Blast from the Past: FOX News Hates Mass Effect

Alright, so, for the sake of getting some posts up and getting readers engaged, I've been searching around for old works I've done that I'd like to recycle (after all, Oregon is one of the greenest states in the nation... I threw up a bit typing that). One such work is this one, pulled from a group project from last year in which we looked at the notion of censorship in modern Western society. I'll likely pull a couple other posts I made on that blog for this in the coming weeks, but no need to bombard you with old stuff, right?

Keep in mind when reading this that it was written for a professor and a class who very likely hadn't played Mass Effect. Many of you have probably played it or know quite a bit about it, but I'm too lazy to actually go in and change things to accommodate. It's still an interesting piece (I think... biased...) regarding a now half decade old story, since FOX News hasn't really changed and videogames still get stupid amounts of blame for "corrupting our children" from conservative media outlets today.

Anyway, try and enjoy. There's videos!
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In 2007, Bioware released an ambitious role playing videogame titled Mass Effect, which looked to push the envelope on the believable by focusing on character interaction and enabling the player with the power of choice. These choices ranged from the mundane to the extreme, from whether or not you wanted to disconnect a call with your superiors to the life or extinction of an entire species. The plot plays out based on each and every decision the player, as Commander Shepard, makes, whether he even realizes it or not.

The game itself is a 20-50 hour experience, depending (again) on what you decide to explore or not explore. There is the required set of missions that assemble your team and pursue the main plot, then there is a vast amount extra to check out, from exploring new planets, finding artifacts and learning about the game's universe by speaking with teammates after missions, politicians before them or natives during. Needless to say, there is plenty of stuff in this game to keep a player interested, as every interaction varies from the last.

Now, hopefully this all sounds lovely. But what does it have to do with rhetoric in the news? Well, what if I told you that within that 20-50 hour experience of killing bad guys, deciding fates and learning about a wide-ranging fictional universe, there were two-- two-- chances for a 30 second sex scene? And what if I told you that those sex scenes could involve an alien? Or alien lesbians?