Everyone that plays video games knows the name Jack Thompson. Mr. Thompson has raised a new ruckus in his fight against the “murder simulators” that the rest of us know as video games. Thompson has pledged to donate $10,000 to the favorite charity of Paul Eibeler, CEO of Take Two Interactive, if any game company accepts Thompson’s proposal for a new game.
Thompson’s proposal is as follows:
“Osaki Kim is the father of a high school boy beaten to death with a baseball bat by a 14-year-old gamer. The killer obsessively played a violent video game in which one of the favored ways of killing is with a bat. The opening scene, before the interactive game play begins, is the Los Angeles courtroom in which the killer is sentenced “only” to life in prison after the judge and the jury have heard experts explain the connection between the game and the murder.
Osaki Kim (O.K.) exits the courtroom swearing revenge upon the video game industry whom he is convinced contributed to his son’s murder. “Vengeance is mine, I will repay” he says. And boy, is O.K. not kidding.
O.K. is provided in his virtual reality playpen a panoply of weapons: machetes, Uzis, revolvers, shotguns, sniper rifles, Molotov cocktails, you name it. Even baseball bats. Especially baseball bats.
O.K. first hops a plane from LAX to New York to reach the Long Island home of the CEO of the company (Take This) that made the murder simulator on which his son’s killer trained. O.K. gets “justice” by taking out this female CEO, whose name is Paula Eibel, along with her husband and kids. “An eye for an eye,” says O.K., as he urinates onto the severed brain stems of the Eibel family victims, just as you do on the decapitated cops in the real video game Postal2.
O.K. then works his way, methodically back to LA by car, but on his way makes a stop at the Philadelphia law firm of Blank, Stare and goes floor by floor to wipe out the lawyers who protect Take This in its wrongful death law suits. “So sue me” O.K. spits, with singer Jackson Brown’s 1980’s hit Lawyers in Love blaring.
With the FBI now after him, O.K. keeps moving westward, shooting up high-tech video arcades called GameWerks. “Game over,” O.K. laughs.
Of course, O.K. makes the obligatory runs to virtual versions of brick and mortar retailers Best Buy, Circuit City, Target, and Wal-Mart to steal supplies and bludgeon store managers and cash register clerks. “You should have checked kids’ IDs!”
O.K. pushes on to Los Angeles. He must get there by May 10, 2006. That is the beginning of “E3″ — the Electronic Entertainment Expo — the Super Bowl of the video game industry. O.K. must get to E3 to massacre all the video game industry execs with one final, monstrously delicious rampage.”
It’s possible all of this is hot air in retaliation to Rockstar Games’ (a subsidary of Take Two) parody of Jack Thompson’s rants on the website for Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories.
It gets weirder when Penny Arcade’s Mike Krahulik emailed Thompson to inform him that their Child’s Play charity received over half a million dollars in donations of cash and games from gamers around the world last December. Thompson replied back by calling Krahulik, screaming at him for several minutes and telling him that he would “regret it”.
I don’t think many people would view gamers as the violent ones in this increasingly strange tale.
