- Saturday, 14 November 2009
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They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist... - General John Sedgwick
Gamers vent their spleen at dozy pop-shrink
US POP-SHRINK Cooper Lawrence is probably regretting her reactionary sound-byte for Fox News about the Electronic Arts game Mass Effect.
When Mass Effect came out with a small understated sex scene in it, Fox used Lawrence as a rent-a-quote. Although she had not seen the game, or the scene in question, she did her Foxy duty and said it would harm children.
EA and gamers were furious with the fairly dumb, ill-informed comments. Lawrence does not make her money from talking to Fox. She has a fairly lucrative line of self help books, one of which has been recently released called the Cult of Perfection.
Gamers have been visiting book sites flogging the book and ripping it apart and giving it low ratings. Amazon has not been able to rate the book more than the lowest one star. This morning there were about 400 'reviews' of the book, most of them slating it and making a reference to Lawrence's inability to check her facts before shooting her mouth off.
One of the reviews points out that if the tame sex scene in Mass Effect was harmful to children, then the provocative snap of the fairly doable Lawrence on the cover was equally harmful.
The reviewers do not seem to be stopping there. Her other books are also getting trashed.
More here. ยต
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You having a laugh, right??

http://kotaku.com/assets/resources/2008/01/thecultofprefection.jpg
Attack her revenue stream for massive damage
It's nice to see a company as big as EA actually stepping in to handle this the "lawyer way", rather than just the community trying to change someone's opinion by grass-roots tactics. Spamming someone's book reviews isn't going to really do much compared to a big company hitting you with lawyers.

Fox has the power to ignore the knowledgable people in order to push its sensationalism. If you watch the actual newscast the games journo gets about 2 minutes to put the point across, before 4 or 5 people get to argue uninformed opinions against him.

I saw a similar "bash the game industry" interview on Richard&Judy (think it was GTA3 at the time), where Alex Krotski (that girl from Ch4's Bits) had to essentially argue for the whole industry against 3 in-studio people (including the presenters) and a host of street interviews with knee-jerk parents.
Well the net has produced a virtual version of book burning. Interesting.

And it is SAID that whatever content in games doesn't affect anybody?

Then if so education wouldn't have a definition!