Battleangel

Problem-reaction-solution from America. You have something you want to prove, some lucid ideology, so you create a problem to which you react and subsequently solve. Because obviously, had it been left to people do decide on their own, they wouldn’t do diddly-squat, and you can’t have that. So evidence is conjured in the most media-effective way, be it weapons of mass destruction or violent video games. It’s at the heart of the American enterprise. Thompson is an extremist, and a highly specialized one, but his way of reasoning is one that the world is all too familiar with. In the real world, had there actually been a problem, people would have reacted on their own without being deceived or played. Thompson should stick to information and stop the incitement.

Boing Boing - Jack Thompson is a wacko anti-video-game campaigner (so crazy that even the anti-gamers at the National Institute on Media and the Family have told him to stop citing their materials in his credibility-destroying rants). He has offered to donate $10,000 to charity if a video-game company will make a game based on an idea of his to illustrate how bad violent games are for you.

Not too surprising perhaps, the weasels over at TG Daily (formerly known as Tom’s Hardware) offer their politically correct commentary and their 2-cent defence of Jack Thompson. To his credit, the mention for instance that he is … “quite human.”

Having said that I still lean towards accepting the basic premise that game violence may increase violent tendencies. But would also mean accepting that all media, at least as so far as it appeals to our basic survival, i.e. sex, violence, social structure, it shapes us in a radical way that our immediate surroundings can not. The tirade against video games just wont do when you live in a nation run by war criminals, riddled with guns, that glorify killing and euphemise the subjugating of foreign peoples. Video games are the least of your problems at that point. And from one very specific and horrible angle, desensitizing the youth may even be in the state’s best interest. At least if you are to breed cannonfodder.