The Blame Game: Who's Responsible for Jack Thompson?

With anti-gaming crusader Jack Thompson's legal career nearing its end, we've been left with a lot of people who are shaking their heads and wondering how an extremist like Thompson ever got so prominent in the first place.

Former head of the Entertainment Software Association, Doug Lowenstein, sent an attention-getting letter to Kotaku that attempts to lay the blame squarely at the feet of "the game press." Sort of a blanket statement, don't you think? He goes on to claim that the gaming media treated Thompson as if he were a "credible, fair minded critic" and expresses a view that the media should play a role as a filter to, I guess, keep people like Thompson from getting the coverage they need to maintain their profile as an "expert" in the field, suitable for appearing in the mainstream news, as Thompson often did with Fox News and other non-gaming outlets.

Make no mistake, Jack Thompson is a real creep. He's the sort of guy that looks around the Internet for pictures of your CEO's children and sends them along with vaguely threatening text related to their safety and somehow blames it all on video games in the process. He also seemed to think that Microsoft was responsible for Counter-Strike.

So as a frequent target of Thompson's increasingly personal attacks, Lowenstein certainly has a right to wish that Thompson had gone away years ago. But he's about as far off-base as he could get on this one. The gaming media didn't "make" Jack Thompson. Jack Thompson had established himself ages ago. He made his bones back when he was chasing down the 2 Live Crew and NWA over their nasty lyrics, so he was probably already in the Rolodex of most cable news departments when it came time to start waging war against video games. I'd guess that the cards with his number on them probably looked something like this...

First of all, even though we're effectively "trade press," it's still not our job to filter out things that the gaming industry or its lobbying organizations find objectionable. If this is how Lowenstein views thinks this business should work, it's probably for the best that he's not representing it anymore. (Though considering the number of companies who have left the organization since he moved on, maybe it's not much better over there these days.)

If anything, all the gaming media really did was give him enough rope to hang himself in his own words. In brief sound bites, Thompson comes off like he might actually know what he's talking about, especially if you're just an average joe who doesn't follow gaming. By running his statements in full and pointing out his flailing attempts to remain relevant, the gaming media effectively exposed Thompson to be, as Lowenstein puts it, "a charlatan who wholly lacked credibility." Maybe Lowenstein didn't much care for all the calls for comment he received while at the ESA, but it was his job to defend the game industry from whackjobs like Thompson. Not mine.

I could go on and on, but Dennis McCauley over at GamePolitics has already issued something far more eloquent than I ever could. If this topic interests you, I highly recommend you read McCauley's piece.