What a doosh, I hope he gets shot at HIS skool!
Psyche! =P
I was browsing Netflix and glanced at this and its synopsis and I thought "Oh, this will probably end up being just like Bowling For Columbine, nothing I haven't already heard before." Boy was I ever wrong, and it did it with a medium that is 100% relevant to my interests... video games. So often there's this misdirected outrage when events like these occur. He listened to -this- kind of music, he watched -these- kinds of movies, he played -that- kind of video game.
I remember watching a movie on Court TV called "The Interrogation of Michael Crowe," a 14 year old boy's little sister is found dead in her bedroom, the cops treat the brother as the sole suspect, they investigate his room and they find Role Playing Games like "Final Fantasy 7" and that becomes their blame sponge without them even bothering to sit down and review the content of the game before making snap judgements. The child is then continuously interrogated and psychologically tortured (some of the interrogation sessions lasted 11 hours with the interrogators refusing to even let the boy go to the bathroom) until he confesses to a crime he didn't commit.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCXZR_yiM0Q
People like Jack Thompson are doing what those investigators did in the case of Michael Crowe, and I am soooo glad that this idiot has been disbarred from practicing law. These guys judge the games without even bothering to personally experience the content. I also side with whoever it was in the film (wasn't keeping track of names) that said you can't compare sitting at a computer and positioning a cursor and clicking a mouse button to holding and firing a gun in real life, and you cannot call the game Danny made, a 16bit, SNES-inspired, Turn Based RPG "serial killer training." If that's the case, because I played ACTION RPG's like Zelda A Link to The Past and Secret of Mana, I should be an excellent swordsman, even though there were only so many moves you could do in those games and it certainly did not even come close to replicating the feeling of having a sword in your own hands.
Despite my preconceptions and assumption that I would be bored by this film, this was a very insightful and enlighting piece of documentary, and I couldn't help but feel the need to scream "MORON" in the faces of the other Jack Thompsons (again, I wasn't keeping track of names) who spoke in this movie. Video games, to me, are as much an art form and method of conveying emotions as any movie, book, or radio drama. Whoever said they weren't should be chained to a chair with an SNES controller duck taped into their hands and forced to play games like Secret of Mana, Seiken Denestsu 3 (its little known Japanese only sequel which was made playable to English-speakers via fan translation), Chrono Trigger, Terranigma, Tales of Phantasia (another fan trans, and was briefly shown in the film)... until they finish them. Then tell me that video games "have no artistic merit and do not qualify as defensible speech."
I loved this documentary, not just for the content and the message it puts across, because it really isn't JUST about what Harris and Kliebold, or Michael Carneal, or Kimveer Gill, or Brenda Ann Spencer or any of the numerous other school shooters past or present have done, it's about how the media, concerned parents, and idiot reactionists like Jack Offsum treat them and the artforms they -believe- are responsible. Consider for a moment that Charles Joseph Whitman was shooting people from the tower at the University of Texas in Austin in 1966, long before the first video games even came to be.
That one guy definitely hit the nail on the head... "In Japan they have an ultra-polite society, practically no violence at all, but you look at their games and their anime and their manga and it's a total gore fest. And then it hit me... this is a release for some people," that is exactly it. Some people -need- these games to take out their frustrations so that they DON'T pile up to the point they want to go splatter everyone in their schools or their work places.
And is it a game maker's fault if some mentally unstable person gets hold of their creation and uses it as their excuse for violence? If you answer yes, then you also must believe that we must treat creators of violent movies, violent books (which the Bible most certainly qualifies as, despite what naive little Jack Codwaffle and pals would like to believe), and violent music with the same rules. When you do that, it's like a parent trying to baby proof their home. When you plug all the sockets up with those plastic covers, you make it so the intelligent people can't use them. If we spend all of our time and effort trying to baby proof the world for all the dumb people out there, then we ruin things for everyone else out there who ISN'T a mentally unstable ultra-impressionable moron.