GH Editorial: Personal Vendetta

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GH Editorial: Personal VendettaPosted 10:28am Fri Apr 20, 2007 by Aaron Dunlap Tags: archive, editorial, jack thompson, virginia tech, shooting, dr phil, violence

This article was originally published on Gaming Horizon, GameBump's predecessor.

On Monday, April 16th, the deadliest shooting in American history took place at Virginia Tech. In the handful of days since this tragedy, people across the nation and world are trying to make sense of it, to rationalize it, to recover from it, or to forget it. A few people, though, are missing no opportunity to exploit human suffering and death to increase their exposure or legitimize their own self-satisfying crusades.

Personally, since I heard about the shooting on Monday I've had my head between my legs in hopes that if I ignored the bad things in the world they'd go away. This was all going well enough, until a few voices rose above the blur of blame-this-blame-that talking heads and dragged me to the surface.

People have been blaming video games for the world's problems for years now, so it's become hard to care or even notice when the latest demagogue wiggles his way into the spotlight long enough to do so. This situation, however, is different. This shooting has affected almost everyone in the country in some way, and people are actually looking for answers; so when Jack Thompson and Phil McGraw spout off their ill-conceived garbage about video games being at blame for a psychopath's murder of over 30 students and faculty members, people might just listen.

On Monday night, just a few hours after the violence in Virginia had ended, CNN's Larry King had syndicated TV shrink Phil "Dr. Phil" McGraw as a guest on his show. When King asked Dr. Phil if a mentally disconnected killer like Cho Seung-Hui could be treated, McGraw answered:

You cannot tell me -- common sense tells you that if these kids are playing video games, where they're on a mass killing spree in a video game, it's glamorized on the big screen, it's become part of the fiber of our society. You take that and mix it with a psychopath, a sociopath or someone suffering from mental illness and add in a dose of rage, the suggestibility is too high. And we're going to have to start dealing with that. We're going to have to start addressing those issues and recognizing that the mass murders of tomorrow are the children of today that are being programmed with this massive violence overdose.

KING: Well said. This, of course, without any evidence that Cho even played video games. If it's alright to blame the entire concept of video games for psychotic behavior without even knowing that the killer ever played one, why not blame comic strips or sugar or moonbeams reflected off of swamp gas? It would be unfair to say that the devil made him do it, because we don't even know if Cho and the devil are even friends, but somehow it's completely acceptable to place the blame on a whole industry and a pastime of millions of children, teenagers, and adults across the globe without even a bit of conjecture to suggest the killer even plays them? On Monday night, I don't think anyone was even sure of the identity of the killer yet, let alone anything about his hobbies.

On Wednesday, the Washington Post reported in an article that a high school classmate of Cho's claims that Cho spent some time playing Valve's online PC shooter Counter-Strike. The Washington Post later redacted this statement and removed it from the online version of the article. The article's author, David Cho (don't get your Cho's crossed), tells Joystiq that he removed that detail because it was based on conjecture and the memories of people who didn't even know Cho Seung-Hui and only claimed to have seen him playing the game a few times.

One interesting thing to keep in mind is that the article incorrectly states that Counter-Strike is published by Microsoft. I'll come back to that in a bit.

Everybody's favorite Jack Thompson had already managed to get himself on TV before the Washington Post article. He was brought on Fox News as a "school shooting expert" (this because he follows around victims of school violence like ambulance chasers, convincing family members to waste time and money pursuing the game publishers instead of getting on with their lives), where he mostly prattled on about how every school shooting he'd seen was because of either Vice City or Counter-Strike. He was on TV for less than five minutes, thankfully, and didn't get much further than his age-old stance that video games dunnit.

After Thompson saw the Washington Post article, though, he went on the war path.

First, Jack sent a rousing "open letter" to Bill Gates. GameAlmighty.com has the full letter here, but here's the first paragraph:

Dear Mr. Gates:

On Monday, April 16, at 3:10 pm, I was a guest, as I often have been in the past, on the Fox News Channel. News anchor Bill Hemmer asked me to profile the Virginia Tech rampage killer. I did so, noting that until that day the worst school massacre in world history was at the hands of Robert Steinhaeuser, who literally trained on the Microsoft on-line, hyper-violent shooter game, Counterstrike. I mentioned your company’s game by name. I explained that the rehearsal for such a massacre is key to being able to pull it off, as efficiently as Cho, whose name we didn’t even know at the time. Cho and Steinhaeuser were able to do what they did the first time because it was not the first time. This is why the military uses this same virtual reality simulation to train soldiers to want to kill and how to kill calmly, as the witnesses of Cho said he did. The letter ends thusly:

Mr. Gates, pull the plug on Counterstrike today, or do we need more dead to convince you? "Virginia Tech" was the 9-11 of school shootings, and it appears Microsoft is in the middle of it, in more ways than one.

Regards, Jack Thompson

First of all, notice how the first thing he mentions is how he was on TV; if you think this guy gets off on attention, just wait. The interesting thing about Jack's letter is that its entire point is to blame Microsoft chairman Bill Gates for Counter-Strike and how much death it's caused. This is interesting because, of course, Microsoft has nothing to do with Counter-Strike! The game is developed by Valve and published by Vivendi. The Washington Post writer forgot to fact check before publishing, and Jack Thompson composed this entire ooh-look-at-me letter to Microsoft without first making sure that Microsoft actually has any kind of connection to the game in question.

Soon after this, Thompson sent another open letter to the Virginia Police Department Chief. You can read the whole letter here, but here are the important bits:

Dear Chief Flinchum:

The news story in yesterday’s Washington Post proves correct my prediction to your Department Monday that Cho, whose identity was not even know to me at the time, would be a video gamer trained to do what he calmly did on a violent shooter video game.

I went on the Fox News Channel Monday and even identified the game, Counterstrike, obsessively played by Cho, which was also used by Robert Steinhaeuser to author what is now the second worst school shooting in world history in Erfurt, Germany, which he also concluded by killing himself. These are not coincidences; these are patterns.

Once again, he starts off by mentioning that he was on Fox News. He also says that Cho "obsessively played" Counter-Strike, which is completely unfounded.

Thompson also implores the Virginia Police Chief, "If your Department really wants to get to the bottom of this, you need to talk to me now."
While the Virginia Police Department tries to pick up the pieces of this tragedy, deal with potential copy-cat killers, and try to investigate Cho's threat and motives, Jack Thompson wants to waste their time with his God-like delusions of authority. He wants to show them the truth, that it all boils down to "murder simulators." Jack Thompson should be ashamed of himself.

Never mind that, according to a search warrant (pdf) filed by the Virginia State Police, Cho Seung-Hui had no video games in his school dorm. Never mind also that when MSNBC's Chris Matthews interviewed one of Cho's suite-mates, he said that he never once saw Cho playing any video games.

Jack Thompson doesn't mind, because he still maintains that Cho trained on Counter-Strike. He even went on Hardball with Chris Matthews and tried to spout his theories again. Matthews wasn't having any of it, as you can see in this video from Kotaku.

MATTHEWS: How does the game prepare or drill him in the execution of 32 people?

THOMPSON: It drills you and gives you scenarios on how to kill them. It gets you to kill with your heart rate lower…

MATTHEWS: I know it is a theory. And it is a theory in this case. When was the most recent testimony, and when is it applied to, that he was involved with “Counter-Strike,” the video game, that Cho was?

THOMPSON: Cho? His high school friends. And, typically, when…

MATTHEWS: OK. Well, he is a fourth-year student at Virginia Tech...

As I said before, in the wake of a tragedy like this we are all looking for answers. We want to know how a person could do something so horrendous, we want to have some kind of rationalization for an irrational act. This is a natural reaction and is part of coping. I doubt we'll ever know what exactly was going on inside Cho's mind in the time before the shootings, and honestly I don't think we ever should.

But what Jack Thompson is doing isn't helping anybody. He doesn't want to explain Cho's motivations, he just wants to rationalize his own personal vendetta against the gaming industry. Thirty-two people have died senselessly, and instead of helping the afflicted or promoting counseling for depressed teenagers, Thompson just wants to spew his hatred.

Any time anybody under the age of thirty does anything violent, Thompson is on TV ready to blame the games. What has he ever accomplished, though? In my tenure as a games journalist I've seen Thompson call all gamers pot-heads, threaten to sue Wikipedia, sue the Florida bar, prey upon the families of countless family members of violence victims to increase his exposure, offer $10,000 to charity and then refuse to pay, and claim that the Beltway Sniper trained on Halo just for starters, but this is by far the worst.

If there was any evidence to support the fact that the Virginia Tech shooter played Counter-Strike, or even played any video game, I could accept Thompson's crusading as a mis-interpretation of facts. But, for the lack of such evidence, Thompson just pretends that there is evidence. Just to clarify, there is absolutely nothing to suggest that Cho Seung-Hai has played any video games in the last 5 years, but Jack Thompson maintains that that Counter-Strike is the cause.

Jack Thompson is delusional. He is an immature, hallow, self-centered little man who will leave no corpse unexploited to further his cause. America has experienced the worst shooting in history. This is a time for encouragement, for empowerment, and for reflection. This is definitely not a time for hatred, but hatred is all Thompson is capable of. He has an unrelenting, unmitigated hatred for video games and all people who play them and he is willing to exploit even a national tragedy to spread his hateful message.

There is no way to argue that video games had anything to do with this shooting. But, just for the sake of prosperity, could they?

To be perfectly honest, in my lifetime of playing video games I have probably killed over a billion imaginary people, robots, monsters, vampires, and zombies. I can recognize most widely-produced pistols, rifles, assault rifles, and machine guns by sight now, thanks primarily to their use in video games. I know military and counter-terrorism movement strategies, techniques, and equipment; again, mostly because of video games. As far as I know, however, I haven't killed any real people. I've never committed a felony, I've never threatened anybody with violence, and in the few situations when I've been around real weapons I've behaved as responsibly as I could imagine would be possible. Most of my friends are in the same situation.

The connecting fibers between school shooters is not that they play video games, it's that they play video games and shoot people. A person who plays video games and then goes on a shooting rampage can no more blame the games for the rampage than he could the brand of toothpaste he used that morning.

If video games did not exist, those who crave violence would simply find it elsewhere. It's important to remember that violence is not a recent phenomenon, while video games are. People have been killing each other since the dawn of man, not because they learned how to in books or cave paintings, but because there is something wrong with them.

I too would love to find a single thing to blame the violence at Virginia Tech on. If there was a single thing we could point out as the cause and lock up, ban, or outlaw, I'd love it. If somebody could suitably convince me that banning video games on a global scale would prevent any more violence of the scale of what we saw on Monday, I would gladly throw all my games into the trash. Anybody can see that it would be impossible to come to such a conclusion, however. There will always be crazy people in this world. There will also always be old people who don't understand the media of the young. Cho Seung-Hui was no more driven to murder by video games than he was by rap music, rock and roll, or baggy pants.