A little while ago a part of the American nation was shocked as it was pointed to ‘extremely graphical scenes of a sexual nature’ that were to be seen in the Mass Effect game for XBox 360, which was just released on the market. The scenes of frontal digital nakedness could seriously confuse younger gamers and therefor the game should be forbidden or at least edited so the graphic sex would be removed. Despite the fact that the violence of the game really outstands the (mostly suggestive) sexual actions, and despite the fact that Miss Cooper Lawrence, who raised hell on a talk show where she pointed the nation to this fact, the game has now 1.4 million copies sold. Which would make it a popular game.

Miss Cooper Lawrence gave her honest and sincere opinion on the scenes of a telepathic encounter between a man and an alien with a blue skin. This was soon descripted as ‘interracial sex’. Obviously she has never seen Battlestar Galactica or Star Trek, where such close encounters are happening ALL THE TIME! Other than that, Miss Cooper Lawrence based her judging on pure hearsay, because since the game still had to be released at that time and the gameplay takes up to 30 hours, so it seemed really unlikely she would have had the skills or time to have run through the game to be confronted with those specific scenes. EA Games demanded an apology, and miss Cooper Lawrence actually did so, publicly, in the New York Times. She said she realized that she was wrong and that, now that she has seen the scenes (a french kiss and a bum are all that’s shown) she thinks it’s rather ridiculous and thus she overreacted.

One of the other reasons why she was so fast to apologize could also have been the fact that her book ‘The Cult Of Perfection’ dropped to the bottom of Amazon’s ‘most popular books’ list faster than she could say the name of the game. A few disgruntled fans had catapulted bad reviews into her general direction and the book dropped down the charts like a brick in a river. It was obviously an orchestrated event because one of the negative reviews read: “Obviously I haven’t read a letter in this book, but that doesn’t really matter”. Yes. Payback in a consumer generated world can be a mass effect. :)