By: Colleen Hannon (Momgamer) 

Some pundits are spreading misinformation about the M-rated game Mass Effect. Let’s discuss what’s really in the game so you can make an informed decision.

Note: Yes, this article first appeared a few months ago at GamerDad.com. I’m making sure it has a home on this site.

Last week, Evan Moore posted an article on the website CNSNews.com descibing what they consider the newest scourge to our children’s morals, the M-rated videogame Mass Effect. As a parent who plays games and stays informed in my children’s gaming, it’s sometimes hard to know where to go with situations like this.

Some parents may be wondering why would your kids want this game? Well, it’s made by the same guys who brought you the Star Wars game called “Knights of the Old Republic”. It’s well put together, and has a deep and well thought-out story. If I was going to make a ratings exception for an older teen and was willing to invest the time to play along with them I would definately consider this game after playing through it myself. My eldest son and I are enjoying playing it very much, but he’s 20-years-old and an Army Ranger. He’s well able to handle anything an M-rated game can dish out.

The game is a science fiction first person shooter. That means you shoot stuff with guns. A lot of stuff, with a lot of guns. That’s what this type of game is. The violence is pretty tame when compared with other M rated games of this type. You’re pretty definately making things dead, but they’re not soaking the screen with blood. You do court a genocide, and there are some serious themes here. But none of these guys are talking about that at all. The entire discussion of the game has been derailed by a minor plot point and a cutscene that depicts the main character of the game having a sexual encounter reminiscent of an MTV video or a discrete soap opera love scene.

Where that article goes into the tinfoil hat area is in the assertion by Cathy Ruse of the Family Research Council that this game is just like pornography and is somehow warping our youth.

I want to make something clear. The game in question, Mass Effect, is M-rated. That means the ESRB thinks that no one under 17 should be exposed to the contents. I concur. As I’ve always said, it’s hard to go wrong if you at least follow the ESRB ratings.

There is no secret plot to get this game in front of children. They are not handing it out with Happy Meals, or putting commercials for it in with the Saturday morning cartoons. There are no toys in the cereal boxes. The posters on your gamestore walls are of a guy in a Buck Rogers jumpsuit with a blue glowing ball of plasma in his hand. If the Family Research Council would care to point out some specific ways this game’s marketing is somehow targeted towards minors I’d love to get up on the bully pulpit with them. But without any examples or even a description of how that’s happening, this is just an empty sentence.

The last half of the article is a discussion of how they believe parents aren’t paying attention and in cases where they aren’t an M rating just means that the game is a must buy for those kids and it’s somehow Bioware’s fault that those parents aren’t taking a stand.

I won’t say that never happens, but the problem there isn’t with a brief flash of alien backside. That’s where parents have to step in. They’ve been marketing sugary cereal at my kids their entire lives. Does that mean that they get it? No. Same process here. Look at the box, read the label, and make your decisions for your family.

Parents need real information about games to make these choices. This sort of fallacious article is the enemy of that.

And to make it worse, this sort of misinformed reporting spawns more misinformed reporting. On the website Townhall.com, Kevin McCullough gives a diatribe about how awful he considers this game. The list of fallacies, exagerations, and outright falsehoods in this article is dauntingly long.

It’s quite obvious he hasn’t so much as looked at the case of the game. The first 20 hours or so are full of science fiction action as your character blows up aliens and flies through the stars. I guess he missed that part. He doesn’t ever address the game itself, just his own interpretation of a particular cutscene near the end.

Realistic sex acts? There is no “humping”. It reminded me most of the love scene in “Top Gun”, which garnered the film a PG rating. Or another good comparison would be the love scene in the movie “Daredevil” which is rated PG-13. Your kids are seeing more explicit behavior on MTV and the prime time TV dramas.

You don’t have to take my word for it. If you want to see what he’s talking about, the scene viewable in it’s entirety on Youtube. (Note: That video shows the option with a female protagonist and a female alien. The only difference between the two options is the gender of the person who isn’t blue. The action is exactly the same.) That’s the most explicit it gets, and that’s all there is in the entire game. It’s aproximately forty seconds long. You only do it that once, the flirtatious comment at the end not withstanding.

Nor is there every combination. If your player chose to use a female character, then both of them are female, yes. If you followed the link above you saw it. There is no option for the male character to end up with a male alien. Nor are there any other additional parties involved. I’m simply not equipped to imagine what other options that author and the soi disant friend he discusses came up with in their head, and I’m not going to try. Suffice it to say they’re not in the game.

There is no interactivity with the players at all. Once you get into that room, it’s a movie. You don’t pose anyone, or in any way direct the action. Once it’s over, it’s over. The player would have to reload or replay the game to see it again. And if a kid wanted just that, they don’t have to do the 20 hours of work to get there, spend the $60 or even ask their parents. The footage is widely available on the internet and believe me any kid who wanted to knew exactly where to find it the game came out.

I’m not going to continue doing a point-by-point rebuttal of the other errors in that article, or his subsequent defense of his writing that he posted. If you wish to discuss it, I’d be glad to do so below.

I disagree with him on just about every point, and so does the mission of Gamerdad. Mass Effect isn’t a kid’s game. Just that big black M on the front of the box should tell you that. We don’t need fearmongering and blaming the game for people’s parenting choices. People need the real facts to make informed decisions about the games their children play.

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