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More On The MGS Suicide
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."
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.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Actually, Jack Thompson's little rant also disgraces us Christians, too.
I really dig the last sentence of their response:
"We forgive you, Jack, and we hope that God will do the same for you."
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
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