Speaking of video games, there exists a group of people who oppose them. One of the most vocal people from this group is Jack Thompson, a lawyer who claims that violent video games trigger violent behaviour in the people who play them. On the Internet, Thompson would quickly be labelled a troll and ignored. He has a record of lying (the Florida Bar Association is seeking sanctions against him specifically for lying, as is the Alabama Bar), and regularly makes inflammatory comments such as “If some wacked-out adult wants to spend his time playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, one has to wonder why he doesn’t get a life, but when it comes to kids, it has a demonstrable impact on their behavior and the development of the frontal lobes of their brain.” (source). Unfortunately, the some members of the media still seems to enjoy portraying Thompson’s view as if it were objective, neutral and truthful (Fox News is particularly guilty in this respect).

Wherever there’s a school shooting, Thompson will be there, blaming video games. People have compared him to an ambulance chaser, feeding on the misery of others to further his cause. So when Cho Seng-Hui shot students at Virginia Tech, we can only imagine how overjoyed Thompson was of having another opportunity to get on the soap box and try to recruit more supporters for his anti-video game crusade. The killer used the game Counter Strike as a virtual-reality training tool to enable him to become an efficient mass murderer, Thompson claimed. Except, when he had made that claim, the police had not yet even identified who the killer was. Thompson was just making a safe gamble: the killer was a young male, and chances are good that as a young male, he had played video games at some point in his life. Thompson was spouting bullshit and playing the odds, figuring he’d never get caught. Except this time fate declined to smile on him: Once the police identified the Cho Seng-Hui, they searched his apartment, and were unable to find any video games at all. Cho was not a gamer.

In response, Thompson is demonstrating typical troll behaviour: stand your ground, no matter what; never admit you’re wrong; deny reality, and disrupt the debate any way possible. “These are real lives. These are real people that are in the ground now because of this game. I have no doubt about it,” Thompson says. “This is not rocket science. When a kid who has never killed anyone in his life goes on a rampage and looks like the Terminator, he's a video gamer.”

Given that Thompson is a troll and a liar, nobody should take him seriously. So it’s very frustrating when the media does take him seriously. The Washington Post had published an article on the Virginia Tech shooting, repeating Thompson’s claim that Counter Strike was to blame. They’ve since removed that article. Dr Phil parroted Thompson’s claims that violent videogames were to blame for the Virginia Tech shootings. So did Fox News. The same thing happened with the shooting at Dawson College in Canada. The same thing happened with the Columbine shootings. It’s very frustrating as a gamer to be portrayed as a immoral killer by Thompson, and for the mass media to take this portrayal seriously.

This is why I want to applaud MSNBC for giving a more balanced coverage of the situation. I appreciate how Chris Matthew emphasized, in a “Hardball” interview with Thompson, that Thompson didn’t actually know whether or not Counterstrike was involved. “But you don’t know that,” Matthew would repeat six or seven times in the interview. “You’re projecting from previous killings to this one. You don’t know that video games were involved.” Thompson would claim that Cho’s friends told him that Cho was an avid Counterstrike player; nevermind that everyone who knew Cho said that he had no friends. It’s unfortunate that Matthew wasn’t able to tell Thompson that the police search turned up zero videogames, but I suspect that may be because this information had not been released when the interview was conducted. Thompson would claim that he did know that Cho was a gamer, so kudos to Matthew for not letting that slide and really putting that particular lie in the spotlight.

MSNBC also gave plenty of opportunity for Thompson’s opposition to state their viewpoint, which is a refreshing change to the way the media handled coverage of school shootings up until now. For example, they cited Karen Sternheimer, a sociologist, who points out:

before this week's Virginia Tech massacre, the most deadly school shooting in history took place at the University of Texas in Austin… in 1966. Not even "Pong" had been invented at that time.

"One thing that people often don't realize is that in the years since video game sales have really exploded, not only have youth violence rates decreased but violence rates in the U.S. have declined precipitously,”