Lefty Side of the Dial

This entry is also posted at our gaming website, The Married Gamers but since this is still Politics Week here on Lefty Side of the Dial, I thought it was appropriate to share this here as well.

Leftybrown reached his eye-rolling quota for the day.  I caught the above news segment over at Joystiq, and have been left wondering  if Fox News has anyone with some limited intelligence and parenting skills.  The only nice thing I can say about the "news" segment is that it had Geoff Keighley from Spike TV's Gametrailers TV as the sole voice of reason (and also it should be noted the only one in the segment that has actually played the game). 

Evidently the "experts" say that Mass Effect will desensitize your kids to sex because near the end of the video game you might romance a character in the game, and get a sexual vignette.  If you happen to choose to play a female character you can still choose to romance another female character.  I played through the game as a female character and did see the very short segment with is not overly graphic.  You see one character's buttocks, and lots of silhouetted lovemaking.  There's an after sex conversation which is a little playful, and then you are off to save the universe. Now if Mass Effect was a movie it would have been rated PG-13.  I spent roughly about 35 hours playing the game, and only two minutes of this "harmful" material.

What I find most disturbing about the Fox News segment is that most of the panelists seem to think parents can't parent their kids.  I personally think that is an insult to parents around the world.  The game is rated M for Mature and if you buy it in the store, the clerk should verify your age.  The box art on Mass Effect even provides details as to why the game is rated M for Mature.  Evidently the "experts" over at Fox News think that if this gets into kids hands they will turn out to be sexual deviants, that the kids are going to do everything in their power to sneak this game and the 30 plus hour investment to get this PG-13 payoff, versus say popping in any Torture Porn movie like Saw.  They compared this game to Playboy and I have to saw Playboy is 100 times more graphic than this game, and I hear Playboy is far more "prudish" than other adult magazines.

The final blow that I found was strangely funny coming from the conservative news channel is that the host wishes that government would protect children from this game because of its content.  I thought conservatives wanted less government and valued the role of parents over state-sanctioned regulations.  I guess that doesn't applied when children try to woo fictional blue aliens.