Jack Thompson still has a grudge
When the video game industry is valued at $300 billion, a Halo TV series trailer is occupying prime real estate during the AFC Championship, and a GTA facsimile like Free Guy is one of the top-grossing films of the year, it is clear that Jack Thompson lost the fight. For those who don’t remember, Thompson was the attorney who led the charge against violent video games and helped morph a fringe topic into a dominant wedge issue of the mid-2000s. He has since vanished from the public eye as the outrage ran dry, and everyone moved on.
Looking back, the imagery of the zeitgeist — think Joe Lieberman brandishing a light-gun live on CSPAN or Hillary Clinton equating first-person shooters to tobacco and alcohol — is rendered strange and atemporal in the harsh light of the 2020s. Yes, the affair still earns some perfunctory attention, usually engineered by the NRA in response to yet another mass shooting, but I think everyone who was once involved in the gaming panic knows that the jig is up. Degenerate classics like Mortal Kombat, Doom, and Grand Theft Auto seep deeper into the marrow of our culture with each passing day with no real objection from the nation’s lawmakers. Hell, Rep. Madison Cawthorn, one of the young stars of the MAGA movement, is actively petitioning for American military technology to better resemble the arsenal in Halo. Where have all the true believers gone?
Thankfully, Jack Thompson was kind enough to answer his phone on a sunny Friday afternoon in South Florida. It only took a few minutes for him to unleash a salvo of takes, forever cocked and loaded for anyone willing to listen. He asserts an association between the rise of crime in New York City to Take-Two, the publisher behind Grand Theft Auto. After
Read more on theverge.com
