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Author "regrets" Mass Effect nudity accusations News
Xbox 360 News by Robert Purchese
Author Cooper Lawrence has apologised for publicly attacking the EA over the sexual content in Xbox 360 title Mass Effect.
She admitted jumping to conclusions when she slammed the game on Fox News. Having now seen the offending content, Lawrence admits it's no worse than the kind of sauciness you'd see on TV.
"I recognise that I misspoke," Lawrence told the New York Times. "I really regret saying that, and now that I've seen the game and seen the sex scenes it's kind of a joke.
"Before the show I had asked somebody about what they had heard, and they had said it's like pornography. But it's not like pornography. I've seen episodes of Lost that are more sexually explicit," she confessed.
However, Fox News is refusing to budge - sticking to its claim EA was invited onto the channel to tell its side of the story.
Jeff Brown of EA previously wrote an open letter to the news channel to refute an ignorant stance made from misinformation.
Ray Muzyka, boss of developer BioWare, added: "We're hurt. We believe in video games as an art form, and on behalf of the 120 people who poured their blood and tears into this game over three years, we're just really hurt that someone would misrepresent the game without even playing it. All we can hope for is that people who actually play our games will see the truth."
Cooper Lawrence originally accused the role-playing game of portraying female characters as sexual objects in a storyline that has the male lead "deciding how many women he wants to be with".
Lawrence later laughed and said "No" when asked if she had actually played Mass Effect.
Subsequently angry fans of the game found her book The Cult of Perfection: Making Peace With Your Inner Overachiever on Amazon and decided to apply the same logic, resulting in its user rating plummeting from hundreds of negative reviews.
By Friday it had 472 reviews, 412 of which were one star. Most had not read the book.
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Britesparc
28/01/08 @ 12:13
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Well, at least she's had the good grace to apologise for being an arsewipe. I wonder if the potential revenue damage the Amazon reviews were doing helped sway her towards the light?
See kids: direct action works. |
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Here's the ridiculous Fox News segment:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L13Ct40cF... Here's EA's actually pretty impressive response: http://kotaku.com/348187/ea-calls-fox-ou... And finally here is her book on amazon - most of the negative comments have actually been deleted by now: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1599211... |
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ParmaViolet
28/01/08 @ 12:21
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Ok, so she's apologised - but, it still doesn't excuse the fact that she went out on National television and got on a high-horse about something that she admits knowing nothing about or even bothering to research - asking 'someone what they've heard' is not enough of a basis to even have a private conversation, let alone preach to a nation. Seriously, I'm still not satisfied - Mass Effect is the work of art that Bioware hoped it'd be and I am truly glad that they put all that effort into it, it's an amazing game and I see it as proof positive that games can be fun, interesting, dramatic, challenging and mature - it's time for Fox to make a public apology now....if they don't, sue them.
:-) |
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DutchDemons
28/01/08 @ 12:21
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i find it very funny and impressive that people went to amazon and trashed her book:-)
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squarejawhero
28/01/08 @ 12:24
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Fox's Interactive Media division must also be a bit pissed that the News section is acting in this manner, I'd imagine. Quite hard for the media conglomerate to say one thing and do another.
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"Cooper Lawrence originally accused the role-playing game of portraying female characters as sexual objects in a storyline that has the male lead "deciding how many women he wants to be with".
Maybe ive forgotten but isnt the lead characters sex determined by the player?" Yes, something that the guy pointed out in the Fox segment, before being shouted down... I saw another column before the Fox segment, where some nutty neo-con was saying you could sodomise and rape in Mass Effect. Sadly, it also appears to have been taken down. I think they've realised that they've been had... |
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ParmaViolet
28/01/08 @ 12:29
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Actually, it would appear that most of the gamers' reviews of her book have been deleted, but there are still a lot of people that actually bought it, read it and then awarded it a one star review.....so, she's obviously a crap writer and know's about as much about her supposed specialist subject than she does about Mass Effect.
I guess it's easy to get someone to jump on a bandwagon - provided it's on TV and you're desperate to shift those 1000's of books that are rotting in a warehouse somewhere... :-) |
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Everyone loves a happy ending. But did she back down because she realised she was wrong (unlikely - she admits to never playing it), or was it because her book rankings dropped to nothing?
It's also funny that she moans about woman being looked at as sex objects, and then she puts a full-figure photo of herself on the book cover to show how slim and sexy she is. |
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kangarootoo
28/01/08 @ 12:46
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I think anyone who can admit it when they are wrong about something deserves some respect. Jack Thompson for instance would have utterly avoided the issue and attempted to steer the discussion along another avenue.
Ms Lawrence has basically said "I was misinformed, and said some stupid things as a result", which counts for a lot in my book. This doesn't make me a fan of her or her writing, but I'm happy to see this draw to a close and I wouldn't condone continued attacks on her via Amazon reviews. "Everyone loves a happy ending. But did she back down because she realised she was wrong (unlikely - she admits to never playing it), or was it because her book rankings dropped to nothing?" I think it is fair to assume that the book reviews on Amazon mean very little to anyone as anything other than a show of public feeling. it is quite clear to everyone they were not actual reviews of her book, which was exactly the point. And I'm not sure how her admitting to never playing the game means it is unlikely she realised she was wrong. Surely her apology (and the detail of the quotation) means exactly that she did realise that? |
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kangarootoo
28/01/08 @ 12:46
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@JonFE
Fox are hardly going to give screen time to such things. Its not really her call to make. |
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Muddtallica
28/01/08 @ 12:47
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God, I've only just caught up with this story...what a shower of ass. It's something that the woman had the gumption to put her hands up and say she was wrong (even if it was under some public duress), but really it should be Fox who are doing the apologies. So they claim EA were invited onto the show to have their say, and declined? That gives you carte blanche to tell outright lies then, does it? Not to mention the fact that the games expert they did have on the show was shouted down and largely ignored...absolute farce.
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she doesnt deserve respect, nor did it take any "balls" to apologise. she knows how to sell books, and this thing has probably sold more books than a newspaper advert ever could. she is only apologising to save face, and appear like she has "the balls to apologise"
she is a rented talking head, and this debacle could only hurt her saleability if she didnt u-turn. |
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From Cooper Lawrences Amazon book description:
No matter how hard you try, no matter how much you achieve, your life remains totally out of balance. Achievements should not be the total measure of how a woman feels about herself. Apart from the 'complete one romantic storyline in Mass Effect' Achievement, obviously. |
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Hmm.
While it's all well and good that this pundit has had the sense to climb down from her ill-advised comments, I think the story that everyone is missing is that Fox themselves were responsible for the content and tone of this segment, and thus far have not been made to suffer for their reckless scare-mongering and manipulation of public opinion. The shows producers & studio panel are as guilty of mis-representation as this woman. She has had the consequences of fabricating lies from whole cloth forcibly illustrated, it's about time the other participants in this pantomime were given the same treatment. Especially the anchor who lamented the fact that parents might actually have to start monitoring what their kids were doing. Ohh, the humanity!
Edited 1 times,
most recently on 28/01/08 @ 13:13
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This is the Fox News that couldn't call themselves a news organisation in the EU due to the fact-free nature of much of their output.
I fear it's asking too much for a bit more rigour and insight into games coverage from them, Sky, the BBC and newspapers- a lot of the badly researched fluff they come up with is just insulting sterotyping. |
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nickthegun
28/01/08 @ 13:32
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Im sure accusations of nudity and pornography in a field with this kind of demographic really hurt its sales.
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thepiedpiper
28/01/08 @ 13:48
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ah bless, Fox News are scum. They bloody tricked her into it!!! Bill O'reilly is the worst culprit.
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Climhazzard
28/01/08 @ 13:57
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Very happy to see this happen, his was one of my favourite games of last year and doesnt deserve to be slated like this one bit, and neither do Bioware.
Did she not realise that you could be a woman on this game?????? What a retard. |
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You know, the one really scary thought I always have when main stream media people spread false or misrepresenting rubbish about games, a topic we are all intimately familiar with but many other people aren't: how often do they do the same when dealing with topics we no nothing about? If their research is so terrible or even non-existent when it comes to games, how can we assume it would be any better in other areas?
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