Finally Some Intelligence

After yesterday’s post which was later announced to be full of fraudulent material, I felt it necessary to bring everyone up to speed on the ESRB discussions. From the comments on my last post, The Game helpfully pointed out the good Dr. Thompson’s rebuttal which you can see here. It is a very well spoken/written refute of the about.com article, and really points out a lot of problems with how gamers (myself included) react to things they hear without fully digesting them first. This, in conjunction with the fake Snakes on a Plane fiacso, has led to the swift punishment of our editorial staff (pictured).

Much of Dr. Kimberly Thompson’s response discusses how many people reacted to her research and presentation to the House without even reading their research or skimming over what was presented. This is really a problem with second / third degree reporting, that we should really go to the source and make sure the articles we’re posting are based on accurate information. As you know, simply writing these things is a very intricate process, which results in every now and then some issues make it through. Not to worry though, the Journalistic Guinea Pigs (of Justice) are still with us, and working even harder then before to assure you get your (hopefully poop-free) posts!

It’s oh so refreshing to hear some intellectual debate going on for once when it comes to these things, lines like:

“We only played and coded some older arcade games because we were interested in examining the progression from abstract and repetitive portrayals of violence in early video games to more realistic portrayals in modern video games.”

“As we have noted in our papers, people can reasonably disagree with us, but we did not believe that it was consistent to not count this as violence even though it is quite abstract.”

Just prove that she really wants people to understand what she’s working on here, and that she knows a good bit about what she’s doing. It’s really a shame that viewpoints like this are immediately attacked in the gaming industry, when you come out saying that Pac-man is a mostly violent game (a negative thing for such a classic), then you’re going to piss a bunch of people off if they think you’re telling the government such things. All that needs to be clarified is that these studies on classic arcade games were not presented as part of the study, which was a brilliant move on the researcher’s part.

This actually explains a lot, as in the gene-pool of the great Thompson family tree, apparently all of the intelligence trafficed down Dr. Kimberly Thompson’s side, and left poor Jack Thompson’s side unfettered of logical thought (unless of course they’re closely related, which just makes him the supposed black sheep of the family). All you have to do is look at his comments on the Game Politics post at Joystiq:

“I know how to do what I do much better than you know how to do what you do, which is to pretend to be a journalist.”

“I know you’re gamers and you might have only 3 neurons left, but see if you can follow this, which I doubt”

“Now, any of you gamers who can follow that, congratulations. You still have your frontal lobes left. If you can’t, then you’re posited at the perfect place for you, Joystiq”

Nothing says “I’m a middle-aged man who works as a serious lawyer” like name-calling, immature accusations, and hypocritical banter!