Monthly Archives: January 2006

Jack Thompson: lawyer and man of compassion

Game Politics has a story of a gamer who committed suicide. Apparently, Jack Thompson, anti-videogame lawyer and compassionate man apparently posted a message so horrible that the comment was deleted and Game Politics has decided to no longer allow anonymous comments. MetalGearSolid.org got a copy of it before it was deleted and posted Jack Thompson’s response to the suicide. Here is the message that is attributed to Thompson:

Your “gamer friend” will find peace through the Lord, Jesus Christ, but sadly it’s too late for that.

There is a void in every heart. You can fill it up with the things of God, or the things not of God. This unfortunate soul chose to fill it up with combat games. The playing of these video games is masturbatory activity, meaning senseless self-stimulation. If you gamers could use a dictionary you would know that that term is not necessarily a sexual one.

The real tragedy here extends beyond the life and death of this one fellow. There are literally millions of young people and young adults whose despair is deepend by turning to the things of this world and then finding them meaningless.

All of you gamers need to put down the controllers and get a life. The utter inanity of the vast majority of postings here shows how vapid “gaming” really is.

You are one of the cheerleaders for this wasting of time and the wasting of lives. Do you feel any remorse for having contributed to this “culture of death?” Of course not. Hey, let’s all play MORE games, and ignore all the really productive things to do with our lives.

Let’s pretend to be shocked that a gamer might descend into deeper depression, as his gamer “buds,” knowing he was killing himself, couldn’t figure out how to call 911 themselves for him. That would have involved leaving their computers I guess.

Sad. Sad for all of you.”

One can only hope that this is not really Thompson and that it is just some tasteless joke by a troll. Whomever posted it must have a taste for irony. Suggesting that gamers don’t know the definition of a word when the person who posted this obviously doesn’t know the definition of what it means to be a good Christian or what it means to be compassionate strikes me as quite ironic.

Is It Just Me????

So once again, people are talking about videogame journalism and how horrible it is.

Reading these posts, however, it seems that people have very very different ideas of what “good” is. I know, I know, saying that taste is subjective is a pretty crazy idea! I’m not saying I’m some bastion of good taste. I liked the Doom movie after all…

Here was my comment on Slashdot:

Most of the comments here talk about horrible reviews, but is reviewing really journalism? Is Roger Ebert a journalist? Not to degrade reviewers. But do people really 100% trust one videogame review?

While I like reading reviews, I read videogame reviews the same way I read film reviews: with a grain of salt.

Maybe it is because of my research interests, but I’m a lot more interested in the non-review journalism such as articles that talk about trends in gaming or gaming culture. That is more of what I think of when I think about journalism instead of reviews.

What is most interesting is that one of the people Robin Hunicke mentioned as, “look[ing] beyond muzzle flashes, explosions and crisp sound” is also the same person that wrote what Something Awful called

…the most pretentious review ever written about anything…. You could write a gushing review of “Time Code” as a concrete poem shaped like a moebius strip and you would still be a galaxy away from Kieron’s review of Darwinia.

Then there’s everyone’s favorite Escapist Magazine. Am I the only one that couldn’t look bast the horrible pretentious layout? It may well be the best thing ever written about videogames, but I wouldn’t know because I’ve never been able to read a single article because– call me crazy — but I hate having to click next every three words.

The thing that most frustrates me is that all the complaining about the state of videogame journalism seems to imply that somewhere out there there is some field of journalism that doesn’t totally suck. Sure there are the exceptions and there are the rare good articles, but what are these people reading, listening to, or watching that they think that videogame journalism is some exception to the sad state of journalism? Complaining about horrible videogame journalism is like complaining about someone staining the couch cushion when the couch is sitting in the middle of a garbage dump. It may be accurate and a valid complaint, but it is kind of missing the point.

When it comes to Uwe Boll, you snooze, you loose…

Bloodrayne the movie opened last weekend. I didn’t get around to seeing it, but after hearing about the horrible reviews, I was looking forward to seeing the trainwreck this weekend. But I guess I wasn’t fast enough. The movie stinks so bad that the theaters in town aren’t showing it any more! Bastards!

I could go see Grandma’s Boy, but I’ve already seen it. I wouldn’t go see it again. If you haven’t seen it yet, it might be worth a matine, but I certainly wouldn’t bother paying full price for it.

Re-Examining The Half-Life Story: A First Person-Shooter With A Good Plot?

The essay I got published in the Italian-language collection, Doom: The First Person Reader has been posted online in english at the Videoludica website.

It’s called, “Re-Examining The Half-Life Story: A First Person-Shooter With A Good Plot?”. I wrote it more than two years ago, so if I were to re-read it, I am sure I will be horribly embaraced by it. Therefore, I don’t think I’ll be re-reading it!

Since it was originally published in Italian, and I don’t read or speak Italian, I figured it would be a good place for a first publication. Chances are any potential job search committee here in the USA wouldn’t be able to read Italian either, so I could claim it was a brilliant article. On the off chance someone who might hire me actually could read Italian, I could just protest that the subtlties of my argument were lost in translation. It was a perfect plan! Of course I didn’t imagine that it would get posted online in English! Now my work has to stand on its own merits! Curses!

I will note that as far as I am able to tell, my essay is the only one that has been published on the site. I’m not sure if that is a good thing or a bad thing. Either they started with the best essay or the worst. As to which it is, as all the math textbooks in college would say when they gave an example too tedious or too complicated to solve, “I leave that as an exercise for the reader…”