By Fox News Standards, Top Gun Was Porn
This was all over the web over the last day or so. On Monday, Fox News Live Desk effectively fell for what I'd consider a hoax. The ol' telephone game has taken place, and a short love scene from Mass Effect, regarded by everyone who's actually played the game as more tasteful than what you'd see in many rated "R" movies, has been trumped up by certain ill-informed non-gaming voices into being some gigantic porn simulator.

Fox News took that at face value, swallowed it hook, line, and sinker, and produced a pretty embarrassingly bad pretense at journalism. And they roped poor Geoff Keighley into it.

Unfortunately, it looks like Geoff was suckered into the classic "Have Your Quit Beating Your Wife?" question. While he thought the question was about the love scene in question in a rated "M" game, the REAL question they were asking was, "Why do you think this interactive porn game is appropriate for 13-year-old boys?"

So he tried to play a defensive game, the sole person in the segment actually concerned with getting facts straight, while everyone else was laughing off his question as to whether or not they actually played the game and knew what the hell they were talking about.

I haven't played Mass Effect, so I probably don't know any better than the talking heads what I'm talking about. But I have seen the scene in question, which left almost everything to the imagination - quite to the contrary of MacCallum's allegation - and was less steamy and not much more graphic than the love scene in the movie Top Gun. Now unless there's some hidden Hot Coffee-esque secret version that I've missed (and, knowing gamers, if there was we would have heard about it by now in graphic detail...), Fox News was really just making crap up. At a certain point, people, what you call an "exaggeration" is indeed a lie.

And then Cooper Lawrence chimed in with some 1981-era demographic knowledge by claiming that even grown-ups were buying it, they certainly weren't playing it. Right. And before you know it, TV shows are going to show couples sleeping in the same bed and lead to the downfall of civilization as we know it.

Now, I'm not going to defend the appropriateness of the love scene in Mass Effect. As far as I know, it's a gratuitous bit thrown in to stir up exactly this kind of controversy (and to send sales through the roof). But the incredibly shoddy journalism and double standards shown by Fox News Live Desk is just begging to be mocked.

And my sympathy goes out to Geoff Keighley. The battle was unwinnable. Maybe he would have scored more points if he went on the offensive and said, "Are you both on DRUGS? What game are you talking about here? Where can I buy this porn simulator you guys are referring to, because I've played all through Mass Effect and all I got was one two-minute PG-13-ish love scene!" But he might not be invited back, and there are undoubtedly less stupid battles to be fought in the future.

I guess with the writer's strike still ongoing, people are desperate for fiction on TV.

UPDATE (7/24): EA (Now owner of Bioware) has sent a letter to Fox News requesting that they retract their blatant falsehoods, explaining very clearly exactly where they were ... shall we charitably say, "misinformed?"

Story At Kotaku

The silly thing about this is that the Live Desk segment, while increasing the bizarre (but, I hope, increasingly marginal and impotent) anti-videogame hysteria amongst similarly misinformed viewers, probably helped give Mass Effect's sales a nice boost. A public retraction would probably do the same. So EA, Bioware, and Microsoft are probably enjoying a win / win scenario.

Labels: Politics

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 8:07 AM (Permalink)