Laws of Play

Pundits Find Parental Responsibilities “Unfortunate”

Fox news recently ran the above segment chastising Xbox 360 game Mass Effect for displaying “full digital nudity and sex” and for degrading women by allowing a male character to dictate sexual situations. Unfortunately for Fox, and correctly pointed out by Mr. Geoff Keighley of SpikeTV, Mass Effect features neither of these scenarios.

Mass Effect, which has been widely lauded as a critical success, does feature a brief “love scene” contingent upon certain relationships being cultivated throughout the game. However, this scene features at most a brief glimpse of an ancillary character’s posterior and can be experienced as either a male or female character (depending on the player’s preference). This is a far cry from “full digital character nudity” and is certainly devoid of any misogynistic intent.

I believe that Mr. Keighley did his best to accurately describe what occurs in the game, but it is disconcerting to hear Cooper Lawrence freely admit to having never played the game and continue to assault its content without any actual base of knowledge. But, the true highlight comes near the end of the clip when host Martha MacCallum replies that it is “unfortunate” that parents must “control what their kids are seeing.”

Is this really the current state of parenting in this country? Do Americans really want the government to decide what is and isn’t acceptable for us to watch? Mass Effect’s content could not be considered “obscene” by any stretch of the imagination and falls well within the category of “protected speech” under the First Amendment. Is this a right that we are willing to compromise in order to ease the hardships of parenting?

For even more disgust see: Jim Sterling at Destructoid