Even after being disbarred and repeatedly shot down in court, Jack Thompson continues to be a nuisance. His latest move involves a letter to President Barack Obama himself. Once again, Mr. Thompson has capitalized on the horrible acts by disturbed individuals – such as the recent attack in Germany – to further his self-righteous agenda against video games. His catch phrase for any game that involves shooting or attacking is “murder simulator” and he is promoting the ban of video games to all individuals, not just minors. There’s no way he would seriously want to ban ANY violent video game right? Wrong…
“If the video game industry will not do what is necessary to keep killer games out of the hands of impressionable kids, whom neuroscience proves are the most likely to copycat these virtual reality killing scenarios, then we must implement, as a society, a total ban on the consumption of these murder simulators by adults and kids alike.”
He ends the letter with an attempt at personally relating to Obama:
“…one father to another, to take the bold moves necessary to get these murder simulators out of America. We have more guns than people in this country. We are training our teens to be Manchurian Candidates to use them and to author what will be more Columbines, more Virginia Techs, and more shattered communities.”
It’s clear that Mr. Thompson will never stop as he believes, like so many other great thinkers (G.W. Bush, Hitler, Bin Laden) that he is doing God’s work and needs to protect us from ourselves. This debate has been going on since blood and gore first appeared in a realistic way in Mortal Kombat and is only getting more heated as games can more accurately depict and stylize violence. The popular consensus from people with working brain cells is that the parents should actually parent and monitor their child’s intake of things like sex and violence. The issues is, sometimes kids don’t really have parents or ones that make any impression on their lives. If kids end up parenting themselves, how good of a job do you think they do? Video games are just another form of media with added asthetic of control over the content. Who’s fault is childhood obesity? Sure, the parents are, but what about the fast food on almost every street?
To say that children should not buy games rated by the ESRB as M or AO is understood, but even Thompson implies that the ESA and ESRB “are spending countless dollars doing all that they can to avoid strict compliance with their own age ratings on games.” The concept that these disturbed murderers actually sharpened their skills on video games is quite absurd and points to Thompson having the same delusions that those killers had in blending a world clearly manufactured as entertainment with the real one of life and death. Here would be my response if i was President of the USA:
Dear Mr. Thomspon,
We have bigger fish to fry right now.
Sincerely,
Barack Obama
President of the U.S.A.
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
