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?

Yesterday, GamePolitics reported on the Entertainment Consumers Association's opposition to a Sierra Club proposal that would impose a 1% surcharge on video games and TV sets sold in New Mexico.

We've also heard from the Entertainment Merchants Association (EMA), a trade group which represents a large bloc of video game retailers. The EMA has likewise taken a position against the proposed levy and shared with GamePolitics a letter sent to the Rio Grande Chapter of the Sierra Club in Albuquerque.

In the letter, EMA VP Sean Bersell writes that the tax idea is based on "suspect assumptions:"

[The] Sierra Club states that the goal of the proposed video game tax is "to fight obesity and poor school performance which may result from excessive... video game exposure." Childhood obesity and academic underperformance are complex social problems that have a myriad of suspected causes. Targeting video games as a major contributor to these problems is unjustified and not supported by a scientific consensus...

Bersell also writes that such a tax is "constitutionally suspect" and that the proposal would place New Mexico retailers at a competitive disadvantage:

Video games, like other forms of entertainment, are expressive products protected by the First Amendment...

A special tax on physical video game sales would place an unfair burden on store-based video game retailers in New Mexico as they compete against other video game delivery systems that are not subject to the same level of taxation.

New Mexico's KOB-4 has a video report.

Full Disclosure Dept: The ECA is the parent company of GamePolitics.