The McCullough Mass Effect Debacle

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So much can happen so quickly on the internet in just the span of three days. I’ve been following such a whirlwind regarding Kevin McCullough, a conservative blogger and apparently an obscure radio and/or podcast personality who seems to know jack-all about jack half the time and mistakingly extended his school-yard taunting thinly disguised as journalistic blogging to the world of video games.

McCullough posited that the video game Mass Effect (which I have completed, by the way, and am considering doing final impressions on) was some sort of sex simulation game where you could design characters specifically to "hump" in, and I quote, "the most realistic sex acts ever conceived". He even goes on to claim Mass Effect contains rape and sodomy. Oh lawdy.

According to an article on GamerDad, McCullough may have gotten this idea from an equally misinformed article on CNSNews.com (another, surprise surprise, conservative site) which claims "A new, best-selling video game, Mass Effect, made for the Microsoft Xbox 360 console, allows the characters to engage in explicitly graphic sexual intercourse" and goes on to worry about the feeding of porn to children. Where have these conservative bloggers gotten this idea? Well you see you can, if you so choose, complete a romance subplot in Mass Effect. You only get to choose between three characters: Ashley Williams and Liara T’Soni if you’re male, Kaiden Alenko and Liara T’Soni if you’re female. Liara T’Soni is an Asari, a blue woman of an all-female alien race. She’s dull and boring and is one of those intelligent-but-naive-otherworldly-maidens-who-speak-in-a-formal-tongue that I always hate. But I was playing as a female and there was no way I was going for Kaiden (at least not on that file) so according to Mass Effect goddamn do I love blue boobs.

Speaking of boobs, if you complete this optional subplot in Mass Effect, which involves building a relationship with one of your two choices throughout the entire game, you can trigger a brief love-scene toward the end where your character and whichever character you chose to romance (if you chose to romance anyone at all, that is) consummate their relationship before heading for certain doom to defeat the villain of the story who is trying to, in no small way, destroy all organic life in the whole damn universe. You can also have the characters choose to wait, and I don’t know if this love scene ever occurs at all if you do so (I’ve only played through once and your every decision dictates what happens at any given time.) This is simply part of the story, something two real adults falling in love with each other would do in such a situation. You don’t control the actions of the characters in this scene, nor do you get to design your character’s romantic interest as McCullough claims. It only occurs once.

You don’t actually see any boobs, either, the entire scene is something you could see on evening television (aside from, you know, aliens), heavily shaded, cropped just right, camera blurring in the right places, one 3 second shot of ass, music is the only sound you hear.  I’ve seen more skin in commericals for body lotion, for crying out loud. The scene is so brief and cropped and blurred so much I can’t even get any decent pictures from it for this article. The real issue here is that you can pair your female Commander Shepard with another female character, and we all know that’s just naughty.

If this romantic scene were in a movie, it’d be rated PG-13, Mass Effect is rated M, the film equivalent of R. And that’s another issue: in no way are M-rated games marketed toward children. It’s not like when you see commercials for Lord of the Rings toys with 7 year olds who shouldn’t have even watched the films playing with them. In fact a child would probably find Mass Effect extremely boring considering all the dialog you go through, it’s a pretty good deterrent if you’re worried about them investing 25 hours into shooting robots and talking a whole damn lot just to see a glimpse of some digital female ass.

But McCullough couldn’t bother to even glance at BioWare’s official Mass Effect website or even a  Wikipedia article about the game before he started making all sorts of claims about it.

"Starting with the disgusting idea that 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. Right? We can all agree on this? Then there’s the dishonesty behind the game’ 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."

The irony in that single above statement is the most hilarious part. Hey! By it’s title Mass Effect sure sounds like a science fiction GI-Joe game, but it’s really an orgy of alien rape and sodomy! And we all know the character creation is all about creating idealized people, despite the fact they can only have bad military haircuts and it’s quite possible to make them ugly as sin if you so choose. Oh yeah, and that’s only why both of the female characters I created pictured in my  "impression" review both have noticeable scars on the right side of their face. You even have the option of giving your character a pot-marked skin texture.

After his article was linked to from both GamePolitics.com and Penny-Arcade.com McCullough received a flood of responses from gamers, many intelligent, some sadly not, the latter of which were the target of McCullough’s next article. He attempted to desperately backpedal, stretching logic extremely thin as he tried to justify all his claims about Mass Effect within the context of the game’s actual content, but he mostly spends all of his time insulting the gaming population.

Earlier today, perhaps finally realizing he was becoming the butt of a very large internet joke, he finally posted an apology to the gaming community. Well, the sort of non-apology you usually see from conservatives anyway. He apologized about his assertations about the gaming industry’s irresponsibility when it comes to ratings enforcement and children purchasing M-rated video games (really its the fault of the retailers, after all), apologized somewhat to the gamers, but he has yet to apologize for the blatant lies about Mass Effect, saying only that the gamers pointed out he was incorrect on "one or two points", rather than all points, everywhere, for infinity.

McCullough’s 15 minutes of fame

You may ask yourself, why should we care? Why should we give this man the attention? He’s just some Conservative nutter who spouts misinformation so he can take the stance he wants on any given issue, whether or not that stance is even justified or realistic. But it’s stuff like this that really damages gaming culture. Look what happened, he read some misinformed blowhard’s article, took it for fact, and wrote an even blowhardier one. All the "concerned Christian mothers" and conservative jerkoffs who frequent TownHall.com will now read his article and take it for fact, never attempting to research the subject themselves (not that they won’t just balk at that one romance scene cry foul anyway…) This is how Conservatives tend to operate: they only listen to each other. The gamers probably won’t change McCullough’s feeble mind, but luckily the comments would get through to any passer-bys. And of course there’s the bonus that after feeling the wrath of the internets, McCullough might shut up for a while and go back to calling Hillary Clinton a bulldyke or whatever it is he normally does.

Mass Effect is a fantastic game, it really has set the bar incredibly high when it comes to gaming narratives and has proven once more that games can be a storytelling medium on par with film. It doesn’t deserve this fabricated controversy.