Jack Thompson’s Bar Trial, Human Rights, and Video Game Violence

GamePolitics has a 9-piece series following the Jack Thompson Bar Trial. Each episode is long, although they contain merely excerpts from the full court transcripts. It’s definitely an interesting read. No decision has been made, as yet, regarding the case. And regardless of whether or not he gets disbarred, I highly doubt it will end his crusade against violent video games. Stuff like this always gets me thinking.

As a gamer, I don’t like Jack Thompson. I don’t particularly care for him as a parent, either, although I can somewhat understand where he’s coming from. Now don’t you dare take that to mean that I agree with him or his methods. He’s an extremist and I don’t believe that extremism is healthy in any environment. “All things in moderation. Including moderation, ” is a tenet that I live by every day. I think JT gets way too much press, exposure, and attention. He reminds me of a screaming toddler, doing everything possible to get attention. But there’s a positive side to this. As long as people like him exist, the gaming community will have no choice but to ban together and work hard to ensure that our First Amendment rights don’t get taken away. By anyone.

It’s important to understand how CRUCIAL that is. A lot of people may be thinking, “What’s the big deal?” Human rights are a delicate and fragile thing. Once one right gets taken away, it’s that much easier to remove another. And then another. While the gaming community is getting older, it is still mostly populated by a generation of people who don’t know what it’s like to have to ride on the back of the bus, or to not be allowed to read books like Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales or James Joyce’s Ulysses. Generations ago, people fought, often sacrificing their lives, to ensure the freedom of expression that we take for granted today.

Another thought that crossed my mind was how we define violence. What is violent? Is it the same for everyone? When I was working at GameStop, I had a regular customer who had a son around 8 years old or so. She wouldn’t buy Super Mario for him because it was too violent. “You jump on living creatures,” she said to me. At the time, I remember thinking that was really crazy. I mean, really, who goes THAT far? I certainly don’t. I monitor my son’s gaming very closely and we often play games together. Still, as I got to understand a mother’s role in raising a child, I realized that she was taking responsibility for her child. That’s more than many parents do. For every 20 parents I met who bought games for their kids without any knowledge of their content, there was maybe 1 parent like this strict mom. And as sorry as I felt for the poor kids who weren’t allowed to jump around and ride green dinosaurs, I had to respect that the parent was actually being a PARENT.

On the other side of the coin, there are parents who bought violent games for their kids, knowing full well what was in them. They would say, “They see stuff like that on TV all the time, so it’s okay.” It’s hard to disagree with them. I don’t watch television at all anymore. One of the reasons is that I often find the images on the screen to be too disturbing in one way or another. I can’t seem to desensitize myself to guns, knives, blood, and death on television. (Honestly, I don’t WANT to.) So here’s a question. Why the hell do I like playing games like Requiem: Bloodymare so much? There’s blood, guts, and body parts all over the place in that game. I think this is where different people’s tolerances come in. When I’m watching a TV show and some guy brutally murders a woman in a dark alley, although it’s fiction, it doesn’t LOOK fake. Movies and television shows don’t get good ratings if the blood looks like ketchup and the death scenes look like something out of Hamlet. The reality is that I could get brutally murdered in a dark alley. As good as graphics are in video games, to me, what’s going on is clearly FANTASY. That’s why I play games: to escape into a fantasy world, where I am in control. And there is absolutely no reality where I am going to have a demon arm that can turn into a sword while I’m flying through the air in a big red cape.

I’ve read so many articles about violence and human behavior. I think that for every study that says that gaming makes people violent, there is another study that says the opposite. It’s so easy to blame video games for today’s troubles. It’s a medium that is misunderstood by the older generation, much like rock & roll and heavy metal before it. However, it’s important to remember that violence in the media is increasing all across the board. We see shootings and dead bodies on the news. You can say certain swear words on network television now. Movies that were rated R in the 80’s would be PG or PG-13 today. This is why as a parent, I’m determined to continually parent my son. Hell, I’m in my mid-30’s and my parents still parent me! And as a gamer, I’m determined to do whatever I can to support gaming so that my rights and the rights of my offspring aren’t trampled.