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.
--Jack Thompson
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Wow, are you confused. The man who was voted Video Game Co-Person of the Year, along with Paul Eibeler, for 2005 is testifying before a state legislature on behalf of a constitutional video game bill, and that is not news at a site supposedly dedicated to covering governmental efforts against the video game industry? What illegal substance are you on, bucko?
Jack Thompson
Michael Moore Is a Big Windbag
Of course Michael Moore doesn't think video games have anything to do with the massacres at Columbine, Red Lake, Cold Spring, Paducah, Jonesboro, etc., etc., because the whole purpose of Bowling for Columbine was to indict the gun industry, even though Klebold and Harris broke the gun laws to get their hands on the guns.
Moore is distrustful of all major concentrations of power, unless they're concentrations in the leftwing media, then they don't exist.
Michael Moore is not a filmmaker. He's simply a very technically proficient propagandist in the Joseph Goebbels tradition. Jack ThompsonJack Thompson
Weaver Is Woefully Behind the Virtual Reality Curve "Virtual Columbine" is already here. It's called BULLY, Mr. Weaver, and you've obviously missed the school boards (Miami-Dade and two others), the county commissions (Lincoln, New Mexico), and others who actually have degrees in useful disciplines (psychiatry, psychology, education) who understand that Bully is in fact a Columbine simulator. Maybe Mr. Weaver needs to read the newspapers more rather than pro-game trade journals. Maybe he needs to ponder where the Duke sex scandal came from--from a pop culture dumbed down to the video gamers' scum level. Jack Thompson
Jack Thompson
Lets say you make a kid feel angry; he is going to act out what he has spent hundreds of hours doing. He has spent hundreds of hours hurting people in virtual reality. And the thing that is doubly troubling now is the graphics are so crisp and so virtually real that the brain can literally not differentiate between real violence and virtual violence, I'm a lawyer who for 20 years did medically related work. As a citizen, I entered the violent video game arena with the Paducah, Ky., shootings,
I had represented abused women and children, and that album ("As Nasty as They Wanna Be") was totally inappropriate for minors,
Killing is such an incredibly dramatic thing to do. But I quickly became disabused of that skepticism. Now it's a whole body of thought that is very, very troubling. And we are seeing these instances with incredible frequency. Here we had one in Kansas and a day later in Alaska, Playing the games desensitizes the person to the act of killing, because there is no guilt. It's a game. You are winning the game, and it's a pleasurable thing. You can get a gamer's high killing people. And there's no need to feel guilty about it -- that's how you win the game. In the Civil War, for example, soldiers were found dead on the battle field with loaded muskets. It wasn't because the guns were malfunctioning. The soldiers were young men who had been trained by their parents to go hunting with guns -- not use them to kill others. And they couldn't do it, even in the face of hostile fire. So time and again these men would load their guns, raise them and pretend to fire. Those soldiers had not been trained to overcome their inhibition to kill, If somebody else's kid plays a video game and puts my kid in harm's way in school or someplace else, I have a legitimate interest in that, The Grand Theft Auto games immerse you in a lonely world of violence, cheap sex, and pixelated nihilism, Most experts say it takes more than 100 hours to complete all of GTA: San Andreas just once.
It shows you how to -- by bullying -- take over your school. You punch people; you hit them with sling shots; you dunk their heads in dirty toilets. There's white-on-black crime in the game. You bludgeon teachers and classmates with bats. It's absolutely nuts. This is the most knuckle-headed thing I think any entertainment entity in the history of American entertainment has ever done. The word 'Columbine' means something. Everybody viscerally understands that you don't want to teach kids to bully one another. Suspects in the Kansas and Alaska incidents have bullying components just as Columbine's Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris did. Then you give them a simulator on how to exact their revenge and settle scores? It's crazy.Jack Thompson
The corrupted and corrupting video game industry will, of course, challenge this law once it is signed by Governor Blanco. The reason is that this industry, through the ESRB (Entertainment Software Rating Board), its developers' lobbyist, the ESA (Entertainment Software Association), and the retailers' lobbyist, IEMA (Interactive Entertainment Merchants Association) are involved in ongoing fraudulent conduct in marketing video games that contain adult material to children.
Jack Thompson
Thompson, Jack
Thompson, John Sparrow
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