By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close

Forums - Gaming - Fox News: "Is Bulletstorm the WORST game in the World?"

osamanobama said:
TruckOSaurus said:

@Snesboy, there's a difference between Fox station and Fox News:

Fox is a TV network with shows like The Simpsons, Family Guy, Cops, Fringe, Glee, Hell's Kitchen.

Fox news is a news network like CNN. It trives on sensationalism and right wing point of views.


fox tv is owned by fox news.

and no, Fox has people with all points of views, not only right but also liberalism, they have libertarians, socialists, tea partiers and everyone in between.

perhaps, you should inform yourself before you post stuff like that

Could you link to some Fox News content you thought wasn't biased or bad reporting?



Around the Network
MARCUSDJACKSON said:

its fox news. enough said.


^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Because one arrow just isn't enough.



osamanobama said:
TruckOSaurus said:

@Snesboy, there's a difference between Fox station and Fox News:

Fox is a TV network with shows like The Simpsons, Family Guy, Cops, Fringe, Glee, Hell's Kitchen.

Fox news is a news network like CNN. It trives on sensationalism and right wing point of views.


fox tv is owned by fox news.

and no, Fox has people with all points of views, not only right but also liberalism, they have libertarians, socialists, tea partiers and everyone in between.

perhaps, you should inform yourself before you post stuff like that


And perhaps you should stop sugar-coating Fox News. You're kidding yourself if you really think they have "all points of views". Having Alan Colmes on maybe 3 times a year and Juan Williams doesn't make you balanced. TruckOSaurus was 100% correct in his post.

And as everyone else is saying, it's Fox News, what do you expect?



Rock paper shotgun sums up my thoughts nicely 

Yesterday Fox News asked the headline question, “Is Bulletstorm the Worst Video Game in the World?” Which is spectacular. It’s a quite remarkable piece of writing, worthy of our own Daily Mail. And why is it the WORST GAME IN THE WORRRRLD? Because they’ve named some of the Skill Shots with sexual innuendos. Which, they absolutely astonishingly claim, causes rape.

 

If it weren’t scaremongering bullshit that will misinform those who do not understand that their news source makes up any old rubbish, it’d be hilarious. And some lines really are. For instance,

“players are rewarded for shooting enemies in the private parts (such as the buttocks).”

First of all, is a parenthetic explanation really necessary for “private parts”? Were they concerned that readers may think they’re talking about a secluded beach house or farm driveway? And secondly, of all the private parts to single out, the bottom is by far the funniest. They wanted to shock their audience, but they don’t want to cause them to faint!

However, while the article is all outlandish nonsense, it very quickly descends into something more appalling. After observing that the game has Skill Shots with names like “gang bang” and “topless”, and literally nothing else, they conclude that it is promoting rape.

It’s an excellent example of letting a loose fact mutate as the story goes on. It begins by saying that the game “ties” violence to sex acts by the use of sex-themed words. Then they quote various medical professionals, the first explaining that,

“If a younger kid experiences Bulletstorm’s explicit language and violence, the damage could be significant.”

Now it has become “explicit language”. That’s cited words like “topless”, in case you’d forgotten. Then the next quote moves things on a stage further.

“Carol Lieberman, a psychologist and book author, told FoxNews.com that sexual situations and acts in video games — highlighted so well in Bulletstorm — have led to real-world sexual violence.”

We’ve gone from a word appearing on-screen that puns something naughty, to highlighting sexual situations. Like a man being topless? Apparently so. And then they hit their mother lode. Lieberman adds,

“The increase in rapes can be attributed in large part to the playing out of [sexual] scenes in video games.”

And there they have their story: Bulletstorm, and games like it, cause rape. Now they are “sexual scenes”. The mutation is complete. Based on the game’s featuring the words “topless” and “gangbang”. The quote comes from Carol Lieberman – “psychologist and book author” – whose claim that there’s an increase in rapes in the US is peculiar. While we in no way trivialise the severity of sexual crimes, this is purely about investigating the claims made and the related numbers, and they don’t hold up.

The number of rape convictions, and indeed reported rapes, has enormously fallen in the US since the 70s (when gaming made its commercial début). This Washington Post article from 2006 discusses how the 85% drop over the last three decades has been a consistent fall, a clear trend in the numbers going down. UN statistics show that there were fewer rapes in the US in 2009 than there were in 2008. Not significantly fewer, certainly, but no indication of the quoted increase. Let alone an increase that can be attributed to the apparent sexual scenes in video games.

So who is Dr. Carol Lieberman? She’s a TV shrink, her name spelt correctly is Carole Lieberman, and she has no stated expertise or insight into videogames. In the 90s she wrote books with titles like, “Bad Boys: Why We Love Them, How to Live with Them, and When to Leave Them” and “Bad Girls: Why Men Love Them & How Good Girls Can Learn Their Secrets”. Then after the events of 2001 turned to tomes such as, “Coping with Terrorism: Dreams Interrupted”. (Her website promises that in 2009 she’ll be releasing “American Dreams Interrupted: How to Stay Safe and Sane in a Time of Terror”, but that doesn’t seem to have happened.) We have contacted her to ask for evidence for her claims.

The previous two quotes came from Dr. Jerry Weichman, a clinical psychologist at the Hoag Neurosciences Institute in California. He’s a motivational speaker for teens, and his site also bears no suggestion of time spent researching the effects of gaming. We’ve also contacted him to ask him on what his claims are based.

Things return to the amusingly daft as we continue on, with the claim that the game won’t sell well because of this content. The wonderfully named Billy Pidgeon at M2 Research explains to them that games with excessive violence and sexual content “simply don’t sell well.” Well, that’s Fox’s summary of what he said, and one that someone should probably tell Activision. But it seems that Pidgeon may not have been talking about Bulletstorm at all. In fact, I wonder if he knew what he was being asked about, since his quote appears to be completely out of context.

“Games without sufficient quality of gameplay — games that include highly objectionable violent or sexual content — often pump up the level of this kind of content to gain media attention. This tactic typically fails, as can be seen in the poor sales performance of titles such as BMX XXX and Postal.”

It should probably be pointed out that another explanation of the poor sales of those games is that they were bloody awful. We’ve contacted M2 Research to find out if their quote was in context, and whether they believe the same is true of Bulletstorm as of games like BMX XXX and Postal.

The story then twists off into the ongoing tussle regarding the attempts to make game ratings become legally enforceable in the US. A Ph.D. informs us that “9 year olds are playing games like Bulletstorm”, which is bloody unfair, as we’ve not even got review code yet. And then they explain that the ESRB’s description of the game is “too graphic” for them to print, before printing by far the juiciest bits. The only line they appear too blush-faced to include is the description of the swear words included, despite the delicate flowers at the ESRB having censored them themselves: “Language such as “f**k,” “sh*t,” “p*ssy,” and “c*ck” can be heard in dialogue.”

They finish by throwing up their hands in frustration at their being ignored by Epic, People Can Fly, and, er, Microsoft when they approached them for comment. And then, amazingly, they get specifically huffy because Warner Bros., who the story states have nothing to do with the game at all, told them they didn’t have a comment. Marvellous! Perhaps they should also have become indignant when McDonald’s and Exxon didn’t get back to them.

So there you go. Bulletstorm causes rape. That’s your take-home message. Of course it was always a game that was going to engender some degree of outrage. It’s clearly trying to, in its gleefully naughty way, from its ultra-cartoon-violence to its provocative advertising campaign. But perhaps they weren’t expecting something quite as remarkable and outlandish as the Fox News response.

We will update you if any of the experts get in touch.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/02/09/will-bulletstorm-murder-your-children-no/



@TheVoxelman on twitter

Check out my hype threads: Cyberpunk, and The Witcher 3!

osamanobama said:
TruckOSaurus said:

@Snesboy, there's a difference between Fox station and Fox News:

Fox is a TV network with shows like The Simpsons, Family Guy, Cops, Fringe, Glee, Hell's Kitchen.

Fox news is a news network like CNN. It trives on sensationalism and right wing point of views.


fox tv is owned by fox news.

and no, Fox has people with all points of views, not only right but also liberalism, they have libertarians, socialists, tea partiers and everyone in between.

perhaps, you should inform yourself before you post stuff like that

Says "OsamaNobama"  in defense of Fox News.

Having a "liberal" or "socialist" on to get shouted down by Bill O'Reilly or Hannitys panel isnt having "all points of view"
 

That said, this has nothing to do with Fox News' utter bullshit, even though this piece is utter bullshit it being on Fox's website is irrelavent from their politics and lack of professionalism since this kind of stuff is everywhere to be honest.



Around the Network

I'm a little bit tired of the Nazi comparisons. Quit belittling something just to try to make a "cool" comparison.



themanwithnoname's law: As an America's sales or NPD thread grows longer, the probabilty of the comment "America = World" [sarcasticly] being made approaches 1.

TruckOSaurus said:

@Snesboy, there's a difference between Fox station and Fox News:

Fox is a TV network with shows like The Simpsons, Family Guy, Cops, Fringe, Glee, Hell's Kitchen.

Fox news is a news network like CNN. It trives on sensationalism and right wing point of views.

LDoesn't tv in general thrive on sensationalism?  People act like fox news is so much worse than everybody else.  Hell, Ax Men on History Channel gets advertised by them acting as if somebody is going to get injured or lost or shot in the next episode.  I mean, what the hell, they are trying to attract viewers by exploiting events that can be extremely tragic towards a family.



Money can't buy happiness. Just video games, which make me happy.

Soleron said:
osamanobama said:
TruckOSaurus said:

@Snesboy, there's a difference between Fox station and Fox News:

Fox is a TV network with shows like The Simpsons, Family Guy, Cops, Fringe, Glee, Hell's Kitchen.

Fox news is a news network like CNN. It trives on sensationalism and right wing point of views.


fox tv is owned by fox news.

and no, Fox has people with all points of views, not only right but also liberalism, they have libertarians, socialists, tea partiers and everyone in between.

perhaps, you should inform yourself before you post stuff like that

Could you link to some Fox News content you thought wasn't biased or bad reporting?

People need to get over it, all the news stations are the same way.  Can you post a link to news that isn't biased from any place out there?  That's what I thought.



Money can't buy happiness. Just video games, which make me happy.

Baalzamon said:
TruckOSaurus said:

@Snesboy, there's a difference between Fox station and Fox News:

Fox is a TV network with shows like The Simpsons, Family Guy, Cops, Fringe, Glee, Hell's Kitchen.

Fox news is a news network like CNN. It trives on sensationalism and right wing point of views.

LDoesn't tv in general thrive on sensationalism?  People act like fox news is so much worse than everybody else.  Hell, Ax Men on History Channel gets advertised by them acting as if somebody is going to get injured or lost or shot in the next episode.  I mean, what the hell, they are trying to attract viewers by exploiting events that can be extremely tragic towards a family.

I agree. I think the South Park episode Quest For Ratings sums up pretty well what has happened to news networks.



Signature goes here!

Baalzamon said:
...

People need to get over it, all the news stations are the same way.  Can you post a link to news that isn't biased from any place out there?  That's what I thought.

BBC. Their Egypt coverage, to the best of their ability, is presenting the facts and a range of opinions without endorsing any. That's a recent example of what they do all the time.

For example: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12392492

Fox is usually not even making an attempt to be neutral. They have an agenda and that's what they slant everything to. Most of what they produce isn't even news coverage, I think of it as comedy inspired by the news.

I agree all American networks are biased. I did live there and had to listen to the BBC World Service (PBS was the least bad of the rest).