An Echo Of An Echo

I've never been fond of how blogs tend to parrot news by linking it, and that on occasion such links actually turn out to be the first in a chain one must follow to finally find the actual bloody story. I've resolved to never just link a story here, but I think I'm going to make an exception.

Florida Bar Wants Jack Thompson Disbarred For Ten Years.

This brought a bit of a smile to my face, even if the verdict is only a suggestion. For those of you who don't recall Jack Thompson (AKA Wacko Jacko AKA Yack Thompson) he's the Florida lawyer who has been on on a righteous, religion-fueled crusade against the video game industry and its "murder simulators". Read here for more specifics (that is, so long as the article hasn't been strewn with graffiti).

See, the sad thing is that Thompson has some good points. Nobody wants a fucking ten-year-old playing Grand Theft Auto IV. As little as I happen to like ten-year-olds, kids don't need to see that shit. It will probably fuck them up if they do, and that's how you wind up with adolescent convicted murderers. Films are regulated by law. It is illegal to sell an R-rated film to someone under seventeen. There are no such regulations for video games. There's the ESRB, but all they do is offer suggestions. What effectiveness they have comes from the willingness of video game retailers to abide by those suggestions, a willingness which is often sorely lacking. If you could make an easy extra forty bucks at no cost to yourself by ignoring someone's strongly-worded suggestion, you'd probably do it, too.

So he's right, there needs to be some kind of official body that oversees the rating of video games. If you give the ESRB legislative backup to legitimate their ratings and thereby make it illegal to sell M-rated games to little kids, the problem would probably be solved right there (so long, of course, as the federal involvement was reasonable and overseen by people who know what the fuck they're doing). With that done, video games would pose no more threat than, say, Lord of the G-Strings does on late-night cable.

That's shit nobody needs to see, but I digress.

Thompson's problem is that all his nutjobbery--from denouncing The Sims 2 for lechery because a third party made a nude patch for it to promising to donate ten thousand dollars to charity if someone created a video game based on his Modest Video Game Proposal then balking when someone actually did--has obscured his actual intent. People just think of him as a whackjob nowadays, and his behavior at his court hearing for misconduct is cementing that. It doesn't help that in the "lengthy objection" Thompson seems to (if I'm reading it correctly) compare himself to not only Jesus Christ and John the Baptist, but to the Jews in Nazi concentration camps.

Bloody hell, that man has problems.

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It is a little goblin with a big-ass crossbow.