Enough and more has been said about Jack Thompson and how he is wangling his way onto public television by giving people fodder on videogames and how they’re supposedly to blame for all the violence that happens in the world. But still, when you are an attorney, you don’t really expect that someone would go on television without any facts backing him up and blabber anything and everything that pops into his head.

Yet, that’s exactly what’s happened. Jerkwad Jack went on MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews to talk about how the VATech massacre is all the fault of Counter-Strike, but one thing he wasn’t expecting was getting his ass kicked all over the place and being made a complete idiot on national TV! While Jack claims over 80% of the male population at VATech plays computer games, Chris refutes him by saying how the students are actually into healthy sports like basketball and that there’s no evidence of a violent videogame subculture on campus. However, when Jack drags Counter-Strike into the mix and how it helps prepare mass murderers for their massacre by “training” them to keep them heartrate down and stay calm, he gets more than he bargained for, which was a couple of soundbites that he could paste all over his website. Chris, armed with real evidence, brains and a sharp tongue takes the “School Shooting Expert” to task, claiming instead that Cho was actually working on his English essays instead of playing the “murder simulator” on his PC and how Jack was making stuff up and forcing his theories on the masses without proof. Basically, Jack goes down the toilet the moment he opens his mouth, continuously blithering on about the FBI, the Secret Service and about “hyper-reality situations in virtual reality”, whatever that means.

But wait, here’s where it gets better. Not to be outdone with the public debasing, Jack writes one of the best open letters ever to Bill Gates, (forwarding a copy to Game Almighty) about how Microsoft’s “online, hyper-violent shooter game, Counter-Strike” is what helped Cho train for his rampage and how the military use Counter-Strike as a “virtual reality simulation to train soldiers to want to kill and how to kill calmly.” (Counter-Strike? Simulation?! O RLY?! And what about games like America’s Army, Rainbow Six, Operation Flashpoint and Ghost Recon?)

April 18, 2007
Bill Gates

Microsoft

1 Microsoft Way

Redmond, WA 98052 Via Fax and e-mail

Dear Mr. Gates:

On Monday, April 16, at 3:10 pm, I was a guest, as I often have been in the past, on the Fox News Channel. News anchor Bill Hemmer asked me to profile the Virginia Tech rampage killer. I did so, noting that until that day the worst school massacre in world history was at the hands of Robert Steinhaeuser, who literally trained on the Microsoft on-line, hyper-violent shooter game, Counterstrike. I mentioned your company’s game by name. I explained that the rehearsal for such a massacre is key to being able to pull it off, as efficiently as Cho, whose name we didn’t even know at the time. Cho and Steinhaeuser were able to do what they did the first time because it was not the first time. This is why the military uses this same virtual reality simulation to train soldiers to want to kill and how to kill calmly, as the witnesses of Cho said he did.

Sure enough, last night I was doing a west coast radio interview when the host said to me, “Mr. Thompson, you are right. The Washington Post is reporting right now the following:

‘Several Korean youths who knew Cho Seung Hui from his high school days said he was a fan of violent video games, particularly Counterstrike, a hugely popular online game published by Microsoft, in which players join terrorism or counterterrorism groups and try to shoot each other using all types of guns.’”

I thus went back on the Fox News Channel, and Bill Hemmer and I explained not only that I was right about your game figuring in the Virginia Tech massacre but also that the Washington Post excised the above excerpt from the story this morning. That is yet another story. The bad news for the Post however is that you can still get the excised excerpt at WashingtonPost.com. Thus, the cat is out of the bag, and his paw prints are still on the bag. Is this a great Internet, or what?

As you know, I similalry [sic] went on NBC’s Today Show with the DC Beltway Sniper still unidentified and at-large a few years ago and told Matt Lauer and the nation that the triggerman would most likely be a teen video gamer trained on a sniper video game. The tarot card was a clue, but there were other clues. I was right, as Malvo trained on your Microsoft game, Halo. NBC reported that three months later, and it was part of the criminal trial of Malvo.

Mr. Gates, your company is potentially legally liable the harm done at Virginia Tech. Your game, a killing simulator, according to the news that used to be in the Post, trained him to enjoy killing and how to kill. You knew five years ago that your on-line game, Counterstrike, so clearly figured in the massacre by a student in Erfurt that the event and the game impacted the race for Chancellor in Germany at the time!

Yet, here you are, five years after “Erfurt,” still marketing Counterstrike. having done nothing to disable the server(s) for this mass murder simulator, and it looks like “Virginia Tech” is a consequence. There’s more going on in the world than Vista. Just ask the bereaved Virginia Tech families.

Mr. Gates, pull the plug on Counterstrike today, or do we need more dead to convince you? “Virginia Tech” was the 9-11 of school shootings, and it appears Microsoft is in the middle of it, in more ways than one.

Regards, Jack Thompson

We’re still not sure whether Valve is happy or raging mad that they didn’t get mentioned for their creation. And in a talk show, host Rush Limbaugh, lambasted for his views by a sizeable chunk of the community, delivered a surprisingly clear statement about how one shouldn’t try to exploit such a sensitive issue to further your own, selfish interests.

But what the heck, I am sure Valve would be more than happy to put all this publicity to good use, printing all these “testimonies” on the box of upcoming Counter-Strike: Source retail copies - “The choice of the discerning school shooter - now with improved graphics! Guaranteed 60 BPM heartrate or your money back!” Wonder whether this furball will cough up a hairball when he finds out that an Asian, Min “Gooseman” Le, was responsible for the game’s creation and how he spent more time developing the game than he did on his studies.

On a side note though, I am seriously beginning to wonder whether the real reason I kick rocks around on the street is because I played too much Asteroids when I was a kid and have a subconscious desire to see rocks break into little tiny pieces…

Rush Limbaugh: Games Aren’t to Blame [Kotaku] >>
Thompson targets Microsoft in latest crusade [Game Almighty] >>

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• brian Says:
  April 22nd, 2007 at 3:48 pm

  Oh now we have to ban Flight simulators too, so when someone steals a plane they don’t know how to crash it into a building without rasing their heart rate 0_o I would slap this bitch up if I met him, he’s a tool.