Jack Thompson Weighs in on Oblivion
Robotron23 writes "Jack Thompson has commenced his attack on The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion by seeking appearances on several talk shows. A press release announcing his availability speaks of Take Two not having 'learned its lesson' over the Hot Coffee scandal, before continuing to detail the issues surrounding Oblivion's re-rating, in particular regarding nudity - concluding that the game content will spawn 'an even worse disaster' than occurred during Hot Coffee."
If I understand correctly, it was a 3rd party mod applied to Oblivion that caused the nudity fuss, not a 3rd party unlocking of existing content a la Hot Coffee.
As people have said already, you might as well rate every single game ever made as Mature, since any game can be hacked independently to show nudity or sex or clones of Jack Thompson for that matter.
Argh.
Can't be pissed off at Thompson for being a wanker...He was born that way, I doubt he could help it. I guess you could blame his parents for not slapping the stupid out of him...
All that being said, W. T. F. was the ESRB thinking giving that game a goddamn Teen rating? DIABLO II got a goddamn M rating. Any moron would know that a first person game with fricking SWORDS is going to rate an M. Didn't Morrowind rate an M?
Really, does it weight that heavily on the sales if it ends up rated M?
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I notice in the article it says, "In Thompson's engrossing memoir...Thompson explains the moral, legal, ethical, and racial implications of this battle" (i.e. the battle against Satan's own game industry) - but Racial implications? Don't suppose anyone's actually read the memoir and can explain what on earth he claims the racial implications might be?
Nah. From what I can tell, he just jumps on the stories after they hit media sources. As soon as it's on GameSpot or Slashdot, it's fair game for him.
Of course, I've only got recent memory to go off of since I was too young to follow these things in the nineties, but I'm almost positive that he has yet to create a scandal...he just jumps in and makes a bigger mess out of what's already there. He's reacting to this after the fact, and I recall him doing the same with Hot Coffee.
I think the only genuine news he's created so far was his "modest proposal," and that was built off of the GTA story.
Goo goo g'joob.
I don't think you can really claim that your base model of a human couldn't have non removable underwear built into the model. Not that you should need to do this, but you could. And given how innaccurate their models are to begin with, I'm not sure the need for accuracy argument holds much water.
And a parallel might not require banning mannequins wholesale. What about banning mannequins with unnecessarily graphic details. For example, do mannequins require coloration of the nipple?
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
They actually have a disclaimer designed for this:
Online games that include user-generated content (e.g., chat, maps, skins) carry the notice "Game Experience May Change During Online Play" to warn consumers that content created by players of the game has not been rated by the ESRB.
http://www.esrb.org/ratings/ratings_guide.jsp
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There's a religious talk show called steve brown etc., and Jack was on there last week. A caller called in though and challenged him on whether video games cause violence when statistically violence is going down (at least in the us). Thompson said something about how the caller was wrong about violence going down and talked about some news study that showed it was going up. The caller then said something like "I can't believe you'd be calling a news story more accurate than crime statistics from the US govt." It was pretty funny...thompson basically conceded and then made some lame statement that violence would be down even more if there weren't violent video games, which is obviously bs. So anyway, why don't all of us arm ourselves with statistics like that guy and call into every show he's on?
3
Oh and that show has an mp3, here's the link for it: http://media.gospelcom.net/kln/sbetc/050606sbe.mp