It’s as likely to happen to one journalist as any other, sooner or later. Just a complete miss.
‘Find yourself reporting what might very well have been the story of the year, if not for it being news of something that just isn’t so.
Scott Jennings shares the case in point.
It almost seems easier for this to happen with something completely, blatantly, utterly wrong. Who’d ever imagine in a million-trillion years that this sort of brouhaha could erupt spontaneously from the void?
One might be more inclined to check the facts on something far easier to believe. Perhaps even rightly so, those typically being things far easier to lie about, too.
Frankly, it’s one of the major reasons why I believe we put a man on the moon, and never so much as entertain the debate against it having actually happened. I know no more than that there are people who believe the whole affair was faked on a sound-stage, and do no more than dismiss them as kooks.
But tell me something relatively far more probable than stuffing men into missiles and shooting them all the way to the moon (and back!), and I may have doubts. Tell me Britney Spears sought professional help and in an act of compassion, the entertainment media has boycotted paparazzi pics of her for a few days - and just read the expression on my face.
Kevin McCullough’s “The ‘Sex Box’ Race for President” post first alerted the nation to the shocking thing’s he thought were in Mass Effect after watching YouTube videos of god only knows what. He even came up with the ’sex box’ thing, see?
I’d link you to it, but the link where it used to be just redirects to a default page. I couldn’t find it after as many seconds as of caring about it as I could manage.
Seems I wasn’t the only one looking for it.
Obviously if the “some critics”-article upon which the story is based itself withers under scrutiny, Fox News cannot be expected to pretend as though nothing happened. It’s not as if posting the wacky thing were like one of the things he said Mass Effect contained, mere figments of a fearful imagination. His article really was there. I saw it. And it had penises all over it.
So Fox News reported a story they assumed to be true - ’cause man, how could it not be? - and anyway everyone knows there are two sides to every story, true or not. No journalist ever reports anything without finding a spokesman for each side.
GamePolitics - if that is his real name - took issue with Fox News as well as with the spokesman - excuse me, spokes-female-American, Cooper Lawrence.
I’ll get to her in a minute.
Fox News is first, for what Game Politics referred to as taking a smear campaign against Mass Effect mainstream. Despite it being a smear campaign that is certain to put an end, once and for all, to every single copy of Mass Effect not having been sold yet, they rudely introduced the story with the on-screen graphic:
“Se”Xbox? New Video Game Shows Full Digital Nudity and Sex
Completely ignoring the question mark in that sentence - right near the front there, see? - GamePolitics sums up this bit of work:
GP: Another disgraceful game bashing from Fox…
I watch my local Fox affiliate news about an hour a day, every day, and about twenty minutes of that “news”, every day, are reports on American Idol.
Sorry, I just don’t think they can do anything to ever make me think less of their journalistic adventures. In fact, hell, at least for once the mainstream media is focusing attention on a good game. I’m going with Woody on this one.
Moving on…
So just who is Cooper Lawrence? If GamePolitics were a Fox news man, we might never know, unless suddenly a story broke revealing she is in fact a Sasquatch or the like.
Rather than making something up, he apparently utilized a computer to obtain private information about Coop’s personal life and distributed it on the internet, as Fox news might say, meaning he read the bio she posted to her MySpace page.
As for Cooper Lawrence’s expertise with video game issues? It’s apparently nonexistent.
Indeed! So why was she the “counterpoint” to the “is not”-argument from our side? It was no mistake, in my opinion.
The complaint reveals a misunderstanding about what the Mass hysteria Effect story was really about.
The accusation against Mass Effect was an invitation for Cooper Lawrence to share her opinions with the world, and few of those opinions are about games. If not Mass Effect, then whatever, you know, stuff like that (isn’t)…
The point is that things do exist which are an offense to women, desensitizing young boys to the idea of treating women as inferior, even endangering women. Just providing young men with the tiniest bit of encouragement is certain to see them pursuing their darkest desire. To finally live that one special dream all men share: To revert back to beasts and kill every fucking body.
What she’s talking about is well within her realm of expertise: She is an expert on men… specializing in a woman’s perspective.
She wants to engage in an entirely different discussion and whether you oblige her or not, she’s sure as hell not going to talk to you about Mass Effect. Even if she says the words Mass Effect and seems to be describing a rape-fantasy of some sort… nah.
That’s my take on it, anyway.
Update: An excellent article in the NY Times supports this conclusion:
In an interview on Friday, Ms. Lawrence said that since the controversy over her remarks erupted she had watched someone play the game for about two and a half hours. “I recognize that I misspoke,” she said. “I really regret saying that, and now that I’ve seen the game and seen the sex scenes it’s kind of a joke.
“Before the show I had asked somebody about what they had heard, and they had said it’s like pornography,” she added.
i.e. She was speaking about pornography.
I still feel as though most everyone is missing the larger issue here. It’s not about whether Mass Effect has adult content that everyone can enjoy, or adult content that few would like but which many would not and so we must seize the opportunity to impose our will on those weirdos.
What Cooper Lawrence and Kevin McCullough have said, in a nutshell, is no video game may contain content that is inappropriate for children [e.g. "pornography"], ever.
As per the way this thing works, “inappropriate for children” really means “inappropriate for you“.
It’s a bit disturbing to see the points of their arguments challenged, even when it is fairly easy to crush them on account of their arguments being stupid. The argument itself is offensive.
That’s a much more important issue to me than whatever Fox News is doing between American Idol updates.
They are saying that Mass Effect is bad because it is a video game with pornography in it.
The response has been to point out that there’s no pornography in it, as if to acquiesce to the opinion that video games may not contain the equivalent content of an R-rated movie, under any circumstances.
It does not matter why they wish to trespass on our rights. We shouldn’t argue over the validity of their reasons for calling to impose censorship , but rather argue that calls for censorship are obscene.
I’d rather risk my children being exposed to pornography than risk them being exposed to censorship.
Freedom of expression is worth our lives.
How about: No, we’re not going to burn the books you don’t like, so piss off.
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I’d comment here about how stupid and how pissed I got about the whole Fox News thing (and the PAC/PTC/WTF crap), but I already made an entire post about it…
http://www.nerfbat.com/2008/01/25/this-weeks-misinformed-award-goes-to/
Yeahhh… but… there’s no reason to skip to the end argument before rebutting their stupidity. That’s just not going to work, and after all, you want your argument to convince people. If you respond to “Mass Effect has pr0n” with “well, so what if it did? you can’t censor me!”, you’ll produce exactly the backlash against gaming you’re trying to avoid. Because, in this case, it seems the people on the other “side” aren’t really engaged in a debate, but a crusade, either for puritanism or just for your attention.
Win this battle, let everyone know how silly these people are, then let everyone chill and slowly see the big picture. If you deflate advocates of game censorship by popping their spurious arguments, they lose any political capital they got by over-hyping the lies. That makes them lose influence.
Oh Jeffrey, your mastery of italics sure does rev my engine. I can feel your passion through your text Jeffrey, and it’s invigorating. Hold me!
On a side note, a question (on a different subject because I’m tired of being #1 usual suspect if you know what I mean): For your Dungeon Runners crazy thinger doodle, does DR have a nifty link somewhere that says “Here’s the xml shit” or do you just view page source or some other sort of tomfoolery? Basically, if the stats for Savage 2 are in xml and able to be used by me as you did with DR, I’d be half tempted to give it a shot dair pardner!
To me, that’s the same thing as saying “You shouldn’t protest this,
because you’re just proving their point that people who like these kinds of books are anti-social.”
And that’s the point here…I’m a forty year old man who has been playing video games since I was in the single digits age-wise. If I want to play a game that’s wall-to-wall porno, whose business is it but mine?
The response to this isn’t “You’re right, that shouldn’t be in a video game, but it’s not in this case,” it should be “And why the hell can’t it be?!?” Coop made mention of the fact that “It’s not men playing these games, it’s thirteen year old boys.”
DAMN…I’ve misplaced my link to the “O RLY?” owl again…just imagine he’s here.
If you wonder what the big deal is about this, remember…censorship starts off with a wonderfully uprighteous face, and before you know it they’re banning Huckleberry-freakin’-FINN.
The only mature response to censorship is to resist it. Period.
Great article, Jeff.
Bonedead: The short answer is you need a nifty link that says “here’s the XML shit”.
WoW Armory is a bit of an oddball, because the page source in that case is the XML you’d need, but that’s an atypical case.
Long answer: there are also web-apps out there on the internet that you can point at a formatted page like the Savage2 stats page, and given a couple or three examples it’ll be able to milk-out the data you’re after in XML format. So even without being given the XML data, it is possible to get it from whatever web pages they are giving you. That’s just one (real big) additional first-step.
You know, I can really respect the point of view that taking an extreme position and refusing to budge on it can be counter-productive. Usually I’m more prone to that sort of thinking myself.
Still though, not in this case. Explaining to the savages why they’re wrong about Huck Finn and therefore should not burn it would only be a better approach, to my mind, if what I really cared about was stopping Huck being burned.
But it’s book burning that I am against, and including the books that I find personally offensive. I think it’s intolerable that free speech would be something people have to be treated patiently and with gentle understanding about ’til they’re able to come to terms with the very first right in the bill of rights.
Fear of backlash historically has given us “voluntary compliance” with “self-regulation” that would be completely unconstitutional otherwise. We agree not to exercise a right if they’ll agree to stop scaring us with all their talk about taking it away.
On top of that, no less, they never do shut up. We wind up having to fight them ’til they find a new bogeyman anyway.
Gaming is not the niche pastime of a disenfranchised youth subculture that they could succeed in bullying for long. We could fight for a few years and keep our rights - at worst suffer this or that setback during that time - or we can give away more rights than we already have and not get them back for decades.
All that is, of course, IMO. I do respect your opinion, though - not being sarcastic, there.