Video Games: PC, PSP, PS3, xBox, and Wii Gaming News

It’s official! Our favorite (read: most hated) anti-gaming, anti-happiness attorney Jack Thompson has been disbarred in Florida. That means he can no longer practice his frivolous brand of lawsuits in the state, a big win for your right to play whatever video game you want.

John Bruce Thompson
Disbarred Not Eligible to practice in Florida
ID Number: - 231665
Address: 5721 Riviera Dr, Coral Gables, Florida 331462750, United States
Phone: 305.6664366
E-Mail: amendmentone@comcast.net
County: Miami-Dade
Circuit: 11
Admitted: 05/31/1977

You can read the official document on the Florida Bar’s website. You may also want to consult the Wikipedia entry for Jack Thompson (attorney), which highlights his failed career as a right-wing hack:

Thompson came to national prominence in the controversy over 2 Live Crew’s As Nasty As They Wanna Be album. On January 1, 1990, he wrote to Martinez and Reno asking them to investigate whether the album violated Florida obscenity laws. Although the state prosecutor declined to proceed with an investigation, Thompson pushed local officials in various parts of the state to block sales of the album, along with N.W.A’s Straight Outta Compton.

Goodbye Jack, we won’t miss your attacks on our rights to freedom.

Joining previous bans of pc games Carmagedon, Grand Theft Auto and Postal which all garnered 18+ “adults only” ratings in Brazil, now first-person shooter Counterstrike and MMORPG Everquest join the ban list. Since 01/17/2008 a federal judge in Goiás has begun confiscating copies of the games, enforcing a ban that was legislated last fall. Other provinces are not seizing the games.

Kotaku also reports that Counterstrike “in the vision of specialists, teaches war techniques” and that Everquest “takes the player to total nonsense and heavy psychological conflicts, because the quests he receives may be good or bad.”

More amusingly, Everquest is not even officially sold in Brazil, and the offensive Counterstrike content where “Rio de Janeiro drug dealers kidnap and take to a slum three UN representative s” and “the police invade the place and are welcomed with bullets” refers to a user created map, CS_rio. Lol, it’s ok Brazil, we have politicians like that too in America; they’re called Hillary Clinton.

In his letter to Bill Gates, Microsoft is only again abused by anti-game activist Jack Thompson’s latest barrage of threats, threats that stem from an over-zealous confusion of moral value and necessity of legal action.  The game that’s pissing Mr. Thompson this time is Halo 3 for the Xbox 360, a game that he calls “hyperviolent.”  Furthermore, he erroneously alleges that the original Halo was the source of inspiration for Lee Boyd Malvo, the DC Beltway sniper, and that Halo allowed Malvo to become “remarkably efficient” in his killing.  However, JT couldn’t leave his letter as a mere judgment of Halo 3’s content, so he decided to threaten Gates with legal action if it didn’t prevent the sale of it to minors.  Here’s Jack Thompson’s letter in full to Microsoft’s Chairman Bill Gates:

Bill Gates
Microsoft Corporation
Redmond, Washington

Re: Halo 3

Dear Mr. Gates:

As you know, the Federal Trade Commission has repeatedly found that games rated “Mature” by the video game industry-captured Entertainment Software Rating Board are routinely sold to kids under the age of 17 despite the age rating. The most recent failure rate of the ratings on “Mature” games, according to the FTC, is 42%. The entire rating system is a fraud, and “broken,” the latter description aptly provided by Senator Hillary Clinton.

As you also know, Lee Boyd Malvo trained on Microsoft’s Halo to further enable him to become the remarkably efficient “DC Beltway Sniper.” That was reported by NBC News at the time and was noted in Malvo’s criminal trial.

You appeared on CBS’ 60 Minutes II and rather revealing and usefully noted that “the cool thing about these games is that they transport you to a world you think is real.” Precisely. Capcom has recently disclosed to investors that your video game industry’s violent games, sold to children, pose a real hazard to the health of the industry. Right on.

The hyperviolent Microsoft Xbox 360 game Halo 3 is scheduled by your company for commercial release in September of this year. The Beta version that was released last week shows us all just how violent the game is and how inappropriate it is for play by anyone under 17, as the “Mature” rating it will surely receive indicates.

Here’s the deal, Mr. Gates: Either Microsoft undertakes dramatic, real steps, through its marketing, wholesale, and retail operations to assure that Halo 3 is not sold, via the Internet and in stores, directly to anyone under 17, or I shall proceed to make sure that Microsoft is held to that standard by appropriate legal means. I have done that before successfully as to Best Buy, and I shall do so again as to Microsoft and all retailers of Halo 3.

Regards, Jack Thompson

I wonder what will come of Mr. Thompson’s latest endeavors.  Will he successfully sue Microsoft for perceived crimes of passivity?  How will he be able to prove Microsoft culpable for the legal violations of retailers who sell its games?  We’ll keep you posted.

Last year, we heard about GTA: Vice City’s infamous “Hot Coffee” mod, a in-game sex scene that could be unlocked via an internet hack.  However, the game was apparently rated as Mature by the ESRB without any knowledge of the aforementioned sex scene.  The New York Times says that this scandle “prompted debate in Congress about the violent and, in particular, sexual content in video games”.  Take Two, the publisher of the GTA franchise, modified the game to be in accordance with the ESRB’s prior rating of Mature (otherwise it would have been reevaluated as an “Adult-Only” game), taking out the sex game, and then restocked retailers with the amended version. 

But now, Take Two Interactive has recieved grand jury subpoenas from the “Manhattan attorney’s office, seeking information about a range of its business practices dating back to 2001 and the inclusion of sexually explicit material in one of its games”.  This development has caused Take Two’s stock to tumble “nearly 19 percent, to $10.44, a 52-week low”.  As the public catches whiff of Hot Coffee again, the online petitions are becoming all-the-more conspicuous.  For better or for worse, “Hot Coffee” is a stale brew of the past, re-heated again for a second swig.

Illinois’ Violent Video Game Law and Sexually Explicit Video Game Law have just been declared unconstitutional by the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. The former of these laws was shown unconstitutional because the state could not prove either that “(a) violent content in video games is ‘directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action’ or (b) violent video games are ‘likely to’ produce ‘imminent’ violence”. The latter law, the Sexually Explicit Video Game Law, was considered unconstitutional because the term “sexually explicit” content was defined in such a vague way, and thus was not applied consistently enough in the legislation. Read about the actual case at gamepolitics.com.