Children often are drawn to bloody and gruesome fairy tales and ghost stories in order to come to grips with heavy concepts like right and wrong, responsibility, loyalty, life and death. Should a game like Mass Effect that centers on making difficult, grown up, choices, advocates diversity and harmony among different races while teaching responsibility be off limits to developing minds?

Using children as an excuse for ideologically motivated stances is nothing new. Politicians, religious leaders, man and women of power have been doing it for a very long time. As a matter of fact, on a macro level, we can trace the desire to protect our young to biology. (Although that evolutionary desire undoubtedly ties with physical harm: ‘I don’t want my offspring to be eaten by a tiger.’) However, transferring this desire to the realm of morality is a whole another can of worms… an ugly, rusty can, with sharp jagged edges, full of guilt-ridden, self-righteous, zealous worms.

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