Stranger 109

When I originally planned to start this site, I considered implementing what would best be described as the Jack Thompson rule. As a gamer, I can’t help but cringe every time he finds his way back into the media, crusading to save the children. It is bad enough that reputable news organizations like CNN and MSNBC bring him on as an “expert on videogame violence,” but what troubles me most is that Jack tends to get more attention online thanks to the ire of devout gamers. His forum flame wars have kept him a fixture on the gaming blog scene. So my instinct initially was to make a point NOT to talk about Jack and his antics in order to prevent him from extending what has seemingly been an endless 15 minutes. But the man is simply too big of a target not to address. His relentless pursuit as the anti-gaming crusader only poses a threat if enough people start to believe the things that he says. Therefore, as a person who studies gaming culture, I feel the need to respond to the various misinformation campaigns that he has made a career by spreading.

This week Take Two releases its highly anticipated BioShock for the PC and Xbox 360. On Friday they aired a commercial (above) for the game during WWE’s Smackdown. By Monday morning, Jack had penned a letter to the Federal Trade Commission citing this as further proof that the gaming industry targets gamers under 17 for their mature titles:

Remarkably, the video game industry is running ads for games like BioShock on teen-intensive television programs while at the same time its industry-captured “watchdog,” the ESRB, is running a self-congratulatory ad campaign to assure parents that the video game ratings system is working and that the industry can be trusted not to target their kids with these Mature-rated games. It is all a lie, as the BioShock ads prove.

He then proceeds to compare this same marketing tactic to “Big Tobacco’s” use of Joe Camel to lure children in as smokers. Granted, marketing departments for publishers like Take Two have a vested interest in capturing the largest possible market for their titles. But of all the publishers, Take Two has probably learned the most expensive lessons in PR than any other game company based on the Hot Coffee debacle. Moreover, the ESRB has made such a point to crackdown on any such antics to save face for the entire industry precisely because of how Take Two handled that situation. In fact, this week at the Leipzig Games Convention Developer’s Conference the president of Factor 5, Julian Eggebrecht, spoke out against the ESRB for the ways in which it has become overly cautious in censoring games.

First of all, its important point out that Jack has just placed videogames in the same threatening category as tobacco. And this is not the first time; he has long believed that videogames should fall under the purview of the ATF. Does he actually believe that videogames are equally dangerous? I don’t think that he does. Instead, he implements the rhetorical strategy of a fear appeal to galvanize his position among concerned parents. To a large degree this has worked out for him, which is why he gets the call from news networks when a horrible act of violence has been committed by a young man who may have played videogames at some point in his life.

Second, I need to highlight a layer of irony at work here. Having seen footage from the game, I can easily see why it warrants its the rating of M for mature audiences. But the game’s narrative is set in a futuristic Utopian world that has gone awry and one of the game’s major enemies are the Big Daddies (pictured above) whose job is to protect the Little Sisters, demonic looking children that you can either choose to save or sacrifice to advance in the game. The way in which the Big Daddies are depicted as oafish brutes lumbering forward to protect the children of Rapture begs the question: was Irrational Games poking fun at anti-gaming crusaders like Jack when they created of them?

Lastly, I hope that I’m not the only one having trouble digesting the logic that the marketing of a rated M game, which contains “virtual” violence, during the airing of a show like Smackdown, which contains “simulated” violence, is not exactly inconsistent. I will be the last to jump on the media effects theory of violence bandwagon, but the proliferation of backyard wrestling videos that have popped up on the net makes me wonder if Jack has targeted the right medium this time around. I love that in his opinion the interruption of a match, where one guy jumps from atop a 10 ft ladder and drops a folding chair on another guy’s head, by a videogame commercial constitutes the more egregious offense. But what I love even more than that, is now knowing that Jack watches Smackdown on Friday nights. I wonder who he roots for?