Revisiting Crazy Mass Effect Columnists

Ok, so I already commented briefly on the nutcase complaining about Mass Effect’s, er, “most realistic sex acts ever conceived” (one presumes he’s aware of actual pornography, which is presumably the most realistic you can get), but this GamerDad response rubbed me slightly the wrong way.  That’s in part because it reflects a critique that I’ve seen a lot from defensive gamers: namely, that games like Mass Effect shouldn’t be attacked because they’re not targeted at kids.  This is very true, but it misses the point.

The basic problem I have here is that it implicitly concedes that the core content of the game in question is offensive.  Sure, we say; these games aren’t for kids (read: there’s a lot of adult material), but we’re not marketing the game to kids.  But that’s besides the point.  The basic message we should be beating into people’s heads is that Mass Effect has no themes more mature than a Harry Potter novel or an episode of Friends.  If we pretend that the game is only inoffensive because the content is age-appropriate, then we run the risk of ghetto-izing gaming into some sort of adults-only taboo playground, at which point the games really will become what people fear they are.

Bottom line: people fear games because they don’t understand them (as this errant columnist has so clearly demonstrated), and they don’t understand them because they don’t experience them.  I realize that GamerDad did refute any number of points that were made: but taking such arguments seriously legitimizes them in a way they don’t deserve.  Let’s stop pretending we have something to be ashamed of here.

Post-script: I’ll admit that the reaction to the lesbian sex scene - and I use the term loosely - was disturbing,  but more for the prurient interest it generated among the gaming press than for any other reason.

Thinking Of The Children

Kotaku seems as bored of these things as I am, but this op-ed seems worthy of note due to the way in which it manages to confuse rhetoric with argumentation.  An op-ed is, by definition, opinion, but the Christian Science Monitor is reputable enough to understand that they nevertheless require some sort of baseline logical structure.  Even if that “structure” is nothing more complex than “some scientist says X, therefore Y.” 

Yet Mr. Devereaux isn’t even able to cobble together a single argument to support the notion that a lack of “moral consequence” is somehow psychologically damaging.  He alludes to some of the studies we’ve discussed in the past - but they’re simply strawmen, since none of them are directly relevant to this claim.  He makes a passionate plea for discussion - but there’s no indication that something which is, at best, barely plausible is worthy of further comment.  The CSM should really know better than to blindly accept a submission simply because it screams - Maude Flanders-esque - “Think of the children!  Won’t somebody please think of the children?!”

Non-Scandal?

I can’t get too exorcised about the fact that Matt Cassamassina is married to a Nintendo PR executive.  Yes, IGN should have disclosed this fact… but there’s no evidence that Cassamassina’s coverage has been affected by that connection, it’s unclear whether his wife actually works on Nintendo products, and the fact appears to be relatively widely known within the industry.  In my opinion, at least, VGMWatch should have gotten a statement from Cassamassina first, rather than attempting to muckrake some fairly thin dirt here.

Can Gamespot Recover? (Updated)

Kotaku has allegedly spoken to a Gamespot employee who states that the editorial staff is “devastated, gutted and demoralized”, and that Gerstmann’s firing may actually result in a mass exodus from the company. If Gamespot suddenly lost most or all of its editors, it’s probably safe to say that they wouldn’t be able to keep up with the need for new content. It’s probably also safe to say that finding qualified new editors may be difficult, as a lot of those that are qualified would probably be nervous about working for the company now given the current environment. Essentially, if Gamespot loses a majority of their editors now, they could be in for either a temporary suspension of updates, or in the worst case, the website being permanently taken down.

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Old News Disguised as New

Why does it seem like everyone is surprised to see Activision (as if motivated by the Blizzard merger) announce that their big franchises, like Tony Hawk, Call of Duty, and Guitar Hero, will have annual releases? Isn’t this what we’ve already seen?

A quick look at Wikipedia reveals that Tony Hawk has seen a new release every year since 1999, Guitar Hero since 2005 (and actually received 2 installments this year), and Call of Duty since 2003 (unless you don’t count the various expansions and other subtitled games that were made available in 2004, then it would be since 2005).

So, in other words, other than potentially the gap between Call of Duty 1 and 2 (which was barely even a gap), this was already business as usual. Fans of the Call of Duty games seemed to be most upset by this news because it meant that Infinity Ward wouldn’t be developing the next CoD game, but given that this already happened with CoD3, again, this is hardly surprising.

I do wonder, however, if Activision is sort of setting up a “Star Trek movie” curse for the CoD series, where only the even-numbered games (and the original in this case) are good because they’re developed by the original creators. It will be interesting to see what happens with these games in the next few years.

Open Thread and Mini-Posts

Just thought I’d comment on a few news pieces from the last few days:

• Is it a little strange to anyone else that there is new downloadable content for Guitar Hero II (yes, 2)? It would make slightly more sense to me if it were cross-compatible with or at least simultaneously released with similar Guitar Hero III content, but for now this seems to be the same to me as if Bungie were to release downloadable content for Halo 2 now. What’s sort of interesting is that I can’t seem to find any information on who actually developed the new content, since Harmonix was the original creator of Guitar Hero II, but Activision now owns the property. Was this new content developed by Neversoft, or perhaps it was completed long ago by Harmonix and they are simply releasing the rest of the GHII content under some contract? Either way, it seems a bit strange to me.
• Gametap is losing 70 games due to expiring contracts with EA, Interplay, Atari and a few other publishers. It actually seems more significant to me that they are actually losing a contract with the publishers (EA in particular) than just the fact that they’re losing 70 of their games, since that means the loss of several future games as well. Strangely enough, Gametap just celebrated their 1000th game making it onto their network, and they will now have less than 1000 again. Their Editorial Director says they weren’t aware that the games would expire when they made the big announcement that they had hit 1000 games, but he also explains that the contracts with the publishers had a “beginning and an end.” If that was true before, why didn’t they see this coming? Did they simply forget about it, misunderstand their contract, or is there something we’re not hearing yet?
• Joystiq has obtained an “exclusive“interview of sorts with Jeff Gerstmann, which manages to add actually very little to the current knowledge of the event. Gerstmann says that he “stands by” his Kane and Lynch review, which I think should be a given by now, considering that he was allegedly fired over it. Other then that, he denies the irrelevant rumor that he didn’t complete Kane and Lynch, and basically just says he doesn’t know what he’s going to do just yet.
• Bioshock finally gets its widescreen “fix” this week, along with some supposedly free DLC containing new Plasmids. While I loved Bioshock, this actually doesn’t interest me much at all. While having the widescreen “fix” is sort of nice, I don’t think the original widescreen mode really ended up impacting the game at all. As for the DLC, playing through the story mode of Bioshock again just to play with some new Plasmids doesn’t seem like much motivation. Maybe if there were some kind of “arena” mode where you could basically just outfit your character anyway you wanted and you basically had to survive waves of attacks from enemies I could find some use for it… but I can’t imagine the plasmids will be interesting enough to make me want to play through the game again so soon. Since it’s going to be free, it almost makes me wonder what the point of even bringing it out is. Since it’s not a multiplayer game, it seems like the people to get the most use out of this pack would be people that haven’t played the game yet, but I highly doubt it’ll really sell any more copies either.

A Tour Of Recent Gamespot Reviews

Given the brouhaha over Jeff Gerstmann, I was curious to see how Gamespot has been scoring its reviews lately.  I took a closer look at the previous 10 reviews for the PS3, Xbox 360, and Wii (allowing for duplicates where the games were multiplatform), in order to see whether or not reviews have been higher than you might otherwise expect.

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Pinning The Face On The Reviewer

MattG at Press the Buttons manages to make a Kane & Lynch-related point that I hadn’t thought that much about before:

“All too often I hear my friends and general online folks talk about “the GameSpot review” or “the AMN review” of a certain game, as if the reviews are coming from the faceless corporation itself. I hardly ever hear the name behind the review mentioned…”

As nice as it would be for reviewers to get credit for its own sake, PtB makes an interesting observation here - if the game reviewing industry were more personality-driven, rather than site-driven, it would be far more difficult for individual reviewers to be manipulated by their employers/corporate overlords.  Why hasn’t this occurred?

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All the news that’s fit to print… and more!

We’re all aware that when the mainstream media tries to tackle video games, they often miss the mark.  But you have to wonder exactly how a paragraph so poorly written and filled with complete fabrications can get published in the New York Times (via Joystiq):

“Those who have spent the day trading carbon credits have another opportunity to save the planet, this time from aliens in Halo 3, the third edition of the Xbox 360 game. The PlayStation 3 game Gran Turismo 5, a hyper-realistic, high-speed journey, is one of the best sellers for that Sony console, which starts at $299. Microsoft’s Xbox starts at $280. Both are built around the multicore Cell processor, which allows numerous tasks to be done simultaneously.”

Amazing… the rest of the article regarding other technology-related gifts manages not to completely mangle the reporting. It’s just this one paragraph that seems to have been shoddily written and researched and, in some ways, seemingly completely fabricated.

Let’s break this down, shall we?

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Crossing the Line

As has been pointed out in our comments already, there is currently a rumor circulating the web that Gamespot’s editor of 10+ years, Jeff Gerstmann, has been axed, at least in part, because of his negative review of Kane and Lynch, which was being heavily advertised on Gamespot.  Shacknews says they have confirmed that Jeff Gerstmann was fired, but the reason he was fired is still not officially known.

The potential problem here certainly doesn’t need to be spelled out.  As soon as the editorial content becomes influenced by advertising dollars, the content publisher ceases to have any reliability whatsoever as an objective source, and instead simply becomes an extension of the advertiser. The line between advertiser and editorial content should not be crossed.

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