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Tuesday, January 15, 2008

*Sigh*

If you want to read an article by an idiot you can do it here.

If you choose not to read it, I'll summarize:
It's a wonderfully inane piece of fear-mongering, completely devoid of anything close to an understanding of the subject the writer is covering. Basically what the writer wants you to be aware of is that a certain video game on the Xbox 360 is a sort of Trojan horse of sexual depravity that will mentally (and very likely, physically) sodomize your children.

The game, Mass Effect, is even more dangerous not only for its lurid sexual content, but also for the level of customization the player has when designing his/her character. As the writer puts it, "one can 'create' their own versions of what people look like, removing warts, moles, and bald spots while enhancing - shall we say - the extended features of the game's characters tends to objectify women, sex, and human relationships..."
It's a ludicrous argument, and the writer actually follows it with, "Right? We can all agree on this?"
Yeesh.

In his next paragraph the writer goes so far as to attack the game's title.
"'Mass Effect' sounds like a war game with a deadly virus that is spreading unless the GI-Joes are able to defeat the evil and deadly substance and it's covert war plan."
Huh? The virus has a covert war plan?
"By it's design, kids could ask for it, or for their parents' Best Buy Card to go purchase it with nary a raised eye-brow. Generic, non-descriptive, and relatively harmless."
I suppose he'd prefer if the game was called Sexual Deviancy In Space!

His next paragraph, however, is the article's funniest and most nonsensical, and goes the furthest in proving that the writer is talking out of his ass:

"But it IS marketed for the X-Box 360, perhaps the most visually stimulating gaming system ever made."
Even the hardware itself is so stimulating it will cause wanton, spontaneous fornication among children.
"The software for such allows the blending of DVD video, component graphics, and the manipulation of actual pictures so that an alternate reality engulfs the fifteen year old boy playing it without much objection."
What the - what? Manipulation of actual pictures? Alternate realities engulfing children? What in god's name is the writer smoking?

The main point of the article (if it can be said to have one) is about the 2008 Presidential election, and whether or not there is a candidate brave enough to take a stance against such a game. A game that "can be customized to sodomize whatever, whoever, however, the game player wishes."
Never mind that the only sexual encounters possible in the game are between consenting adults in the following combinations: male human/female human, male human/female alien, female human/female alien.

Still, this doesn't change the fact that with Mass Effect, "virtual orgasmic rape is just the push of a button away."
(Virtual orgasmic rape: much, much worse than regular, garden variety rape.)

And for the record, here are some videos of the game's sex scenes that are "pushing our next generation of young men through the gates of hell as fast as is humanly possible":





I've seen hotter action in Lifetime original movies.

3 comments:

BG said...

I think Tycho sums it up best:

I don't like to advocate violence, because it argues against the thesis of the site, but Jesus Christ. This man should be loosed naked into the Savannah, where wild animals - drunk on his heady bouquet - will attempt to drag him in different directions simultaneously. I'm clearly in the wrong line of fucking work.

Sharkbear said...

Yeah, I actually found the editorial through his comment.

I wanted elaborate on some of the writer's more asinine statements.

The sad thing is, there is a huge portion of people in this country who will take the guy's word verbatim. And he clearly doesn't have the first clue about anything.

I'm tempted to track down a copy of his book (listed at the bottom of the article) just to see if it's filled with the same nonsense. I hope that it at least doesn't contain the same kind of mangled sentence structure the article displays.

Treegreen said...

I tend to think the only people who will find the article useful are the same people who already have preconceived notions about video games and the people who play them. I'm not even sure he's played Mass Effect, and rather feel that he is just relaying blurbs presented to him by the most conservative of reviewers.