Why We Don't Hear From Jack Thompson Anymore: My Thoughts

As someone who grew up in the 90’s and early 2000’s and lived through the controversies around violence in video games I had a lot of passion for the Thompson project. I remember rolling my eyes reading about protests of Mortal Kombat in GamePro, and occasionally seeing something on the news. Why did these adults seem so dead set on ruining a good thing? The answer to that is more disappointing than you think.

You might think that the idea was a peculiarity of an older generation or a past decade, and that today’s young adults, even if they didn’t play video games are familiar enough with them not to buy into such sensationalist tripe. I certainly thought so.

While writing the Jack Thompson article over Christmas I tried to explain to my family who he is and what he did. I explained his belief that video games cause violent behavior, and the response I got did not impress me: “Well he’s at least part right”

How could people still think this? It’s an idea that’s time has passed, that has been disproven, so how could people still champion it? The incident reminded me that while Thompson and his ideas are widely rejected by gamers, outside our little enclave Thompson and people like him were wildly successful in spreading the idea that video games are anti-social and dangerous.

Ideas are like a virus and tend to spread whether they are true or not and back in the early 2000’s the idea that videogames make you violent was widely considered true.  Such ideas are mostly considered discredited today, but while gamers are often well informed on this, you can’t expect that the average person has kept up to speed on the issue.

We forget that Thompson’s ideas were highly popular. The bill he helped write in Louisiana passed unanimously, and less you conclude that this was simply the product of southern conservatism, California passed a similar law. Fortunately the courts in the US generally shut down that nonsense. Other countries were not so lucky.  But despite the court’s ruling, I would not be surprised if a majority or at least a sizable minority in the US would still be on board with these sorts of laws.

But though Thompson lost the battle of laws his ideas have germinated in the minds of many.  Those ideas influence how society at large sees video games and gamers. For those who play games this is a less than ideal situation. If your friends or loved ones consider you’re hobby immature or associate it with real world violence the possibility of social blow back is quite real. Ask your loved ones, and see how many of them believe that video games have negative psychological effects, and prepare to be disheartened.

I have no solutions for changing public option, other than pointing to the evidence and hoping that logic and reason win out in the long run. There was a time when people though comic books turned boys into criminals and people got over that but not before damaging the industry for decades. We can only hope that in time these attitudes will disappear sooner rather than later.

-Gedaemon