This really bugged me.
I'm very late to this particular controversy but apparently some talk show host named Cooper Lawrence (whose the first girl I've ever heard of using the name Cooper by the way) came out against the game Mass Effect on Fox News because it uses nudity and a few mild sex scenes.
In retaliation gamers started giving her book a 1 star rating on Amazon. Here's the quote from Gaming Today...
After hearing the offensive and biased attack against Mass Effect on Fox News, I decided to check out some links on Cooper Lawrence, the psychologist who took part in the biased strike on the game. I came across her book on Amazon.com titled ‘The Cult of Perfection: Making Peace with Your Inner Overachiever’. It was interesting to see that the page was full of one-star reviews of her book mostly coming from gamers. Shawn covered the topic HERE yesterday. This is definitely one of the reasons I love the Internet. She may think that it’s ok to bash a product she has never used and gamers are now bashing a book they have never read to drop her book rating on Amazon.
Isn't "Two wrongs don't make a right" still something we teach to Kindergartners?
That said lets go over the multiple reasons why this is stupid...
- It has a destructive effect on the community: By far my biggest annoyance here is the fact that people like this do nothing but take credibility away from the power of a social network. Amazon eventually had to just delete all the 1 star reviews which robbed the people who actually read the book and didn't like it of their voice (oh, and made the book look better to people in the process)
- They actually helped her sales: Here's a little life lesson, every time you attack someone en mass you actually draw attention to them. Mark my words, her sales are going to go up because of this. So again these idiots did exactly the opposite of what they were trying to do.
- Newsflash: the News is scripted: The biggest irony here is that Mrs. Lawrence may not even be against this game. CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and all the others hire pundits to take a side on these type of shows and people who do these debates don't necessarily agree with what they're saying. They are paid to take a position of "positive" or "negative" and nuance isn't something the networks are interested in. If you want proof see Mrs. Lawrence's follow up comments here.
I'm sure there are more but that makes my point well enough. What bothers me about this is the gamers' actions accomplished nothing that they set out to do. They actually did damage to Amazon's community while helping Mrs. Lawrence sell books. It never ceases to amaze me how many people will just act without putting any thought into whether their actions do anything to actually accomplish their goal.
It really does just bother me to no end...