Last week, my fellow columnist Shankar Gupta did a great job covering the drama between a conservative columnist's misunderstanding of the game "Mass Effect," and the people that had played the game. While I hate to follow up this week with the same issue, there's been a significant development that demands a revisit: "Mass Effect" has hit mass media.

t's been a busy week for video game alarmism. Unless this is the only gaming article you've read this week, you've doubtlessly heard about a pack of lies authored by conservative columnist and radio talk show host Kevin McCullough on TownHall.com, the resulting outrage, the subsequent response, the further resulting outrage, and finally a weak and weaseling apology.

I've been thinking about the new year. And movies. Yes, this is the "gaming" insider, but there are a lot of parallels between the film and game industries, and one of the emerging trends for video has me thinking about the same application for games. The buzz around digital distribution of video seems to be that rentals stand on the horizon, and will likely appear on mainstream distribution centers in 2008. This is very exciting. I've also been thinking that such a model might be a good fit for gaming, depending on the execution.

We've spent a lot of pixels in this space talking about gaming as a storytelling medium. In gaming circles this week, there's been some controversy about a game being used to tell a somewhat different story.