Speaking of Puke Bowls…

Boring grown-ups talking about things I enjoy make me puke–especially when it comes to video games, which is an area that I am honestly going to say I know little about. I’m a huge n00b and a total outsider, but I do appreciate the video game industry’s impact on pop culture. But whatever, I’m not going to go into that because I stopped writing term papers like 5 years ago.

Apparently fans of Mass Effect were just as annoyed when they watched Cooper Lawrence’s retarded comments about sex and video games and its influence on young, innocent boys. They utilized their nerdy skills by bringing Lawrence’s equally retarded book rating down on Amazon to a “lowly single star.”

One word: AWESOME.

It’s nice to see that smart people who can appreciate the value of technology, escapism and “internet tubes” create their own “mass effect” (oooh nice use of puns) in retaliation. Nerds rule, dude.

I also had this whole other paragraph written in my head about this, but I forgot what I was going to say cause someone brought extra pizza in the kitchen and I am going to eat a slice.

But let me say this:

Geoff Keighley is the smart guy featured in the Fox News interview above, and he is pretty cool. I met him once when WOW was putting together the proposal for our I, Videogame series for Discovery, and he came on as a consultant. So this man knows what he’s talking about, instead of that giant vagina face spouting idiotic ideas about sex.

Seriously, would you believe scientific research that concluded that boys couldn’t tell the difference between real life and video games? What kind of kids did they invite to this study? Amoebas? Fetuses? Let’s get real, here.

The only study I could google was this University of Maryland study that found students were less affected by graphic and gory video game imagery. In other words, these students believed these pictures were “harmless,” suggesting “that many young adults are oblivious to the impact of raunch and gore rendered in ever-crisper detail by the current crop of video games.”

Yay for crisper and more realistic details in new video games. But there is a HUGE difference between not becoming upset when you see a CG character’s head getting blown off…and not being able to understand that it’s fake. Way to distort science, lady.* A nice, concise summary of the study can be read here.

*Apparently, I’m not the only one interested in finding out what this U of MD study is. This blogger even emailed Dr. Killen (who did the previous study), and she wasn’t even sure what Cooper Lawrence was talking about. The only recent video game related study aimed “to assess late adolescents’ evaluations of and reasoning about gender stereotypes in video games.” Still, gender stereotypes =/= reality.

ANYWAY, I have an expense report to compile so my bosses can get reimbursed for everything they spent money on and therefore, make even more money than I ever will. Fun.