A letter to Jack Thompson

Jack Thompson is an attorney who fights violence in video games by selling half-truths and arguing them aggressively. You can read about him here or visit his website at http://www.stopkill.com.

To see if he would live up to his name, I have just sent this email to him and am awaiting any responses:


Mr. Thompson:

I have recently come across your website, http://www.stopkill.com. After reading it and doing some additional research on your opinions, I have a few questions and beliefs that have not been satisfied.

I am a 15-year-old male; my experience in FPS games is mostly limited to a computer game known as Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy, which I played habitually a year ago but have since stopped. I have played GTA: Vice City on two occasions in my life, and I believe I am agreeing with you when I say that it was a brutal game that was too graphic to be fun. The place where our opinions differ is that I do not believe that such games are responsible for violent behaviors, or they at least are no more responsible than the other factors which I am about to state.

On your website, you frequently criticize the video gaming industry for making these violent games available to teens. What I fail to understand is why you don't blame parents instead, who have a direct control over the games that kids play until they reach their early teens, at the very least. Wouldn't discouraging parental neglect be much easier and more effective than suing these companies and attempting to change the ratings of various games to AO? The main reason that I have not played video and computer games more heavily is that my parents prevented me from being exposed to them and that is much more effective than any law that could be passed; a person under 17 could still easily get games rated M through other people if his parents weren't involved, regardless of any laws that made such action illegal.

As to the notion that video games are the main cause of youth violence, that's absurd. First of all, as research by the U.S. Bureau of Statistics indicates, youth violence is at an all-time low (source). Even if it were going up, it seems to me as though the readily available weapons that are a constitutional right are much more tempting to would-be teenage murderers than some game where virtual people are shot.

You claim that video games reduce one's inhibition to kill. Let me say that I have known quite a lot of people who played violent video games actively, and none of them would ever have confused reality with a game. Only someone with mental problems would do that; but then, it's not the game's creator's fault that instable people are drawn to it, and there aren't any more of those people now than there were in 1950. The games draw murderers in much the same way as baseball matches draw fans, but those murderers are already murderers before they've played the game just as baseball fans are fans before they view a particular match.

The game I mentioned above which I used to play, Jedi Academy, lets players have special powers, including the ability to jump more than 30 feet high, survive 100-foot drops, and push bullets away with one's hands. Furthering your idea that normal gamers can confuse games with reality, I should be thinking that I can go jump off a cliff without any harm. Not surprisingly, I've never thought that, so maybe you understand why I have a difficulty understanding this particular belief of yours.

Finally, since your website contains quite a lot of speculation, let me finish my letter with some similar reasoning of my own. Maybe some people use FPS games as a source of stress relief, as they find the notion of blowing up virtual items a way to let out anything that has built up inside them. If these games were denied them, a very small percentage of them would perhaps start blowing up real people instead, as they wouldn't have such a convenient way to get rid of their stress anymore. Thus, having games right now is actually preventing violence.

I am sure you have reasons for believing in your side of this issue, but I fail to see many of those arguments. I would appreciate it if you could take some time to explain why you think that my reasoning above is flawed.

Thank you,

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