More On The MGS Suicide 30
Last Thursday we mentioned the misreporting of a gamer's suicide, the death of a young man who frequented a Metal Gear Solid forum. This week, GamePolitics tries to clear things up by talking with one of the forum admins and giving gamers a place to air their reactions to related events, such as Jack Thompson's callous disregard for the young man's life. The Guardian Gamesblog comments on the unreality of the situation: "According to Gaminghorizon, AFP, the international newswire service that picked up on the Bulgarian story, has corrected its take on the events, although news sites that picked up on AFP's original version, including CNN and Yahoo have apparently yet to make alterations to their reports. Ultimately, the lack of major international media coverage has lent this sequence of events an air of unreality, of illegitimacy. A tragedy quietly perpetrated and pulled apart online."
Deaths on Servers (Score:5, Interesting)
If this young man committed suicide, he obviously needed a close group of friends which would explain why he would log onto the forums. Perhaps he was looking for someone to talk him out of it and he couldn't find anybody anywhere else? After RTFA, seems like he was a daily poster on the forum.
There's also cases of people dying in real life and the community coming together to remember them. I'm reminded of Luckky Johnson [sony.com] on the Scylla server of Star Wars Galaxies. She battled a serious illness in real life and her character (that was logged on at all times) was suddenly never on anymore.
I Suppose this is just another effect of social networks based on computer networks through the abstracted level of the internet. Will it ever be "ok" to be concerned about guildmates or people you play online with? Right now, everyone seems to treat "meeting online" as a social stigma
Case In Point (Score:2)
Case in point: http://www.applenova.com/ [applenova.com]
They pretty much took down the main page and replaced it with that memorial type page (with links to the other sections still, of course).
Merely a case of games reflecting real life (Score:2)
This isn't because the games themselves lead to increased suicide rates, but a side-effect of the huge masses of people playing them. If you have several million people playing, a certain number of them are going to die each year.
-Eric
Not all that quiet... (Score:3, Insightful)
A tragedy quietly perpetrated and pulled apart online.
I wouldn't say it's quiet by any means...just because the aging 'conventional' news outlets haven't pounced on it. All this serves to do is point out their increasing irrelevance.
Most people concerned with this story get the majority of their current events online...it's not surprising that that's where the coverage occured.
Does any one have a link to what JT said? (Score:1)
I didn't manage to find a quote from him.
Thanks in advance.
Re:Does any one have a link to what JT said? (Score:5, Informative)
Clicking on that link above will give you MGS.org's response, which is exceptionally wonderful.
Re:Does any one have a link to what JT said? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Does any one have a link to what JT said? (Score:3, Insightful)
"We forgive you, Jack, and we hope that God will do the same for you."
Re:Does any one have a link to what JT said? (Score:1)
Re:Does any one have a link to what JT said? (Score:2)
Let's take a look at what he's saying, paragraph by paragraph:
Re:Does any one have a link to what JT said? (Score:3, Interesting)
You're missing the point. JT is exploting the death of a young person for his own selfish, ignorant crusade.
And this will go along with your sig,
Games don't kill people, people kill people!
Just because people play games doesn't mean they are filling their lives with emptiness. Religion is certainly not the only way to fill emptiness in one's life, and in my opinion, it's far from the best.
Re:Does any one have a link to what JT said? (Score:2)
Sure, just because people are playing games doesn't mean that people are filling their lives with emptyness - no more than believing in organised religion, smoking pot, drinking booze, or working your arse off for 60 hours a week does. But, often people do exactly those things to fill their lives.
Now, I'm not a gamer, don't frequent or read gamer boards, and wouldn't know JT from a hole in the ground. Hell, I don't even know what game this is about! But reading that extract of th
Re:Does any one have a link to what JT said? (Score:5, Insightful)
I see that you mention in your second post that you don't know who Jack Thompson is. Sadly, he is in fact one of the "radicalist nutjobs" you refer to.
Yeah, right - stop pretending you're immune, that you'd notice at all, or behave any differently if you did.
Actually, I have personally been in that situation. And I behaved very much like the people on the MGS forums did: I talked to the person, tried to talk him out of it, and used the information I had to contact the real-world forces (cops, in this case) who could and would help. I was luckier than Kuja's friends; the person in question is still alive. But I've been tested in that fire, and I know what I would do, because I have done it.
That's what really happened -- not what Jack Thompson, in his twisted way, is telling people happened. The people who knew that troubled young man did more than "get up from their computer"; they did everything in their power, individually and collectively, to help him. They did what they could, but it wasn't enough, and their community is bleeding. All of us who have been touched by this, or a tragedy or near-tragedy like it, hurt along with them.
Then Jack Thompson jumps into this pain, the pain both of Mitch's online friends who tried to save him and failed, and his offline family who shared his life, who found his body, who are devastated. He, a man who has devoted his life to destroying video games (or at least to being paid a lot of money for pushing lawsuits against game companies) has his own "answers". According to him, Mitch died because he didn't follow Mr. Thompson's religion. He died because one of his hobbies happened to be playing computer games. One wonders, if it turns out that he also played basketball, would Jack Thompson wage war against that, too?
And then Mr. Thompson turns his bile on the people who are already in agony over their inability to help a friend when he needed it the most. The surivivors of a suicide are vulnerable themselves; they torment themselves thinking they could have done something more, seen something they missed, something, anything. So Mr. "Compassionate Christian" /spit Thompson rubs salt into their wounds. He denies that they did anything at all. He accuses them of not caring, of not trying. And he knows what he's doing.
I'm sure at some point in your life, NoMaster, you have had the experience of someone -- a parent, a teacher, a boss -- accusing you of not trying when you know you poured all you had into something. Mine was a boss who dismissed a project I sweated blood over for weeks as trivial, not even worth his time to review. There is a special sort of pain that goes with that, pain that abusive parents and spouses know well how to inflict. When it concerns not just a term paper or a work project but the life of a friend, the pain is indescribable. A decent, compassionate, moral person would acknowledge what those hurting people, those family and friends, are going through, would acknowledge that they tried their best, would console them -- not accuse them of not caring, of never trying at all, of causing the very thing that has torn their hearts open. That is not "a wonderful thing". That is viciousness on a master level. It is on a par with the fatherless sons of diseased dogs who line up outside the funerals of people who have died of AIDS and scream at the bereaved families that their son, their brother, their beloved, is burning in hell. It's not about getting anyone to think -- it's about hurting for the sheer sadistic joy of hurting another human being.
You, as you say, are not a gamer. You are not a part of these little communities of ours. I'm not sure that anyone who has never participated in one can really understand what it is like. Just as there were people a century ago who maintained a friendship by postal correspondence for years or decades, so we have our friends we have never met in the physical world. We might not know their real names, but we know their hopes, t
Re:Does any one have a link to what JT said? (Score:1)
Re:Does any one have a link to what JT said? (Score:2)
Re:Does any one have a link to what JT said? (Score:1)
I actually came across this story earlier today via Ctrl-Alt-Del. You may want to check out http://www.ctrlaltdel-online.com/news.php?i=969 [ctrlaltdel-online.com] and follow the links.
If that's a true response (i.e. not someone masquerading as Mr Thompson) then he shows an astounding lack of human compassion and a worringly sociopathic streak.....
Another (off-game) suicide (Score:2, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:3, Funny)
20 World of Warcraft players will die this month!! (Score:4, Interesting)
Somewhere in the US, at a rate of almost one per day, a World of Warcraft player tragically takes his own life.
No, no, don't lynch me yet. I'm a WoW player myself, and on the side of the good guys. I'm just spinning some statistics here to give you an idea of the numbers involved, and hopefully to have some ammunition against the likes of Jack /spit Thompson.
Here's the (very rough) numbers:
The US suicide rate is roughly 12 per 100,000 people. It varies by age group, but for the sake of discussion let's assume that it's approximately correct for the demographic of WoW players. While I'm assuming things, let's also say that there are 2 million WoW players in the US. (it's been a while since I've seen figures, but with 5 million worldwide, that should be in the right ballpark)
2 million players, .012% of them commit suicide annually, that's 240 a year, or 20 a month. Tens of people a month ... hundreds per year ... that's a lot of people. A lot of tragedies. Enough to touch every faction on every server.
But here's the catch: You could probably generate roughly similar figures on WoW players being elected to public office, winning the lottery, or being murdered. When you're talking about millions of people, ANYTHING happens in non-trivial numbers. Pull those numbers out of context, though, and you can make them look like whatever you want them to. You just have to spin the numbers fast enough and hope your readers don't think for themselves.
Of course, made-up "facts" are a lot more lurid than the real truth. They're a lot more "newsworthy" than the things that really happen, the things that we as people who happen to play online games have seen and done. I am far from the only gamer who has sat up all night talking, listening, to a depressed kid who I only knew as text on a screen, with no possible means of contact except that fragile thread of words. There are a couple of people alive today who might not be if they hadn't had me, or someone else they knew in-game, to talk to. One is for sure: some of our mutual friends (I wasn't around at the time) tracked down his parents and got him hauled to the hospital in time. Of course, "Gamer Sits Up All Night Listening To Depressed Friend" just doesn't have the "oomph!" for a good headline. "Teenage Gamer Doesn't Commit Suicide" won't sell many papers. Making stuff up, on the other hand, seems to work very well.
Hundreds of thousands of people read Slashdot. Statistics being what they are, the odds are pretty good some of them will be journalists. Some of those will be shady journalists. If you happen to be one of them, think about this the next time you're tempted to make something like this up: Is it really worth selling papers if the price is the pain inflicted on a person's family, friends, and community when they read your lies?
Re:20 World of Warcraft players will die this mont (Score:2)
On the other hand, with the increasing prevalence of gamer communities and social networks online, it should be taken as a good sign that we don't hear about dozens of gamer suicides every year.
Maybe comparing it to the demolitions industr
Jack thomson to the rescue of sanity! (Score:2)
Also we should do something important with our lives, instead of wasting our FREE time playing games, such as devoting our lives to a 9-5 job so we can retire with not en
Someone point me in the right direction? (Score:1)
Could someone point out to me what reliable evidence there is to suggest that this is definately a Jack Thompson message. Not trying to be cynical - I just couldn't find any, and would appreciate a link or something. Many thanks.