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Shooting Lawsuit Against id Software Dismissed
greg writes: "I saw on Bluesnews that the lawsuit against id Software over the Paducah County school shootings has been dismissed.
Here is a link to id CEO Todd Holleshead's .plan file." Sounds like a sigh of relief from id -- just think of the implications if the judge had gone the other way. (Remember the PMRC?)
There seems to be a real bad Slashdot code bug around here - the Score descriptions aren't showing. Meaning, if a post is rated (3, Informative) the 'Informative does *not* show up (only the "(3,)") does.
You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
... There's no way in hell John Carmack would have enough money left this year to buy another Ferrari.
You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
This type of frivolous lawsuit is completely detrimental creativity. There may be a correlation between violence and video games, but even that does not, in any way, equal causation. I could just as easily mention that it rained here in Toronto, and that prices of pizza went up in China. The two seem unrelated, but statistically, there is a correlation. However, it doesn't take much to conclude that the rain didn't cause the pizza prices to change.
The problem is that the individuals who were both victims and agressors in this case refuse to acknowledge that it wasn't something as trivial as movies or video games, but a greater pervasive problem throughout a society.
You want a focus group? Try Canada. We recieve the same movies, video games, and much of our culture is related. Clearly, the media is not to blame.
I could theorize about the lack of guns in Canada, or our less liberal view of hunting for children, but that would just bring out the gun-nuts. I'm more concerned with showing what isn't the cause - the media - not placing the easy blame.
----------------- "I have a bone to pick, and a few to break." - Refused -------------------
Remember the PMRC?
Wasn't that the committee that declared Tipper to be the inventor of music?
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2B1ASK1
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Nicotine free Amish .sig.
Fortunately judges take a dim view of this sort of attitude and I hope it stays that way.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
This will never make it into the mainstream media. You will not see this story appear on CNN, MSNBC, or [insert your favorite news media source here]. The intial lawsuit was considered "news" and "interesting" and therefore fit for distribution becuase it would attract eyeballs and therefore ratings. But a lawsuit being dismissed?
Why, it's completely boring and uninteresting. Who would ever care about such a thing? Result=no public exposure when these ridiculous lawsuits get thrown out as they should. Chalk it up to a fundemental flaw in the media system and how it perceives its relationship to those who receive information from it. The media has no legal responsibility whatsoever for printing or distributing a retraction or correction to an inaccurate previous story. The media has no legal responsibility to present both sides of a story. The media has no legal responsibility to follow up on a story and report on its aftereffects.
Victories in the courtroom are all well and good, but when was the last time you say Bernstein, Junger, or [some ludicrous lawsuit thrown out or some issue resolved in favor of any resonable sense of justice] receiving equal prominence with, say, the RIAA or MPAA's receiving preliminary injunctions against such "pirating and hacking tools like DeCSS"?
Hmmm...I guess that makes him a bisexual judge `;^)
Okay, I'm a smart-ass!
Have a look at my web site
4-6-2000
In a decision that has just been made
available, id has prevailed in the
Paducha lawsuit on all points. Judge
Johnstone has dismissed the case on
all grounds, validating what we have
said all along: the case lacked a
shred of merit.
Now that this legal hurdle is out
of the way, work can finally resume
on id's latest title, "Columbine
Revenge 2001," and our latest add-on
pack to Q3A, "Cafeteria Crossfire"
When I was a kid in the late 70's/early 80's, we had a games we all knew about in the neighborhood. Ahh yes, back in the pre-PC age of analog, we had to come up with games instead of buying them, believe it or not. We had three neighborhood favorites. "Ghost In The Graveyard", "Smear The Queer", and "Guns".
In "Ghost In The Graveyard", we played it only at night. One person was selected to go somewhere in the neighborhood and hide. The rest of us would split up and search for the ghost. The fun came when you had the crap scared out of you when you came across the person hiding, or heard a scream of terror somewhere in the neighborhood. I liked Ghost In The Graveyard, and played it alot. However, it didn't make me worship satan and bite the heads off of chickens later in life. It was a game.
At the risk of sounding patronizing, or incredibly insensitive towards gays, i'll tell you about the next game. "Smear The Queer" was a variant of rugby. Before the days of political correctness, it was a sure-fire way of humilitating and physically punishing your friends as a group. The person with the football ran around and had to avoid relinquishing posession of it, even after being tackled and beaten into submission. I liked playing Smear The Queer, and played it alot. However, it didn't make me a gay-bashing redneck later in life. It was a game.
Similarly, "Guns" was alot of fun. Any object in the household that even vaguely resembled a firearm was used in an imaginary war of attrition with a line drawn between houses. In my case, I managed to get a discarded power-drill from my dad which looked vastly more impressive than the simple garden-hose sprayers and silicone caulking guns the other kids had. We chased eachother around the neighborhood, the 6 of us, for hours on end, jumping over cars and diving over bushes, hiding under stairwells and such, our imaginations running wild with the thought of gunning down our friends in a real-life Quake arena, if you will.
However, it didnt make me a homocidal mainiac with an unquenchable thirst for human suffering. It was a game.
So, here I am, 20 years later. I have no interest in the occult. I have no urge to physically assault gay people, and I have no bizzare fixation with firearms. Infact, it would scare me to even know someone involved in any of those activities, let alone be a participant in any of those activities myself.
When the line between fantasy and reality is blurred in the mind of a child, you can often times look directly at that kid's parents and point out very, very severe problems in how they handled the task of raising their child. Dylan Klebold left his house every morning wearing a black trenchcoat with a swastika armband on, leaving a sawed-off shotgun ontop of the dresser in his bedroom. His parents did nothing about it, unfortunately. And by the time they understood the gravity of their own neglect of their child, a dozen or more kids lay dead in a school.
Your upbringing wont cause you to become a psychopath later in life. The _lack_ of an upbringing, however, will. Thats not to say that companies like Id are immune from scrutiny but the fault most often lies with internal causes rather than external ones, like TV, music, or entertainment in general, IMHO.
Flame away. Thats how I see it, and i'm-a stickin' to it.
Bowie J. Poag
Project Founder, PROPAGANDA For Linux (http://metalab.unc.edu/propaganda)
Bowie J. Poag
Thank God they didn't get a stupid judge in this case - that would have been bad news.
Lawsuits like this make me wish I wasn't an American. This country has way too many problems with trying to treat the symptoms of a problem rather than the causes of the problem. Example: all the shit that followed Columbine. People are cracking down on people dressing in black and being different than other people, rather than trying to figure out why these people have a tendancy to go nuts and start shooting. If they just looked at the problem in a larger scope, they would see that they are not the causes of the problem - the cause of this problem is people harassing these people because they are different, and the people who are trying to fix the problem are just making it worse.
...check out the Amazon customer reviews on Lt. Col. David Grossman's Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill .
:-)
This will give you an idea of what id and the gaming community as a whole are up against. For those tuning in late, Col. Grossman is the chief evangelist behind this and similar lawsuits which attempt to pin the blame for recent school shootings on creators and distributors of popular culture.
Never one to let facts and statistics interfere with a good diatribe, Grossman and his cronies excel at distracting their followers' attention from the fact that acts of violence in schools (not to mention the rest of US society) are occurring less frequently these days than at any time since the 1960s.
So if correlation really does imply causation, as Grossman would have us believe, then we should be thanking id Software and Valve for selling American kids a violence-dousing cathartic.
Personally, when it comes to figuring out what drove Michael Carneal to go postal at his junior high school, my money's on the town uranium-enrichment plant.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
What should we have done if the judge had gone the other way? Precisely what we do when the judge rules for a position that we favor. One cannot selectively pick and choose which judicial mandates to ignore and which to accept based on the personal self-benefit that would be derived from such a position. I too am utterly outraged when some judge rules for some idiotic company only interested in enriching its own pockets at the expense of the consumer and trodding over the rights of the many; however, if we accept the rulings in our favor, and thereby the implicit underlying premise that our common abstract conception of justice will eventually prevail in the end through the judicial process, we would be inconsistent to refuse to obey a ruling that had gone the other way.
Civil disobedience: a term use frequently by Slashdotters in a flimsy justification for disregard of the law. It's a noble concept, but mirroring the DeCSS code, for instance, just doesn't cut it, IF you are not willing to accept responsibility for the consequences of your civil disobedience. If the judge had gone the other way, fight vigourously to have the decision overturned on appeal, pester your legislators for change in tort reform, contact all the civil liberties assocations that you know about, boycott the company, whatever. But I believe that it would certainly be hypocritical to defy such a ruling under the assertion that the judge is a moron, or some such nonsense.
....because if I can go from pushing the 'CTRL' key down with picking up a submachine gun, striping it, cleaning it, reassembling it, loading and cocking it, aiming it, and firing it, while using the proper stance, BRAS technique, staying on target, target discrimination, etc etc whilst wearing a scratchy trench coat then DAMN, hold me back!
Oh, and since I've played Falcon 4.0, don't let me near an Air Force base; I can bugger off with a Falcon and bomb people to death!
Besides; anybody who's actually played Doom knows that if somebody was going to kill people, Doom Style, they'd do it with the CHAINSAW!
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go play Heretic II for the EXPRESS purpose of learning how to cast magic spells.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.