Alien Sex!

Mass Effect was released in November amidst all of the holiday hullabaloo. The good doctors over at Bioware were shooting for an incredibly immersive sci-fi adventure with a host of interesting characters... including a bunch of aliens. During your travels through the stars you can stop and chat with your crew members and the denizens of many planets. Two characters in the game, a hot girl and a hot alien girl, are open to extra curricular activities if you talk to them often enough and ask them the right questions. Bioware refers to these in-game actions as "romantic subplots" in their 360 Achievements. Clever, clever guys.

So there's a sex scene in the game. Check it out here on the youtubes. And again!

(I'm going to skip over the fact that you can only choose between boy-girl sex or girl-girl sex. Apparently boy-boy sex is just too taboo...? Holy crap is America weird...)

So now the stage has been set. And with a presidential election coming up it only took a couple of months for someone to notice. Kevin McCullough scooped it up and wrote a scathing article bashing the shit out of the industry and Mass Effect. Then of course some gamers flew off the handle and told him that he was an asshat. I wish they had exercised a bit more restraint... but it's on the internets and people are pretty serious about things over here. Kevin then went on to post a scathing rebuttal to all of the "Gamer-Nerds" that wrote in to him. I guess I shouldn't be too offended... I mean, he capitalized both "Gamer" and "Nerd." And he hyphenated it. Thanks Kevin! I appreciate your support.

I'm not sure how I feel about this entirely. It seems like Kevin really enjoys riding that moral high horse around, telling us why we're bad and what we can't do. But while his sensationalism is bringing readership to the site, it's also weakening his position because he's such a dick about it. It's hard to think of this as little more than an internet troll.

But at least he's coming at it from a respectable position: we don't want our kids exposed to smut. That's pretty reasonable. I don't want kids seeing smut either. There's a time and a place for everything, and it's the exact moment that you turn 18. But these scenes in Mass Effect aren't exactly hardcore pornography. Kids are probably seeing worse stuff on tv, in movies, or on the internets.

The only difference here is that it's interactive. But here's where Kevin conveniently gives the industry too much credit. The scene isn't really interactive. You make a couple of choices and then the characters do pretty much whatever they want. You have about as much control over what's happening in this sex scene as you do in any standard porn dvd. This is kind of another topic altogether, but Mass Effect is a far cry from a "virtual orgasmic rape" simulator as Kevin puts it.

Sex in gaming is kind of a big deal and it's something that we have to monitor closely as an industry. The ESRB, the media outlets, and parents need to keep fighting the good fight and try to keep adult entertainment out of the hands of impressionable youth. And by and large it appears that they're doing a solid job. Kevin doesn't really point to a solution in his article, but I hope that attempts to legislate this kind of thing fall flat. Self-regulation seems to be working for other types of media and the games industry shouldn't be treated as a special case.

-Brad!