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I’m sure by now that many of you have already probably heard the news of Jack Thompson’s fiasco in the Florida court, which would most likely result in him being debarred from practicing law for ten years. That’s right. Count it on both hands, baby – 10 Jack Thompson free years! I’d like to feel a little bit of joy and more than well-deserved feeling of “Finally!”, but I can’t help but feel a sad bit of pity for him now.
Judging by the objections he filed with the court (which had refused to let him read it out), and the wild claims he made about the Judge Dava Tunis before walking out of his own hearing it’s quite clear that the he missed the Sanity train not once, but probably twice in a row. The entire fiasco was quite pathetic and pitiful, and I have to wonder how the hell he ever got to be a lawyer in the first place.
Still, as a gamer, it’s a relief to hear such news and see such an anti-gaming extremist out of the picture… but as a human being, I can’t help but be naturally curious. What hatred could drive this man into willingly jumping into the seas of insanity? What reasoning does he holds against gaming – that which is essentially an indoor extension of the physical activities and games of make-believe we once played as children?
Could it be he really feared that playing such violent games like Quake, Doom and the like made us naturally more violent? Well, does it?
Whoever said videogames cause violence, mayhem, death, destruction and mass murder of kittens, fairies and polar bears (are you listening, Jack Thompson?) should take a closer look at the work the non-profit group Games for Change is doing. With games like Border Patrol, that encourage players to kill illegal immigrants, and incidents such as the case of a 16-year old New York girl from Bangladesh who was accused of planning a suicide bombing and detained for 6 weeks before being deported back to a country she did not know, rearing their heads in today’s world, one international human rights organization has taken to videogames to get their message across to people worldwide.
Using a number of creative outlets, Breakthrough focuses on implementing much needed change in today’s world through the use of music, art, performance, television and of course, videogames. Working through offices in India and the United States, Breakthrough has developed ICED! or “I Can End Deportation!” that lets people know about the harsh immigration policies of the United States, where a number of people have been deported to their native countries for the smallest of mistakes, or worse, for no mistake of theirs. According to their website:
Game players have to live the day-to-day life of an immigrant teen. The teens are constantly being chased by immigration officers, while making moral/consequential decisions and answering myth & fact quizzes about current immigration policies.
If the player chooses or answers incorrectly, he/she increases his or her chances of being thrown into detention. Once in detention, the player endures both physical separation from his/her family and unjust conditions while awaiting, often for unknown amounts of time, the random outcome of his/her case.
The game is set to launch online in November 2007.
With more and more people appreciating the medium and using it as a creative tool for social change, one wonders why people like Jack Thompson cherry pick their data to twist matters around in cases where the people involved have already suffered a tremendous amount of anguish. Of course, then there are some other people like Joseph DeLappe, who goes by the nickname of dead-in-iraq on America’s Army servers (which, incidentally, is a game made and promoted by the US Armed Forces) and just stands around waiting to get killed. When he does, he manually types in the name, age, service branch and date of death of every service person who has died in Iraq till date. With organizations like Breakthrough and Games for Change and dedicated individuals like Joseph DeLappe, games have transcended what The X-Files’ Dana Scully called a “testosterone frenzy” to become a profound political statement or better yet, a tool for change.
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.
It appears that in a bizarre turn of events - the VTech killer Cho Seung-Hui was, after all, NOT inspired by violent video games to do what he did. The so called “EXPERTS” were quick to jump onto the blame game, instead of actually focusing their energy on the families of the victims. And to think that these idiots get publicity AND money to talk trash!
To lay all their theories to rest, Cho was emulating NOT a video game, but a Korean movie, when he killed those innocent people. He had probably seen the ultra violent Korean film “Old Boy” way too many times. Probably because he knew that emulating pixellated killers wasn’t as much fun as emulating someone on a 16mm reel! Cho had emailed videos of him striking poses resembling popular scenes from the movie, to NBC in between the shootings.
Cho was on a completely different ‘mission’ when he stepped out of his house and from what you’d read about his agenda, its clear that he wasn’t trying to emulate anything he’d ever seen in any video game.
People like Jack Thompson need to get one thing straight - the facts outweigh the fiction. Get your facts right and don’t be hasty to give us your so called “expert opinion”. Before you jump up to make a quick buck and get your 15 second slot on national TV, do a little thing that we’ve done here - it’s called “RESEARCH”!
It took the police almost a full 24 hours to ID the Virginia Tech shooter, but all it took was a couple of hours for “School Shooting Expert” and crackpot ambulance chaser-cum-attorney Jack Thompson to get himself an audience with the nation on Fox, citing videogames as a cause for such violent events. As if post-9/11 terrorism and and radical fundamentalism wasn’t getting enough attention in the ratings-hungry world of modern day media, such comments on major news channels just serve to add fuel to the fire, with one news channel’s opinion being paraded around as hard facts on another.
With the unholy politico-legal-media complex driving American society in general, it is not unusual for major news channels and obviously biased TV anchors to run with the story, callously ignoring the sentiments and the anguish of the people who had suffered the real loss in such a tragedy in return for some snappy soundbites. So who cares if the story is cooked up by an attention whore? No one cares about the ethics of journalism and how the media actually has to serve a purpose beyond furthering its monetary interests. How is it that we let people like Jack Thompson and Dr. Phil McGraw get away by touting opinion as fact whereas I can’t walk into a crowded theater and yell “There’s a bomb in here!” How is it different? In both cases, isn’t a lie being perpetuated by people who have absolutely no right to do what they are doing? But no, they praise such people and call them “experts” despite the fact that the lawyers and psychotherapists have little to no real world experience on the things they claim to be experts on, even as they desperately try to make people believe that breast implants and cellphones cause cancer or in this case, how videogames turn people violent. Hit up the jump to read more on this…
How low does a person go to capitalize on someone else’s tragedy? Apparently not low enough. In line with being the complete asshole that he is, Jack Thompson has cracked down on today’s Virginia Tech shootings and blamed it on, guess what, videogames! Going on Fox News, this “School Shooting Expert” (BAH!) talked at length about videogames being “murder simulators” and linked them to the rise in school shootings. And the sad joke is that, as of now, no one really knows what really happened up there in VATech. But obviously Jerkbag Jack doesn’t care about all of that!
What pisses us most about this douchebag and his idiotic rants on national television is how his comments will be gobbled up the mindless masses who would like nothing more than make videogames the sacrificial scapegoat in one of America’s worst tragedies. So the shooter was apparently an Asian, and may or may not have been a student, which means that the chances of the police actually finding a violent videogame in his room are extremely high. Heck, my friend’s 16-year old sister likes Gears of War, so hey, show me one average teen in today’s world without a violent videogame on their shelf!
Like VJ said quite sarcastically in a conversation soon after, after all, videogames did create violence in the world and the Nintendo DS is used to secretly molest children. Baseless accusations seem to be the latest media craze these days, with anything and everything being said in the name of soundbites. More on this breaking news as it develops, even as our heartfelt condolences go out to those who lost their friends / family in this atrocity.
…and different they are. It’s not like you daily get to see a half an hour long trailer for a game on national television…that too with just the logo of the game and a countdown clock…and have people watch it…and record and upload it on YouTube for millions of others to watch it.
This is the kind of excitement that a GTA game evokes and rightly so. Rockstar has virtually booked its place in the annals of gaming history with the GTA series. With seven GTA games and an expansion, this series shows no signs of slowing down. Instead it has gone from strength to strength, right from the ground breaking GTA III to the mind boggling GTA: San Andreas.
So it did not come as a surprise when the release of the debut trailer for the next-gen GTA IV brought down the Rockstar server on it’s knees with millions of people logging in to be the first to catch a glimpse of the new GTA in action, yours truly included. So after staying awake for the better part of the night and having to contend with numerous Time Out errors, everyone would ask the same question: Was it worth it?
And the answer would be a resounding “Yes”! Never have I been so excited at 4 O’ clock in the morning. Anyone who has witnessed the trailer in its 720p High Definition glory will be lying if he says that the trailer didn’t give him goose bumps. Rockstar had promised that “Things Will Be Different” and they most definitely are.
The 63 seconds long trailer gives us the first insight into the world of the next generation of GTA and never has it looked so real. Dynamic lighting will have shadows flit across your screen as the sun coasts over the horizon. Light filtering through corrugated metal sheets and stained glass will give Half Life 2 a run for its money. The lighting effect will sear through your mind long before you even start to notice what’s going on in the trailer. The water effect is also something that will have you spell bound. I can’t wait to get in game and go out for a swim, it’s that inviting! The Rockstar Advanced Game Engine (RAGE) powering it certainly has some aces up its sleeve. No pre-rendered shit here. Everything was rendered in real time. There have been unconfimed reports about Rockstar having employed the Euphoria engine for the NPC actions . If that’s the case, then it will boost up the mojo many notches up.
Prepared to be even more surprised at what the game has in store for you. This time around the good ol’
If all this hasn’t burdened your senses already, be prepared for more. GTA IV promises to take NPC interaction to new limits. The trailer shows off NPC drivers adjusting their rear-view mirrors as they coast along the road. Peds are going around doing their daily work and not like the previous installments where all they did was roam on the streets aimlessly just waiting to be mowed down by you. Of course their fate is all the same in GTA IV as well but at least they will have some dignity in death. Keen observers have spotted cops drinking on duty and a child (gasp!). Some of them have sparked an intense debate as to how far can Rockstar really stretch it. Add to that a setting like NY and you start to wonder if Rockstar has the guts to go ahead and put the
If you have noticed, I still haven’t mentioned the lead character of the game. After having given us such memorable characters as Fido/The Guy/Claude, Tommy and CJ, Rockstar springs yet another surprise on us in form of a character who seems to be of Russian origin seeking a new life in the
The game is scheduled to have a simultaneous launch on both PS3 and Xbox 360, which is a first for a GTA game. Episodic content has also been promised for both the consoles though its debatable whether it will be the same or different for both the consoles. Speculation is also rife as to whether the game will support multiplayer for the first time. The possibility seems high though if you consider the multiplayer aspect in the PSP versions of GTA to be a dry run for bigger and better things. Our fingers are crossed.
It’s really amazing how much speculation and debate 63 second of game play footage can generate. Then again, considering the pedigree of the game, it comes as no surprise. One can’t help but wonder what the level of hype will be in the following days as more and more information trickles out. With the release just months away, the excitement is bound to touch new heights. Jack Thompson….eat your heart out!