Thompson Vs. Jenkins On VG Violence

1up.com has a feature up including side-by-side interviews with Anti-Gaming Muckraker Jack Thompson and Prof. Henry Jenkins. The site manages to ask both proponents some tough questions, and they get some realistic answers in response. From the article's Jenkins interview: "Education is the key, not legislation. If you heavily regulate the industry it will narrow what games are in the market, and retailers will only carry content that is suitable for the youngest of players. Retailers won't carry a Mature-rated game if you move to an enforceable system. We saw this with the comic industry in the '50s. The other way to approach this problem is to put the burden on the consumer. We have to educate."

How to lie with statistics

[one-egg]

This guy is a master at using statistics to lie. For example, he cites an alarming rise in violent deaths "in and around" schools: 17, 16, 48 in three successive years.

A quick Google [google.com] search leads us to the widely reported data: this is actually "school-related deaths", and it includes suicides. First problem. But the second and biggest problem, highlighted prominently in "How to Lie with Statistics", is what happened in the two [schoolsecurity.org] years [schoolsecurity.org] before those three: 33 and 31 deaths, respectively.

So instead of the alarming trend of 17, 16, 48, we have the highly varying trend of 33, 31, 17, 16, 49 (the Web site I'm quoting gives a different number). That last number is certainly worrisome, but hardly proof by itself. Especially when you look at this year's [schoolsecurity.org] count of 37. So what we have is a dip and a blip, not a trend. Of course, Thompson will probably take credit for the latest drop.

...and of course there's the question of whether those school-related deaths were related to video games at all. But it wouldn't suit Thompson's agenda to investigate that possibility.