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[neomang5]

In Response to this article
Jack Thompson has officially sunk to a new low. Now he's offering $10,000 to charity if a developer will publish his swill idea of a "game" which is the most obvious and pathetic attack on the gaming community I've ever seen. Congratulations Jack, not only do you look like a hypocrite, and a publicity whore, but now you're just perpetuating the violence and hatred you claim to despise so much. Also, congratulations on making the entire gaming community hate you.[/url]

[jhocking]

Actually, what's sad is that he'll probably start crowing about one-upping the industry when nobody takes him up on it.  Never mind that it's a stupid idea, or that a company would have to sink a two years and a couple million dollars into developing such a game.  Oh no, it's because they're afraid some player will come kill them!

[est]

i really don't understand why people take this dumbcunt seriously.  almost everything that comes out of his mouth sounds like the most obvious usenet/forum troll.

[Se7en]

What a TWAT.  All of these idiots on their moral high horses dont seem to realise that any child that cant tell the difference between fantasy and reality, is pretty much irredemably fucked up anyway.

Everyone in this day and age is inundated with untruths, fantasies, stories, games, and simulations. TV never touches the real world. Adverts tell you tall tails, the internet is divorced from reality. Books tell stories that arnt real.

How old does a child have to be before they figure out that their disney videos are not real? A video game is no different from a book or a film, its just that the player becomes the storyteller.

Did violence in the media turn the last generation into phycopaths? No.

I think the idiotic fuckers that harp on about it are just after the media attention! And the money. Hes a bloody lawyer. Its always about the money. This one is pathetically transparent.

[Digs]

Do we really care if Jack Thompson has a not-even-thinly-vieled-"political-statement"-cum-game made?

[Seckspants]

Methinks that people like this need to be shot in the nuts with a potato gun. At about 1000 psi as a good starting point. Then perhaps they'll realise its the people who are fucked up, not the games fucking them up.

[Storm Rider]

Stop giving him attention. Seriously. When people say games aren't violent, he can hold up the craploads of hate mail threatening to kill him and say he has proof.

[will: wanton sex god]

id be nervous if i were he.  hes kinda outnumbered.

[est]

no, that is exactly what he wants you to think.  see, he is a crusader!  fighting against the ravening hordes of gamers everywhere!  and so on and so on, ad infinitum, e plurubus unum, ad nauseum, etcetera.

[will: wanton sex god]

if i were any good at flash i would have made his game already.

[Blue Kitty]

I really want to buy myself an "I Hate Jack Thompson" shirt now

[Inlander]

You're all taking this a bit seriously, aren't you?  The fact that he calls his game "A Modest Proposal", after one of the most famous pieces of satire in the English language (Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal", which suggested the eating of children as a way of tempering the effects of the Irish Potato Famine), is a massive flag that this guy's just trying to make fun of the video-game industry.  Sure, this Thompson guy's article is a crap, unsubtle, piece of satire, but there's no way in hell that he expects this game to actually be made.  He's just being a shit-stirrer.

[Valrus]

He's just a shit.

Fixed.

[IronOxide]

PEOPLE...

WE HAVE COVERED THIS OVER AND OVER, JACK THOMPSON IS A PRICK, AND THERE IS NOTHING WE CAN DO ABOUT IT. GET OVER IT!

[Sythe]

It would still make a fun game if this "OK" didn't have phrases as cheesy as Dante from DMC.

[Switchblade]

He's a fucktard. Ignore him and repeat after me:

"Calm blue ocean.... Calm blue ocean..."

Take a deep breath in through the nose.... hold... and breath out through the mouth....

Now, go print a "FUCK YOU, TOO, JACK THOMPSON." T-shirt and wear it with pride.

[jhocking]

I don't understand why people get so worked up over this guy.  I mean, yeah, he's an idiot.  But just being an idiot doesn't merit all the "FUCKL YOU!!!1!!"

[Se7en]

Hes a lawyer. Hes obviously making scads of cash out of creating this false crisis. Hes almost as bad as a televangelist.

[Valrus]

...just being an idiot doesn't merit all the "FUCKL YOU!!!1!!"

He's not just an idiot. I mean, I don't want to make him seem more significant than the sad, frothing little man he is, but he's trying to hold back something that a lot of people enjoy, and something that moreover shows signs of eventually developing into an art form. Further, he's trying to relieve people of responsibility for their own actions by blaming video games: something that to my knowledge has never had any convincing evidence behind it and that gamers have been putting up with for years.

All this is nothing particularly new, but Mr. Thompson is doing it in a particularly repellent, offensive, unreasonable and intransigent way. Penny Arcade's news post from Friday 10/14 does a characteristically good job of conveying just how much of a douche the man is.

[jhocking]

Valrus' suggestion to check PA garnered this awesome link.  Even his "allies" think Jack is messed up.

[Switchblade]

http://www.ctrlaltdel-online.com/?t=archives&date=2005-10-12

[jhocking]

That comic starts out slow, but the third panel is hilarious!

"The numbers clearly show that Jack Thompson eats paint chips."

[Switchblade]

hmmm... have a read of THIS ONE.


EDIT: oh, this is off Mister Thompson's website:

Jack Thompson doesn't want your money. He isn't asking you to be a client. What he wants is for you to get up out of your chair because you're as mad as Hell about the video game industry's assault on our children and you're not going to take it anymore!

These people will not stop. They mentally molest minors for money, which is the root of all sorts of evil.

Does anybody else think that, on the basis of that last sentence, we should be questioning his sanity?

[neomang5]

Apparently, someone created some incarnation of his game (based off a mod of the GTA:San Andreas engine, of all the irony) and announced it. It's become fairly popular among many players, so naturally, he found out about it.

He proved, undeniably, that he is the worlds greatest douche.

He claims his entire idea (including the charity donation) was "a form of satire." No joke, he not only refused to acknowledge the irony and humor of the game, and how it made fun of him, but also is NOT donating a goddamn penny to ANY charity. Wow Jack, you're fucking hilarious.

Thankfully, Gabe and Tycho of Penny Arcade, being the wonderful people that they are, matched his donation. $10,000 to Paul Eibler's choice of charities. They donated it in Jack's name too.

[Eldirial]

See- Gabe and Tycho just got even cooler in my eyes.  That's just a slap in the face to Thompson- and a nice donation to charity.

[Se7en]

a LAWYER claiming money is the root of all evil?

I havnt laughed so hard for months.


"hmmm... have a read of THIS ONE. "

Yup. It can be summarised as "well i rang him up and he was nice to me since he thinks im a legitimate journalist, so im going to stick my fingers in my ears and ignore all the other times he has been a total ass, because i know that controversy gets pageviews"

Also, the bloke who wrote it thinks having worked for the inquirer gives him legimacy? SO WHAT! i have worked for them too. It always amuses me to see IT journalists get on their high horses about standards of journalism, because eventually we get down to the truth that every last one of us is a cynical bastard who writes whatever he damned well pleases.

[Gryff]

Thompson's automatic response to everything is to threaten "legal action". The dude who does VG Cats was threatened for emailing him a couple of times, when it was Thompson who emailed him first.

He seems to think he is some kind of righteous master lawyer that people shouldn't fuck with. In reality he is a deplorable, ignorant little shit-stirrer with little knowledge of the games industry and major misconceptions over his own importance.

Does he even read this shit before he sends it out to the world?:

Evil people sometimes have to be stopped, or at least their evil has to be stopped. You can cite all the studies and all the findings and keep giving your video game report card to Congress, and it will not matter unless somebody gets into the trenches and stops these people.

I am fucking exasperated to see him compare the games industry to the Nazis:

Liberals, like you, love to label things and then think that the labeling has accomplished something. If that had been the case, then Churchill's calling Hitler a Nazi would have ended the war. But no, people like me had to get into the trenches and stop the Nazis. And there were always those tut-tutting back home about what a nasty business it is to stop the bad people, and can't we all just "get along."

I agree that the US needs a better ratings system, and I think restricted games should not be made available to chldren. It seems simple to me, so why does Thompson take it upon himself to wage war against the entire video game industry?

The guy is just a giant douche with an extremely tenous grip on reality. Luckily it seems that people are starting to realise this, and nobody is willing to take him seriously.

[TrueNeutral]

And now the boy who got sodomized by a machine from a penny arcade machine is sueing those generous men from 'penny arcade'.

"It is critical to establish that this letter isn't anything to worry about. We've been sent worse by better." - Tycho isn't worried. Neither am I.

[Gryff]

I cannot understand the http://www.penny-arcade.com/">letter that Thompson sent to the police. What does he want them arrested for? All he does is blather on about "constitutional rights", and how San Andreas is a "'cop killing' murder simulator". The only evidence he gives that Penny Arcade have harassed him is the "I Hate Jack Thompson" t-shirt that they are selling, which is of course completely legal (not to mention a constitutional right). Obviously this is "criminal harassment" on par with emailing people or animating 'threatening' AIM buddy icons.

Tycho's response: "We've been sent worse by better".

Seriously, Thompson is a muck-raking, fundamentalist wack-job who thinks that he can frighten people with empty legal threats. All he is doing is making enemies, and hopefully undermining his already rapidly disappearing credibility further.

Thank you, Penny Arcade, for standing up to the guy, and taking the high ground while doing it.

[Valrus]

Does the man sleep? How does he find the time to send crazy-eyed emails to anyone who dares impugn him and still be a full-time lawyer?

[TrueNeutral]

I think his apparent insanity is enough proof of insomnia to say that he simply doesn't. I mean, I've had bad bouts of insomnia where I would become so cranky I'd call people nazis for sneering at me, but even then I wasn't that mad.

[nihilist]

As Gabe said: "What’s scary is that people in the mainstream media listen to him."  That's the most frightening part.  The people in power, who influence what can and cannot be done, hear his fearmongering and crazy crap.  Gamers and the gaming industry need to speak up louder to make sure that we aren't penanlized by what some crazy fuckwad says.

[LiterSize]

I was informed yesterday that Jack Thompson apparently was involved with Ice-T's controversial "Cop Killer."  Who knew?  Good lord, the man's a friggin' crackpot.

[TrueNeutral]

He also ran against someone for some office, and lost, and then made all kinds of outrageous claims against her like how she did drugs and she was a lesbian and whatever. I don't remember who or what, check Wikipedia, it's on there.

[nihilist]

Please don't suggest using Wikipedia as a reference material.  Please don't.

[jhocking]

Why not?

[JimmyMoog]

Okay... morons like him make me scared to admit this, but I am a Christian.  And well... he isn't.  The Bible has a name for people like him- Pharisee.  We have a more modern term, which is hypocrite.  This man does NOT hold to the tenets of the Bible, and it pains me to hear him claim he does.  In the nature of proof, I submit this:  There are many violent instances in the Bible, but this one stands out, to me.  A man was sent to assasinate a corrupt, evil king, who was also hugely fat.  He made his way into the king's upper room, and stabbed the king with a short sword he had concealed upon his person.  The king was so fat, the man's sword was lost because he sunk it to the hilt, at which point the king's fat closed completely over the handle!  (Judges 3: 12-28)  I paraphrased, but that story is directly form the NIV, the most widely accepted and accurate modern translation.

Seriously, I am a writer, and I do alot of short horror fiction.  I never thought up anything that messed up.  And, at least to those of us who believe in it, this is a true story.*  Mr. Thompson may be alot of things, but a Christian is not one of them.

This is Columbine all over again- I may think Marylin Manson is an untalented, attention whoring hack, but I know he wasn't to blame for that event.  Jack Thompson is another of the aforementioned, and he is pointing his foolish finger in entirely the wrong direction.  The worst part?  He makes a valid claim, in parts.  The actions he cites do need to stop.  But muckrakers like him do nothing but set the case back even further by laying blame on the wrong parties.  If this were a story, that's what we would call irony.  Incidentally, somebody linked the CtrlAltDel comic about him.  Check Absath's post from today for some quality thoughts on this ass.

*Incidentally, there is a good reason why this sort of thing is included in the Bible, but this isn't the place for that discussion.  PM me if you're curious about this at all.  And so you know, I don't judge anyone else based on what they choose to believe.  I only get my feathers ruffled when someone claims to represent a group to which I belong, and then proceeds to make an utter ass of himself.  Which is what they usually do.  sigh.

[Sarcasmorator]

He also ran against someone for some office, and lost, and then made all kinds of outrageous claims against her like how she did drugs and she was a lesbian and whatever. I don't remember who or what, check Wikipedia, it's on there.

'Twas Janet Reno, I think.

[Spike]

Yeah, he said Janet Reno was a closet lesbian who took bribes from the mob.

[Switchblade]

Interesting note... if you check the publically available FBI figures for number of homicides and violent crimes per annum, the apparent trend is that violent criminal activity in the States has been declining since the release of the PS1, and hit a fourty-year low in 2004 - coincidentally, the same year that GTA San Andreas was released.

I'd like to post a link to the article in question, but I'm afraid I accidentally closed that window.

[TrueNeutral]

I read an article about that too, but I lost the link and now I can't find it.

I believed it put it as 'video games can't be responsible for the youth crime wave because there IS no youth crime wave'. Or something like that.

[Garcin]

As Gabe said: "What’s scary is that people in the mainstream media listen to him."  That's the most frightening part.  The people in power, who influence what can and cannot be done, hear his fearmongering and crazy crap.  Gamers and the gaming industry need to speak up louder to make sure that we aren't penanlized by what some crazy fuckwad says.

You got it buddy.  PA posting that pic of him on CNN the other day.  Now this here is fucked up.  The gaming industry is now bigger dollar for dollar than the movie industry.  Yet for movies you've got a whole bunch of incredibly bright people, and not a few pretty prominent publications, doing analysis on the trends, mores, effects, motivations, and happenings of the industry.

Whereas for the gaming industry, you've got the most prominent mainstream media sources going to some nutjob who just happens to be yelling louder and more creatively than the guy next door.  Ironically, the basis for picking the anti-video game spokesperson (that his opinions are alarmist and his style is manic) pretty much guarantees that whoever it is, Thompson, or the lunatic next door, is going to be cracked worse than fine china in a mosh pit.

Again, Krahulik was right that Thompson himself is not so much the problem as a happenstance spokesperson for what essentially amounts to a cultural conspiracy to limit the media consumption choices of others.  Krahulik was also right when he suggested that the thing to do about this is not to focus on striking out at Thompson himself, but to intelligently motivate prominent media sources (partly through their advertisers) to present, at least, a fact-based and relatively intelligent opponent to violent and sexual videogames to the public at large.

One problem here is that gaming culture, as financially established as it is, hasn't yet achieved mainstream cultural or intellectual respectability.  Indeed, as it has been frequently pointed out, every new media form faces a period of reactionary-based opposition.  And simple demographics will solve most of these problems -- as gamers age, and each new generation is brought up around gaming pretty much from the cradle, the fear bred from ignorance will become a thing of the past.  But the Thompson phenomenon is also a creature of intellectually barren journalists under the delusion that a balanced view is the product of getting two zealots in the same room and making them fight.  The whole thing is really fucking depressing, and the silver lining here is that, as with Child's Play, PA gets to be on the side of the angels.

[LiterSize]

I was all ready to start refuting Jack Thompson directly yesterday after reading Gabe's initial post but the only way to really fight is to keep educated and when people as wacky as Jacky show up then common sense and empirical reason are all we should need... right?


Kansas, I'm looking at you and ID.  But that's another thread and I'll say no more.

[Bunnyman]

Hate to sound like an apologist, but...

Games are in very little danger of being banned.  Many, many families own some form of game console...while it is in vogue for those in political circles to trash the gaming industry, people still want their games.  And not just shock-value stuff like GTA (and Postal, Manhunt, and JFK Reloaded proved that shock alone only moves so many units; quality will win in the end); people play a lot of games.  So there is a tacit social acceptance.  Thompson, Schwartzenegger, and other demagogues/clueless politicians will still roll with it.

This doesn't, of course, excuse the double standard in reporting that pertains to games.  For some reason, the need to fact check dissappears when discussing GTA:SA.  Molly Ivins, for example, who I usually respect, thought San Andreas was meant to turn our children into "Amateur Pornographers."  Over a hidden, unfinished minigame?  Very few politicians who pan GTA have ever played the game, and are convinced that, for example, rape is a gameplay element (which it is not) and that killing cops is worth points (which it is not).  Coming from people who we ordinarily expect to quantitatively and objectively back their policies and opinions, this is nothing less than hypocrisy.

Gabe is right in that Jack Thompson will do more damage to himself than anyone else.  Let the ESA deal with him and don't worry about it.

[jhocking]

Molly Ivins, for example, who I usually respect

That's been a sore point for me for a while.  The Democratic party has decided media messages, such as videogames, are a pulpit sticking point.  My girlfriend, who is a lifelong Democrat, was full of bile for videogames when I first met her.  It was only after being with me for a while, noting the games I play and observing first-hand somebody who works hard to make games, that she softened her stance.

[Valrus]

Coming from people who we ordinarily expect to quantitatively and objectively back their policies and opinions, this is nothing less than hypocrisy.

Who expects politicians to quantitatively and objectively back their policies and opinions?

[TrueNeutral]

Going back a few posts, I believe this is the article in question:

http://gr.bolt.com/articles/violence/violence.htm

[Switchblade]

Yep, that's the one I was thinking of.