Letter from me to Jack Thompson

Soldato
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Ok, I recently sent a letter to Jack Thompson, and thought I'd share with the community. I'll let you know when he gets back to me ;)

Dear Mr Thompson,

Allow me to begin by introducing myself. My name is Darren Hazelden, and I reside in the UK. I'm only 20 years old, and currently a student at university, studying Computer Games Development.

Now I have been watching your campaign for a while now, and it has led me to truly despair for the integrity of some people.

Now I understand your stance against video game violence. Or, in fact, your wish to remove any game that isn't Hello Kitty MMO from the market. Because, let's face it, a lot of games have violence. Even in Ecco the Dolphin, a game for 6 year olds, you have to fight off sharks at points!

So, this portrayel of violence in video games is not focused on the one game you focus most of your efforts (the GTA series), it is actually a huge theme throughout ALL video games, as I'm sure you know.

So, now we've established I am fully aware of your "plight", let's get to the reason of this email.

Point 1 (Yes, there are points!)

Video games companies cannot, under any circumstances, be held responsible for games such as GTA getting into the hands of younger children.

This is important to stress. Your argument is that everyone gets their parents to buy them games. You claim they market it towards children. This part of your campaign attacks the games companies heavily, saying that they fully realise children will be buying their game.

In the marketing however, they make it quite clear of the ingame violence. They rate the game as 18 rated, or whatever the American equivalent is. The people at fault here are the retailers, and the parents. How can you claim that it is the developers' fault that children are playing these games, when the power over the sale of these games does not rest with the developers. How you can put blame on the hard working programmers and developers for children buying the games really is beyond me.

You are a lawyer, you should know that the games companies themselves can't control that. If you don't, then I would call into question your entire career choice and also your campaign against video games.

Point 2

The content of such games does not cause people to suddenly become criminals.

You imply, regularly, that these games are the cause of violence, that attacks on police officers were inspired by these games, that they somehow cause people to think shooting police officers, stamping on prostitutes, or shooting Nazis.

Sane people do not suddenly decide to attack police, or abuse their hookers (unless they paid for it already). The kinds of people that attack police officers are, well, the kind of people that would attack police officers anyway. Sure, there have been crimes modelled around what is present in a video game, do you really think the people who commited that crime wouldn't have done it at all otherwise? They are criminals, it's always been "trendy" to commit crime in innovative ways. However, if you can prove to me that they all these people were 100% mentally stable beforehand then I might begin to concede to your point. Can you show me where videogames may have actually corupted an innocent law-abiding person to the point where they wanted to just go out and kill people for no reason?

I've been playing violent videogames since I was about 15. I've been shooting up the "noobs", sending my orc armies to destroy the human interlopers, I've been killing pig after pig just to get a better sword. I've been there, I've done it all.

At no point have I considered going out into the real world to do this. I think this is where you have gone wrong, perhaps you are living in the computer game world, and when you see a cop die you immediately associate it with GTA. I see a cop die, I pity the state of the world we're in. The thought of it being computer game related doesn't cross my mind, there were criminals killing people long before computers were even a concept.

There has indeed been increased gun crime in the USA in the last few years. This seems to coincide with the number of videogames released in the last few years. You may also notice that it also increased as the accessability of guns in the US increased. It also increased as the number of pizzas sold per year increased. If you want to blame anything, blame pizzas, because it works off of the exact same logic you're using.


The way you associate this genre with real life is worrying to me. I can tell the distinction between videogames and real life. The criminals can also tell the difference, they are criminals no matter what. You can't spot this though, which makes me think maybe the line between virtual reality and reality is blurred for you. If so, may I recommend getting help, as you need to learn the difference between the real world, and the fantasy world you live in.

Yours forever, and hugs and kisses,

Darren Hazelden

I'm sure he'll completely change his mind ;)
 
More likely he'll sue you for harassment. He sued PA for donating $10,000 to charity in his name after he went back on saying he would do it himself.
 
I seem to remember a load of members from a private message board finding his address and phone number and just ordering him thousands of these free USPS boxes, ordering pizza's to his house and more. T'was pretty funny tbh, but that truly was harrassment.
 
A single letter can't be deemed harrassment. Even he knows that :)



Hehe :p

His grip on reality seems somewhat distorted. Didn't he sue some actress for battery for shaking his hand? Or am I thinking of someone else entirely?

Ahaa, It was Janet Reno, she put her hand on his shoulder and he sued for battery.
 
The thing about Jack Thomson is that the people who supposedly hate him give him all of his publicity. He knows he's taking the ****.
 
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