The shooting on the Virginia Tech campus was only hours old, police hadn't even identified the gunman, and yet already the perpetrator had been fingered and was in the midst of being skewered in the media.
Video games. They were to blame for the dozens dead and wounded. They were behind the bloodiest massacre in U.S. history.
Or so Jack Thompson told Fox News and, in the days that followed, would continue to tell anyone who'd listen.
"These are real lives. These are real people that are in the ground now because of this game. I have no doubt about it," said Thompson, a Florida attorney and fervent critic the of video game industry.
The game he's talking about is "Counter-Strike," a massively popular team-based tactical shooting game that puts players in the heavily armed boots of either a counter-terrorist or terrorist.
But whether Seung-*** Cho, the student who opened fire Monday, was an avid player of video games and whether he was a fan of "Counter-Strike" in particular remains, even now, uncertain at best.
Meanwhile, in the aftermath of the school shootings and the finger-pointing that followed, game players and industry advocates say they're outraged that the brutal acts of a deeply disturbed and depressed loner with a history of mental illness would be blamed so quickly on video and computer games. They say this is perhaps the most flagrant case of anti-game crusaders using a tragedy to promote their own personal causes.
"It's so sad. These massacre chasers — they're worse than ambulance chasers — they're waiting for these things to happen so they can jump on their soapbox," said Jason Della Rocca, executive director of the International Game Developers Association.
"It disgusts me," said Isaiah Triforce Johnson, a longtime gamer and founder of a New York-based gaming advocacy group that, in response to the accusations, is now planning what is the first ever gamer-driven peace rally.
Read the full article here...Winda Benedetti
April 20, 2007
Source: MSNBC