January 26, 2008 -
The pop psychologist and author who so enraged the gaming community this week with her condescending attitude and false characterizations of BioWare's Mass Effect has 'fessed up to the New York Times.Cooper Lawrence made her comments to the NYT's Seth Schiesel, who writes of the gaming community's intense reaction to Lawrence's Monday appearance on Fox News' Live Desk. From the article:
The Internet hath no fury like a gamer scorned...
Bound by global message boards, blogs, chat rooms and of course the games themselves, gamers are perhaps the single most intense subculture on the Internet — fiercely protective of their pastime and at ease with the byways of cyberspace...
Irate gamers have flooded the page on Amazon.com selling Ms. Lawrence’s most recent book, “The Cult of Perfection: Making Peace With Your Inner Overachiever,” sending its user-generated rating into oblivion... Many of the reviewers admit that they have not read Ms. Lawrence’s book.
Lawrence told Schiesel:
I recognize that I misspoke. I really regret saying that, and now that I’ve seen the game and seen the sex scenes it’s kind of a joke.
Before the show I had asked somebody about what they had heard, and they had said it’s like pornography. But it’s not like pornography. I’ve seen episodes of ‘Lost’ that are more sexually explicit.
Meanwhile, BioWare CEO Ray Muzyka told Schiesel:
We’re hurt. We believe in video games as an art form, and on behalf of the 120 people who poured their blood and tears into this game over three years, we’re just really hurt that someone would misrepresent the game without even playing it. All we can hope for is that people who actually play our games will see the truth.
GP: We're delighted to see that Cooper Lawrence has come clean. But we'd also like to know exactly how the Mass Effect beat-down was orchestrated by Fox News. As GamePolitics demonstrated in an earlier case regarding Halo 3, another pyschologist was briefed on what to say just before air time (see: How Fox Morning Show Sensationalized the Halo-in-Church Issue). Did something similar take place in this case?
So far we've received no answers to three questions we posed to Lawrence earlier this week:
1.) Did Fox News brief you on the game, and to what extent?
2.) Were you instructed by Fox News to adopt a position critical of the game for the program?
3.) What study from the University of Maryland are you referring to in your comments?
Comments
http://www.amazon.com/review/product/1599211793/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_img...
Her email:
cooper@cooperlawrenceshow.com
And her Myspace page:
http://www.myspace.com/thecooperlawrenceshow
"You're right Ms. Lawrence, I didn't read your books. Someone told me they sucked and there was a new study out by the University of Maryland that said chick lit merged with pop psychology isn"t terribly good."
Fine, fine, we shouldn't be bitter. There should be more repercussions to her career than gamers saying apology accepted, though. She could at least apologize on Fox News and see if she can't get the rest of those idiots to join in.
The games industry owes its audience A TON- gamers seem to spend more energy fighting the ESAs' public perception battles than they do...
The least she could do was admit that it was a lie. When you misspeak, you don't portray yourself as an expert and act like you know all about the game. Hopefully, at the very least, Mass Effect will be behind us now.
It's a shame it takes a Nerd-Rush to make people apologise for lying and pandering to commercial tub thumping, in the name of a quick buck.
Still I'd say cool it on sending her any more negative reviews. It just makes us look bad, and like vindictive children.
She's best now forgotten amongst the rest of the media hacks and idiots.
Game over.
I also feel Cooper Lawrence deserves absolutely no sympathy- if she had ANY integrity she would have refused to come on the show to speak about something she knew NOTHING about.
All she wanted was exposure which makes her an ATTENTION WHORE.
In addition, her blatant man-hating feminism (the fixer-upper man?) also demonstrates she is no better than a garden variety bigot. Would a white supremasist (sp?) ever get on the air? Man-hating feminists are no different.
I'm really curious about what school she is supposed to be getting her degree from that a)is so easy that she has all this time to appear on television and not do things like, you know, study, teach classes, or work in the campus health center. As a phd student (not in psychology) I know I have these things called responsibilities that would prevent me from being the attention whore she seems to have devoted herself to being. Moreover, I'm curious as to what school would see her on television using her academic credentials to lie and not be a bit concerned.
I wonder how IGN feels.They're paid by the same person who pays the employees of Fox News.
Cooper really made a mock of herself, and I really hope more people learn from this. If you don´t like children to play videogames, at least don´t lie.
But then again, having experts comment on crap they know nothing about other than what they were briefed on 5 minutes before the show is typical 24-hour news channel BS. So I'm not surprised.
Hopefully she's learned her lesson, and takes from this not that gamers shouldn't be messed with, but that relying on Fox's talking points as your sources of information is just asking for trouble, because it assumes that Fox has done their research... which they clearly haven't.
And if it turns out the facts are complete bull, it's the "expert" who ends up embarrassed for looking like an out of touch tool, not the minimum-wage researcher who was given 5 minutes to write up the talking points, or the marketer who edited said talking points to ensure the discussion was as fiery as possible.
sometimes to get someone's attention you have to hit them in the pocketbook.
good that she apologized, would be better if she made a full retraction on the same news show.
And for some people to encourage the continued harassment after shes given her apology (albeit to the wrong audience)... Those who would argue against us think we're childish. Quit justifying said belief.
No point in bothering her any further; Fox News is the real problem here.
As infuriating as false news reports can be, it's important to remember that speaking out of ignorance is not the same as lying.
When Lawrence tries to ad lib her way through a topic she isn't prepared for, that's different from, say, Bill O'Reilly deliberately misquoting his own guests. You end up with a false statement either way, but one's more benign than the other.
Of course, either way, journalists have a responsibility to get it right — but it's clear that Fox News has no interest in getting it right, never has, and Lawrence is small fry compared to that.
Don't be like the one obsessive, creepy guy who's still spamming Kevin McCullough. The anger directed at McCullough and Lawrence has made all the difference it's going to. Let Fox News know what you think of them.
*cue Final Fantasy fanfare*
Pay attention to what Orange Soda says above though; this fight is over. Fox News is the main boss of this stage; Cooper Lawrence is now someone who we'll hopefully be able to look back at and say "she was just a poor NPC in the beast's control, but we freed her by hitting her with our swords".
...that didn't come out like I wanted, but hopefully you get the idea.
As for "fiercely protective". Of course we are. For years (decades?) gamers have been portrayed as immature children trapped in adult bodies and reports like the one in Fox News are the norm, not the exception, in mainstream media. Any group portrayed in that manner by the mainstream media will naturally become "fiercely protective".
Anyway, I agree that it's time to let her go and rip "Faux News" a new one. But uh...
About what Orange Soda said, I personally thing the Amazon bash was reasonable. At least the ones that didn't wish death upon her and just cussed her out. No, the more "mature" responses did more justice. I believe it was a good way to make our voices heard... Besides, even if this confirms this "childish" belief, Honestly...these come from the same people who games rise the crime rates in this country. I bet most of 'em think it contributes to global warming. >_>
Although, I believe the Amazon bash can stop now. Considering the fact that this'll be as good of an apology we'll get.
No we didn't. I'm still not laughing. It's fine and great that Lawrence said she was sorry after the Amazon thing, but the problem will continue as long as people like her will continue putting themselves up as puppets for Fox News. If these experts would just refuse to appear on the air and speak against a subject with no research for the sake of their professional status this would not be happening.
So there. Call me immature. I still blame Cooper Lawrence. She deserves a harsher punishment and to be made an example against the lack of integrity that's running rampant in the media today. Keep in mind this isn't limited to just video games either.
She got off easy.
Regardless, the conservative bias of Fox is yet another indicator that the christian right has firmly set their sights on games. I'm suprised there haven't been church-organized game-burnings...like what they did with Beatles records back in the day.
I agree with you, I'm an psych undergrad working in a psych lab with grad students and I can tell you they don't have time to host a TV show, sometimes much less for anything else, but school.
However, there are some schools that allow part-time grad studies, so Cooper Lawrence is highly likely to be a part-timer. I wonder what her grad supervisor/advisor thinks of her right now... Unless she's doing a Psy. D and not a PhD... which could make a difference.
Anyways, I'm still waiting for the Maryland study so I could comment on it.
Well let this be a lesson to so called "experts" that don't know what they are talking about when it comes to video games.
When I read the title and then half way through the artical. I couldn't help to think she's more reacting to her book then to the gamers.
Still, she at least tried to apologize, so that puts her above most of the people who insult games for no reason.
Gamers are getting the victories now, fter so long of talking to brick wall thompson its good to get some fresh air.
I'm very happy that she has apologised after looking into the matter, now we need to go gung ho for fox and get in a finishing move, the ball is in EAs court.
This, if it generates enough publicity can be a real turning point for respect for games, becoming self-consciouss of alarmist propoganda is something that is very hard to undo and can turn a lot of heads in our favour.
http://www.g4tv.com/xplay/features/19983/XPlay_Editorial_Fox_News_and_Ma...
On the other hand, as juvenile as it is to bash her on amazon just from this scenario (smile), it would be a nugget of sweet yak teat if we could affect FOX itself for ultimately being responsible for this to occur on its network.
Still though, victory marks for us, small though they seem, are still progress!
Did you see the roundtable portion of the clip? It's considerably worse then the interview. GP has gone after MSNBC when they've had J. Thompson on. It's not a 'left/right' thing, it's a 'FOXNews blatantly and knowingly' lied thing.
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Much like Kevin McCullough, now that she has issued an apology, let her fade back into obscurity.
Just goes to show, the way to make sure no one gets away with this stupid behaviour is to punch them in the wallet.
OH and where the hell was the ECA in all of this?
So we have learned that to stop people from lying about games we need to get them early. With McCallaugh and now with Cooper we got them early and they were able to learn how wrong they were.
The true measure of our power of influence will be if we could get the likes of Yee and Thompson to admit they were wrong.
But they are at the point that anything we do is just fuel for their agendas.
E. Zachary Knight
Divine Knight Gaming
OK Game Devs
Random Tower