Better Business Bureau Agrees "Mass Effect 3" Falsely-Advertised

Well, so much for THIS nonsense being over with.

The Escapist reports that a communications director at the Better Business Bureau has come out in public agreement with the position that Bioware's pre-release hype about ME3 was sufficiently different enough from the final product as to constitute wrongdoing.

Bad PR day for EA/Bioware to be sure, but I have a feeling folks are going to over-inflate the importance of this. Despite the name, The BBB isn't a government organization and has no legal power in such matters - they're an activist organization whose primary focus is corporate malfeasance, so it's not at all surprising that they'd come down on the anti-corporate side of this particular discussion.

I really worry about the logical-extremes of this kind of thinking in regard to entertainment products. Outright lies are seldom "cool;" but when it comes to narrative media like movies, books or games a certain amount of potential consumer misdirection is an essential tool. For example, "Cabin In The Woods" - entering movie theaters this weekend and you should ALL go see it because it's fucking amazing - is advertising itself as, essentially, a mashup of "Evil Dead" and "Saw." It's NOT. Not at all. And the shock of the various reveals of what the film actually IS to unsuspecting audiences is the whole point of the film. Will the BBB etc next come for it? Should we also retroactively call-out Ubisoft for not mentioning the HUGE first-act surprise in any of the "Assassin's Creed" trailers?