The first words out of any core gamer’s mouth is probably “What the ****?” after reading the headline. But apparently Jacky boy has worked his magic mojo on a few gamers and have rendered them Jackified.
Detroit Games Examiner, Alexander Berlingieri, recently wrote about his encounter with censor activist and former Florida state lawyer, Jack Thompson.
Berlingieri writes that,
“…there was a Q&A with Mr. Thompson that I was able to see, and I'm going to tell you something. He's a good guy.”…” His argument is (paraphrasing here) that he wants to make it so that stores are not allowed to sell to people under 17 Mature rated games without consequence to make it much more strict and firm so that games would not be the blame if there were an event, as he said "10 times worse then Columbine". If you remember those horrible events, Doom was brought up as a major supposed factor in the students "Training" for the events that sadly took place.”
Oh boy. Anyway, let’s get one thing straight: Jack Thompson may put on good behavior in real life so he doesn’t get run through by pissed off gamers. But just recently Alexander was absentminded of the news that involved Jack Thompson saying this to Blend Games’ Managing Editor, Pete Haas in an impromptu interview:
“…the recent finding is that gamers ingest more drugs than others, and it appears you prove the point.”…”Get a life, gamer dude. Seriously. You need to get into the real, not the virtual world.”
Pete responded by saying that “We don't say the word "dude" anymore. "Bro" is now the preferred slang term. As in: "Hey bro, let's snort grandpa's meds and then play violent video games so as to improve our killing acumen." Thompson, of course, not keen on humor finished up the interview with this gem.
You can say whatever you want, and I'll say what I want. What are you, the language Nazi? Actually, "asshole" fits you perfectly. I'll use that.
Nevertheless, that doesn’t excuse blatant lies used under his license to practice law during select interviews and media outbursts that put him in the hot-seat of the video game community.
For instance, during an interview with GameSpeak Thompson states that games are directly correlated with real-life acts of violence. Saying…
“You just watch. There is going to be a Columbine-times-10 incident, and everyone will finally get it. Either that, or some video gamer is going to go Columbine at some video game exec's expense or at E3, and then the industry will begin to realize that there is no place to hide, that it has trained a nation of Manchurian Children.”Kids took guns to school for 200 years in this country without turning them on one another. President Clinton understood that if we want to do something about gun violence, we need also to look at the stimuli to use those guns. 3000 gun laws on the books. Not a single law on the books to stop the sale of murder simulators to kids. Idiotic.
That’s about as bad as the media blaming Microsoft’s Flight Simulator as a way for terrorists to practice running into the Twin Towers. That’s idiotic.
To completely deface the veritable tone of inflection that Thompson uses in those quotes, as he has done in various other interviews, including one with MAVAV (among many others), it was actually concluded in actual research findings that violent videogames are more likely to be more relaxing due to relieving stress and that simulators such as driving or racing games are more likely to raise stress and aggression levels in gamers due to their difficulty. Interesting studies, no?
Literally, the research in the article (amongst many others) is a complete pimp-slap to the campaign against violence in games campaign. So what does this mean?
It means that when someone like Alexander Belingieri writes in support that games like Doom helped influence the Columbine shooting it’s like showing acquiescence to Jack Thompson’s pitch against violence in games. Not only that but to try to turn the tables in favor of Thompson as being a good guy is like saying that aside from killing Jewish people Hitler’s intentions of world domination weren’t that bad, or maybe that if the Bush administration didn’t screw over so many hard working Americans to steal oil in Iraq, it was a fairly decent double-term for George W.
Yeah well, you can’t separate the spit from the bull just like you can’t separate the lies from Thompson. With that said, the fight against keeping Mature games out of the hands of under-aged gamers isn’t bad, but hopefully Belingieri’s amicability towards Jack doesn’t turn into an unneeded trend by journalists to get in the good graces of Thompson.
And just so everyone knows, parents will always be the sole tool of prevention for whatever kind of behavior they don’t want to see in their kid...not some silly rating system or a bunch of ill-informed censor groups against mature content in games.
