Recently, Fox News had a segment which accused the popular Bioware game, Mass Effect of showing full frontal nudity, objectify women and making it too easy for minors to view these adult situations. The following is the video of the Fox segment:

As you can see, it was mostly the psychologist Cooper Lawrence making accusations as to how video games (like Mass Effect) were corrupting our youth, even though she had no first hand experience of the game whatsoever (she had never seen or played the game!). I give Geoff Keighley credit for trying to set the record straight, but he was cut rather abruptly. It was rather obvious that the station and panel were trying to make games out to be the source of corruption of our youth.

Since the airing of the segment, Electronic Arts vice president Jeff Brown had released the statement which calls out Fox for their misrepresentation and inaccuracies of the content of Mass Effect. As well, the psychologist/author Cooper Lawrence faced the wrath of gamers with tons of reviewers spamming her book, “The Cult Of Perfection” with low scores on Amazon.com. At one point, Amazon attempted to censor reviews, but then faced a lot of negative backlash for their decision and have since relented (reader reviews are currently back on).

Though it’s pretty mean to resort to retaliation on Ms. Lawrence’s books, I think it was justified. She shouldn’t have gone in such a tirade to criticize something she had no prior knowledge or expertise on. It not only made her look foolish but it certainly got the attention of millions of gamers…and trust me, you don’t want to piss them off, as we have seen.

-Stephen