Gamepolitics.com has a post up about a college debate tour to talk about the 'dangers of violent video games and what to do about them'.

Jack Thompson, probably the most reviled lawyer in video game circles who's gone after games like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and Bully, and Bob Guccione Jr., a magazine publisher who's worked on magazines such as Spin and Discover, will be the two debating.

Makes me wonder how much getting these two costs to come to one's school. I'd absolutely love to see this debate. Probably the best part of this event would end up being a Q&A if one was done. There's been numerous cases where Thompson resorts to name calling when he runs out of arguments, but I'd love to see him do it front of an audience.

What would you ask Thompson if you could ask him anything? Anyone going to try and look into booking him? Would you pay to hear this loon speak?

I'd ask him why he spends so much time blaming video games instead of taking note of the prolific stack of data suggesting a pathology of mental disorders that are the cause of violence?

I'd also ask him if he has any real interest in stopping youth violence, or is he just making a buck as a loud mouth huckster/pundit?

If you blame Doom for the Columbine shooting, you'd miss out on other factors like the heavy medication that both boys were taking for anti-social disorders. Split households, insufficient supervision, etc...

Exactly. No one (well, none of the stick-up-the-bum, crusade against the evil ones people anyway) realized that if Doom didn't exist, they would've just shot at cans or something beforehand instead. That and Doom could never be used to successfully train someone to use guns. Unless all guns shot magic heat-seeking bullets.

I don't hate Jack Thompson. I just believe that he is wrong in several key areas, has good intentions but bad ideas, and that if his mother had drowned him in a toilet when he was a baby the world would be a better place.

In Doom, you don't shoot cans. You shoot living beings.

Not really. You shoot monsters and demons and the like. In many ways Wolfenstein 3D was more controversial, as it lets you kill actual humans.




I think you'd be hard pressed to find evidence that supports that. We do know that there have been killings linked to video games, but who knows, maybe those killings would have happened anyway. Besides, for every Columbine massacre there have been probably millions of gamers who played the same games but were unaffected. What I'm saying is that there's no real evidence either way. Maybe video games have turned some people into mass murderers, but maybe not. We can't say.

I agree with Thompson that changes need to be made to the gaming industry. Many good horror movies use graphic violence and nudity to enhance their movies, but this artistic use of mature content is almost completely lacking in games. Many games these days just throw in gore and boobs to generate publicity through shock value. If video games ever want to compete with movies and books as a serious, widely-accepted art form, this is one of the things that need to change. But Thompson's methods (read: going litigation-crazy and trying to boycott everything) are doing anything except causing resentment by gamers.

That resent is caused because gamers are those idiots who buy the game with boobs and guns and like the shock value. B-movies aren't perceived as a serious, widely-accepted art form, and as long as games rarely rise above that level, they don't deserve to be taken seriously, and neither do gamers.

Well if you want to get technical, you actually shoot hellspawn that are trying to rip your tongue out through your anus.

But anywho, the point I was trying to make is that those kids were messed up from the start. Ergo, without DOOM, they would've found a different way to pretend they were killing people. And also as I said before, DOOM really isn't the best game to use for "training" anyway. It auto-aims for you. A game that actually requires skillful/precision shooting and not just facing the badguy would've been a better scapegoat.

As an aside, I have no problem with preventing the sale of M-rated material to minors, blah blah blah. I have no issue with people wanting to protect kids from violent/inaproppriate content. What I do have a problem with is games getting blamed every time a kid hurts someone. Maybe it's just my imagination, but I seem recall people doing horrible things to each other way before video games ever existed.

I wasn't talking about b-movies so much as serious stuff like Silence of the Lambs and The Virgin Spring, basically movies that have claim to artistic merit despite (or because of?) their use of violence and nudity. I don't think it's exaggeration to say that video games like that are rare to the point of being nonexistant.


Yeah, that's right. Doom doesn't teach you anything about cleaning or reloading a gun or compensating for recoil. I don't see how shooting monsters on a computer screen using a keyboard or mouse can "train" you to shoot people with a gun in real life.

Food for thought: here's a graph I saw on Pointless Waste of Time a while ago. It shows how violent crime actually went DOWN at around 1993, Doom's release. The stats were supposedly collected from the US Dept. of Justice.



Interesting, neh?

I can't stand "Doom" and I think it had a very negative influence on the game industry. But to say that some people became killers because of "Doom" is absolutely ridiculous. When will people finally stop putting the responsibility on things surrounding them instead of looking for it inside themselves? Any aggressive, immoral behavior is part of human nature. Each person has the will and the possibility to control his aggressive side. If playing "Doom" makes him more aggressive, then it is his own problem, that's because he chose to play it in the first place. The game or those who made it bear no responsibility for this person's actions.

I think you might end with certain negative results after playing "Doom", but becoming a serial killer is not one of them. If anything, violent games can help you to release the stress before actually killing someone. Your graph also demonstrates this point nicely. The more people sit in front of their computers and shoot imaginary bad guys, the less are the chances they will cure their boredom by pulling out a machine gun and wiping out real humans.

Too true. I can't tell you how nice it is to come home after an exhausting and rough day of work and unwind with Manhunt or the Hulk. A great way to blow off steam if you ask me.