Spouting anything( and I do mean ANYTHING) to get ratings( or more importantly "Attention") is what the so called "media" does. Be it rumor, half truths, un-researched information, or just bald-faced lies.
They wrap themselves in the trappings of infallibility and preach to the masses of what their bias'd opiions say are "right and "wrong". All the while getting exactly what they want. More and more people's attention.
Either to agree with what they're preaching from their soapboxes, denounce it as more attention-whoring, or simply to see what the fuss is about.
Personaly, I'd take morbid pleasure in watching Bioware sue the bastards for slander and misrepresentation.
But of course, the media is infallible, so if any legal actions were taken they'd simply air another broadcast and retract the mis-information they released.
I'm having a hard time finding the story on Foxnews.com. However I did find a fairly recent review of Mass Effect where they gave it 3.5 stars out of four.
Ironic.
Great blog with lots of useful information and excellent commentary! Thanks for sharing.
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