We must be thinking of different games here

It's called "Mass Effect" and it allows its players - universally male no doubt - to engage in the most realistic sex acts ever conceived. One can custom design the shape, form, bodies, race, hair style, breast size of the images they wish to "engage" and then watch in crystal clear, LCD, 54 inch screen, HD clarity as the video game "persons" hump in every form, format, multiple, gender-oriented possibility they can think of.

YouTube has a listing of all of the sex scenes in Mass Effect. Suffice it to say, they are probably a lot tamer than many ads for beer and ads for soap sold to women, but who am I to question the insight of a man who has apparently never even played Mass Effect (and confuses it with Hot Coffee/GTA)?

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?

Role playing games are disgusting. I hear Tokyo is going to have fire and brimstone rained down on it from heaven because of the ongoing sin of producing Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. Jesus reportedly said in one of the gnostic gospels: "for I say to you, it shall be better for Soddom and Gammorah in that day than for Square-Enix." (Yes, I know Mass Effect is made by Bioware)

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. By it's design, kids could ask for it, or for their parents' Best Buy Card to go purchase it with nary a raised eye-brow. Generic, non-descriptive, and relatively harmless.

By design kids could ask for Playboys, automatic rifles, bombs, booze and the keys to the car. A parent that gives a child any of these things is a parent in biology only. According to Kevin McCullough's argument, the makers of the movie Seven should be run out of town because a parent might have bought it for their kid thinking it was an educational video about basic math.

But it IS marketed for the X-Box 360, perhaps the most visually stimulating gaming system ever made. The software for such allows the blending of DVD video, component graphics, and the manipulation of actual pictures so that an alternate reality engulfs the fifteen year old boy playing it without much objection.

Rated M for mature. Mature in the ESRB rating is 17+. Fifteen year olds are not the target audience of this game.

Now if I have trouble with my son taking his James Bond 007 games a little too emotionally, imagine the powerful effect that hormones add to the mix when the player's own character is copulating like jack rabbits with super-models, actresses, and anyone else they can spend the patience to create, name, and "put into play."

What he doesn't inform his readers of is the fact that these sex scenes are accessed through knowing the right combination of interactions, most of which are never going to be chosen in the right order. See, in Mass Effect, your actions have consequences, and they cut off entire parts or add on new parts of the story depending on how your character behaves.

I hear the libertarian Ron Paul's answer already, "Government has no business censoring freedom of expression." Figures, he's a libertarian.

It's harder to tell who McCullough has a bigger hard on for: the designers of Mass Effect or Ron Paul.

If a pre-teen, teen, young adult, or adult male plays such a game in which the women DO submit without choice, are made to appear as Barbie streetwalkers, and perform whatever act can be imagined, what's to stop that same male from assuming that the women in his "other world" shouldn't be forced to do the same.

Grand Theft Auto, Mass Effect, Wii Sports. Ehhh when you've played one, you've played them all...

Yes there will be many snickers that I decided to bring this issue up in the Presidential cycle of 2008 but how refreshing would it be for a President to prove to the nation that his own manhood was not in question and put his pen and signature to a bill that dealt with such simulated sex excess in a way that was punitive to its creators to such a degree that they would never recover from it?

How about we have a President sign into office a bill that makes fact checking a legal requirement for professional columnists and journalists? It wouldn't be constitutional, but it'd be a lot more fun to watch than a bill banning sex scenes in Mature (R)-rated games that look kid friendly compared to an issue of Maxim magazine.

Of course, he's a real way to prove you're a real man. You come into your home, and see a game that your kid bought behind your back that is inappropriate for them. You pick it up, break the DVD in half, and throw the shards away. You then tell your kid that you're the father, and if they ever pull a stunt like that again, it'll be the console that gets that treatment next time. Either that or you'll take away their console and put in your room for your enjoyment at their expense. Real men control their households, and don't require legislation to police the intellectual property that comes into it.

As technology continues to push the limits of imagination and interaction more and more the brain, the emotions, the feelings will integrate with physical responses in reality. And while the makers of such trash seem to be pushing our next generation of young men through the gates of hell as fast as is humanly possible, it needn't be that way.

Here's hoping that as the next President will be forced to deal with this continual emerging reality - and enemy that has set its site to our destruction from within - that we will have elected a man of such character that he will have precision in the clarity of his response.

Foreign wars, a faltering economy and dollar, weak civil liberties, a Congress that acts like a crackwhore with a CEO's corporate card... ehhhh these aren't the big issues. Keeping role playing games with tame sex scenes out of the hands of an audience they aren't even marketed to is really the issue that will decide the future of America.

As best as I can tell, this editorial was pulled from Townhall. I was only able to find it through a Google search where someone had posted the entire thing to FreeRepublic. If I had to guess why, I'd say that it was probably due to the fact that Fox News, being all fair and balanced, with an eagle eye for accuracy in all of their reporting, took this and ran with it, pissing off EA in the process. This commentary from McCullough is so far off base in terms of describing Mass Effect that in all seriousness, it is borderline libel, and that's being conservative toward him.

I'm glad to see that for once, a major video game publisher is fighting back in the media, and playing hardball with the media. It's about time the video game industry stopped laying down and taking the abuse from the media.

**UPDATE**:McCullough has written updates on his Townhall blog here and here. The first part is just a whole series of ass covering on his part, with this truly amazing piece of logic:

5. The major criticism the Gamers had for me in their reaction was this challenge: "Unless you've spent the 20 hours of game time it takes to get to the explicit scenes, keep your fat mouth shut!" Many challenges stated that unless I played it myself then I had no business pointing out its objectionably content. Would they say the same of a strip club at the end of their block or hookers knocking at their door? Normal people would not. There is an innate instinct that tells us right from wrong, it's called a conscience. Did I play the game? No. Did I talk to some gamers who had and who knew the possibilities of the game. Yes! Does it make the lesbian, alien, hetero, homo sex that a player arrives at in the game a proper thing for teenagers to be tantalized by? Absolutely not!

I'm sure they would say the same thing about a book review where the reviewer had not bothered to read the entire book, and instead decided to take a few interesting or colorful parts out and review them instead. McCullough's original editorial made no allowance for context, nor does this defense of it even attempt to cover the fact that he had no personal experience with the game. This puts him into the same category of reviewers that have gotten their panties in a knot over the cover of Liberal Fascism, without having actually read the book.

The over-arching point of the entire piece, was not even to encourage censorship - though we ARE allowed to censor smut in this nation, and it has been defined already by the Supreme Court. (Thus why we are not Europe with our "blue" channel running on broadcast television nightly.) The real point of the piece was however to say that in the election coming up the next President will preside over a society that does more to push the envelope than any that have come before it.

While this is entirely true, it also forgets the fact that the overwhelming majority of the game has nothing to do with sexuality, unless one attributes a certain degree of sexuality to heroism. Mass Effect more closely resembles real life than most games, its sci-fi content aside, because it changes with the way that you behave in the game. You can be a paragon of virtue or a renegade.

McCullough is a flat out liar when he says that he didn't want to encourage censorship of content. That is precisely what he called for in this:

Yes there will be many snickers that I decided to bring this issue up in the Presidential cycle of 2008 but how refreshing would it be for a President to prove to the nation that his own manhood was not in question and put his pen and signature to a bill that dealt with such simulated sex excess in a way that was punitive to its creators to such a degree that they would never recover from it.

I could be wrong, but punishing the publication of content of some sort with the loss of liberty or property through the initiation of force by the state is the classic definition of legal censorship. Perhaps he really doesn't want to encourage parents to take responsibility by censoring what comes into their housholds (I wish I could say this entirely tongue-in-cheek). His own words call him a liar.

God didn't design it that way, and no matter how many gamer-nerds spam my inbox with profane dreams of seeing my dead corpse sodimized...

Call me legalistic, but I can imagine God being rather unenthusiastic about a defense of His morality that has to resort to wild, blatantly not true accusations that ultimately are defended by lying about their substance.

In the second part, he takes a much more conciliatory tone, so it's probably best to just assume that he realized eventually that he was making a complete ass out of himself. This is precisely the sort of behavior that makes socially conservative values hard to defend in modern America. As I have said before, I am a libertarian who voluntarily embraces biblical morality, with the obvious caveat that I have broken the entire law like everyone else. It is extremely difficult for me to stand up for biblical morality when people like McCullough go off on tirades about subjects that they really know nothing about. That creates an environment of guilt by tenuous association.

Ironically, Mass Effect is probably one of the best games out there right now for teenage boys to play through, provided they play it more or less on the paragon mode. Playing it through like that makes your character behave like a real hero who is always clean and above board in everything he does. There might even be a biblical parallel in there about character, but surely that has already been missed by McCullough.