Interesting Stuff

First off, I could really go for a cold placenta sandwich right now.

Having said that, you should all know about a guy named Jack Thompson. He’s been saying for years that video games promote violence in children. He calls many games “murder simulators” and appears to be trying to get stricter regulation of the industry. He has attacked the Grand Theft Auto series as well as Bully and Manhunt for promoting violence. He has even claimed that since The Sims 2 has an unofficial patch which makes characters appear naked, it should be banned for nudity and pedophilia. This alarmist rhetoric has brought him to the limelight, and many television shows have interviewed him. However, by and large, he was ignored.

Recently, however, things have begun to change. He recently wrote an open letter called A Modest Proposal, in which he said he would donate $10,000 to charity if a video game company created a game in which a man whose family was killed by gamers gets his revenge by killing the video game industry. It just so happened that such a mod of Grand Theft Auto was created a week earlier, in which you play as Jack Thompson going on just such a rampage. In response to this, however, Thompson claimed that his proposal was satire, and he had no intentions of supporting such a game or donating money to charity. However, the makers of gaming webcomic Penny Arcade donated $10,000 to the Entertainment Software Association Foundation on Thompson’s behalf. Thompson seems to have responded to this by attempting to get the Seatle Police Department to arrest the Penny Arcade people, and to have responded to other gestures of goodwill with a flurry of hollow lawsuit threats (he’s a lawyer). Moreover, the National Institute on Media and the Family, a fellow anti-video games organization has distanced themselves from him. In response, Thompson has admonished them for not going as far as he appears to be going.

The thing that gets me is that the man is clearly nuts, yet the mainstream media seems to regard him as fairly rational (for instance, he was on CNN today). He is supposedly a lawyer, but I have not yet seen him pen any well-composed writing (this is regardless of content; he can’t seem to make eloquent sentences, let alone valid arguments), despite reading his Proposal, his responses to the NIoMatF, Penny Arcade, VG Cats, and the SPD.

The truth is that the vast majority of gamers do not turn out to be psychotic killers, but instead normal people. The vast majority of video games are nowhere close to the “murder simulators” he raves about (Katamari Damacy, Sim City, Animal Crossing, and Tetris leap to mind, not to mention games with violence that could not be construed as realistic, such as any RPG, any roguelike game, Smash Brothers, any Mario game, etc). The vast majority of the responsibility to keep “Mature”-rated video games out of the hands of children lies with their parents, rather than any two-bit lawyer trying to impose his will on Florida.

I hope the people will wake up and come to their senses soon, before men like this acquire even more control over the policies in this country.