Anti-Game Violence Lawyer Profiled

Thanks to Reason Online for their article discussing recurring anti-game violence lawyer Jack Thompson, whom they describe as "nothing if not relentless" for his repeated attempts to sue videogame companies on behalf of violence victims. They also shine a light on his pre-videogame concerns, which include acting as "a primary force behind 2 Live Crew's obscenity woes", and even "peddling some genuinely intriguing claims about Janet Reno's time in Miami." The piece concludes by referencing similar "brainwashing fears" common to Thompson and an earlier crusader, Fredric Wertham, who "was at the forefront of the campaign to stop comic books from rotting the minds of the young with fantastic, colorful tales of violence, horror, and unconventional living arrangements" in the '50s.

Little known fact..

[\\]

Fredric Wertham was a failed comic book writer and/or artist, I can't remember which. After his failure, he decided all of comics were evil, and the industry pretty much still suffers to this day. (Of course, most of the industry pretty much sucks too, but I'm not trying to start a debate on that.)

Re:Little known fact..

[Snowspinner]

There is a reason that this is a little known fact: it's not true.

Wertham was an accomplished psychiatrist who, noting a rise in juvenlile delinquancy, looked at his own patients, and observed identification with comic book figures in a number of cases. He then drew the connection. If you actually read Seduction of the Innocent, it's mostly not that hysterical - he's mostly reasonably raising the question of whether or not comic books were being sufficiently attentive to the fact that their audience was still psychologically developing, and extremely impressionable.

Seeing as there was no labeling whatsoever on comic books at the time, this is actually a fairly reasonable concern.

To say that the hysterical backlash that followed Wertham's book is his fault is not entirely dissimilar to blaming Columbine on id software, really. Wertham had the fortune, or perhaps misfortune, of raising the question of whether comic books were being responsible or not at a time when people were looking for something to blame - Wertham inadvertantly provided it.

Rated M for Moses

[CdotZinger]

The Talmud contains a lot of strange, "dirty," and bloody stories. There are some which now would be called "horror" stories, with G-d as the "bad guy" (some of which are actually scary, in a startling, slasher-movie way). But since almost no one outside of rabbinical schools reads it, no one gets too worked up about it. You could make a pretty faithful religious-educational survival-horror/"Grand Theft Torah" game starring Akiba (though if you did, the ADL would undoubtedly spend millions to ruin your life).

The Koran of course has a lot of typical Biblical violence, because it, like the Book of Mormon, is a supplementary text to "the" Bible (Torah + New Testament), and its tone was influenced by the fiery stories of Zoroaster et al. Rape and such get mentioned about as often as you'd expect in a religious book--which is to say, many, many times more often than in most other books.

The Old Testament contains, for example, the Song of Solomon, which is, by old-timey standards, a pornographic story. The King James translation is the most "erotic" and evocative.

And, of course, all of these stories are "graphic," their being, like all writing, composed of graphemes.