AG offers video game rating tips for parents:
Imagine that. A state Attorney General and a Democrat to boot that isn’t overreacting about video games.
Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood has actually reminded parents to check the ESRB ratings of games before buying them for children.
A politician with common sense? *gasp* Our hats off to AG Hood.
Thanks to Game Politics for the tip.
(Guest post by Jade)
This time it is my great pleasure to review “Whisper of Fear” by Rhonda B. Saunders and Stephen G. Michaud. Penguin Books (who rules, by the way) was kind enough to send me an advanced copy.
Rhonda Saunders is the prosecutor who wrote the stalking laws in California and has helped other states and countries write their stalking laws. She takes you through her journey of how she became a corporate attorney then ended up as a prosecutor. Her writing style is very reminiscent of John Douglas, the former FBI profiler.
Ms. Saunders started prosecuting stalkers around 1993. Little did she know that her first stalking case would continue to haunt her until this day. She prosecuted Madonna’s stalker, Robert Hoskins, and in telling the story also shares amusing anecdotes about trying to get the Material Girl to testify in court.
She also prosecuted Steven Spielberg’s stalker (a nut-job of the highest order) with help from the director himself. Mr. Spielberg was more than accommodating, even to the point of canceling a session with the Los Angeles Orchestra while recording the “Saving Private Ryan” soundtrack. She found Mr. Spielberg to be a friendly, outgoing person whose only concern was for the safety of his family.
Prosecuting Gwyneth Paltrow’s stalker proved to be a little easier because he was legitimately insane. Not that that made him any less dangerous.
Most of the cases she writes about are stalkers who obsess on ordinary people like you and me. Her first stalking case was that of an ordinary woman who was being stalked by a former lover. After being arrested, she continued to stalk her victim and Ms. Saunders. To this day, she still receives threatening messages from this stalker.
She also has a chapter on how to avoid becoming the victim of a stalker, and what to steps to take if you are being stalked.
I will not spoil the rest of the book for you, because if you are a true crime fan, this is a MUST READ!!!
It will be in stores on November 4, which will be an excellent way to get the nasty taste of Election Day out of your head.
Again, thanks to Penguin Books for giving me the chance to review this book in advance.
I don’t use a rating system, but if I did it would definitely be 5 out of 5!
As reported by Gamepolitics, Jack Thompson has been permanently disbarred and fined $43,675.
And the world just became a little brighter.
(Guest post by Jade)
Rarely am I offered the chance to review a stellar true crime book by a publisher. Usually, it is a book I have chosen on my own, or something wretched sent to me by some hack publishing company. It is my great pleasure this time to bring you “Twisted Confessions” by Charles E. Skollar.
Mr. Skollar was the prosecuting attorney on the Kitty Genovese case in 1964 in Queens, New York. I know most of us have heard of that case, but I myself did not know a lot of the details. This book does not give a lot of details about the case, it’s more about the emotional toll that the trial took on everyone involved.
To complicate things further, Mr. Skollar had prosecuted and convicted a young man (who had confessed) for the murder of Barbara Kralik, a rising high school junior also from Queens. After a suspect was arrested for the Genovese murder, this suspect also confessed to the Kralik murder and the murder of Annie Mae Johnson.
Mr. Skollar goes into great detail about the horrendous amount of work involved in trying to untangle one confession from another. I won’t go into detail about how he was finally able to do it. I strongly urge you to read the book for yourself and find out. You will not be disappointed.
What do those three names have in common besides the fact that they’re overpaid talking heads? Well, two of them have placed the blame for the Virginia Tech massacre squarely on video games while one of them dismissed the idea, and it may not be the ones that you think.
Ok, Jack Thompson is the one that you think. That should have come as no surprise.
What did come as a surprise was TV quack, Dr. Phil. I was never a big fan of his to begin with, but I thought he had more smarts than this…
Well, Larry, every situation is different. The question really is can we spot them. And the problem is we are programming these people as a society. You cannot tell me – common sense tells you that if these kids are playing video games, where they’re on a mass killing spree in a video game, it’s glamorized on the big screen, it’s become part of the fiber of our society. You take that and mix it with a psychopath, a sociopath or someone suffering from mental illness and add in a dose of rage, the suggestibility is too high.
What came as even more of a surprise was radio blowhard Rush Limbaugh coming to the defense of gamers.
Not every video gamer goes out and murders 33 people on the college campus though. There’s more to this than that, it may desensitize people, but it doesn’t turn everybody into mass murderers?
People have a tough time accepting a relatively simple explanation for something of this scale. But how many people are playing video games out there? How many millions of people play video games, and how many millions of people have guns?
As they say, politics makes strange bedfellows.
Megadeth defends music Dawson College gunman loved:
I am a huge Megadeth fan. I didn’t even know that Kimveer Gill had referenced one of my favorite Megadeth songs in his lunatic ravings. I was pissed when I found out. I can only imagine how pissed Dave Mustaine was…
In his blog posted on vampirefreaks.com, Gill, who described himself as a huge Megadeth fan, had singled out the song À Tout le Monde, urging others to listen to it. He wrote in his blog that the song helped convince him to go on his shooting rampage that killed one and injured 19.
Megadeth likes to perform the song À Tout le Monde in Montreal because the title and lyrics are in French, Mustaine said in an interview before the concert.
The song’s chorus says: “A tout le monde/ A tous les amis/ Je vous aime/ Je dois partir,” which means: “To everyone/ To all my friends / I love you / I have to leave.”
Mustaine was deeply offended when he found out Gill referred to the song in his online plans for Dawson.
“I was so angry that this guy would use my song, and that he would try and turn that beautiful song into something ugly and nasty,” he said. The singer wrote the song about his mother, who died when Mustaine was young. “I had a dream that she came back to me, and said ‘I love you.’ That’s the whole song.”
The song is in memory of the living, Mustaine explained. “It’s for those who lost their lives, and it’s a gift to those who are in the process of healing.”
There was no question in Mustaine’s mind that Megadeth would perform the song in Montreal during their show Wednesday night. “[Gill] is not going to control us from the grave.”
I don’t always agree with Dave Mustaine’s opinions, but I have more respect for him now than I ever did.
MONTREAL — On a scary website, Kimveer Gill describes himself as a potential killer and admits that his favourite video game is Super Columbine Massacre.
For those of you just joining us, Super Columbine Massacre RPG (or SCMRPG for short) is a homemade video game put out by amateur game designer Danny Ledonne that puts you in the shoes of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.
I’ve previously called it something along the lines of a sick tribute to one of the most horrific mass murders of all time, or something like that. For some of my previous takes on the game, you can go here or here.
I’ve emailed Mr. Ledonne asking for his comment about it, but as of this posting, I have yet to hear back from him.
Last night, I watched the movie Zero Day. For those of you who haven’t heard of Zero Day, it’s about a fictitious school shooting filmed from the point of view of the shooters much like what Harris and Klebold did with their basement tapes.
As far as movies about school shootings go, Zero Day is the best. It is much more interesting than the crap fest that is Elephant, and much more realistic than Home Room. In my opinion, the director tried to make it like Columbine without it actually being Columbine.
What at first I didn’t like about the movie turns out makes the movie better and more disturbing. In the actual basement tapes, you can see the anger and hatred in Harris and Klebold. In Zero Day, the actors were much more subdued about the whole thing.
My only complaint about the film isn’t with the film itself, it’s the fact that the mutants look at this as almost a “fan film” when I’m pretty sure that this was not the film’s intent.
Anyway, I won’t spoil any more of it, but I highly recommend that anybody, especially those with kids still in school, to watch this movie.
Q&A: Creator of Super Columbine Massacre RPG:
The same writer who interviewed Columbine survivor Richard Castaldo about the Columbine RPG video game has now interviewed its creator.
Q. What inspired you to create a game about Columbine?
A. Firstly the shooting itself. This may seem like a tautology to even mention but it’s resoundingly true. Columbine marked me deeply. I was in a Colorado high school then. I was a bullied kid. I didn’t fit in and I was surrounded by a culture of elitism as espoused by our school’s athletes. I saw so many similarities between the situation there in Littleton and my own. It was very much like being terrified by one’s visage in the mirror. At the same time, it was empowering to see two oppressed, marginalized kids rise up–but we’ll get into qualifying this later because I think there is a dangerous oversimplification to be made by saying this.
Emphasis mine. Empowering to see 13 unarmed people get killed by a pair of psychopaths? 13 people who had nothing to do with their killers. And who were they oppressed and marginalized by? The ever anonymous “jocks”? Empowered. You have some nerve to be empowered by the deaths of those at Columbine.
Also there’s something innately comedic about making a violent school shooting into a game with tiny, cartoonish sprites and text-based menus that make firing a TEC-9 feel like casting a magic spell. Part of the point of SCMRPG is that it parodies video games–much like the Broadway version of “Backdraft” from the film “Waiting for Guffman” parodies films adapted for the stage.
There’s nothing comedic at all about the situation. I can have a pretty sick sense of humor myself at times, but the comedic value of making a game about one of the darkest moments in American history escapes me.
Q. Would you call this a serious or educational game?
A. I’m not sure the two are mutually exclusive. I feel like parts of the game are very emotionally powerful–something I wanted to push in a medium best known for innocuous icons like Mario, Sonic, and Pac-Man. The game deals with difficult coming-of-age situations like rejection, isolation, ridicule, and depression. Behind all the pixels is the fact that people really died–including angry two boys who were at times very thoughtful, sensitive, and intelligent young men.
Yeah, so thoughtful and sensitive, they had no problem with slaughtering so many that had no personal connection to them whatsoever. And they could have had the IQ of Einstein for all I care, it doesn’t change the fact that they were mass murderers.
This next one is my “favorite”…
Q. Do you think there are certain topics that should be taboo for video games?
A. Absolutely not. Foremost, the concept of “taboo” is a laughable one in a society that pretends to care about free speech. I stumbled across KKK versions of Super Mario Brothers, a game about escaping the World Trade Center as the towers collapsed, and a shooting game that takes place at the Branch Davidian. I knew then that I was in good company in making this game.
I wouldn’t call it good company, but it’s the same company.
And to top it all off…
Q. Are you concerned about the impact a game like this might have on the people directly effected by the events at Columbine?
A. This is actually a more difficult issue for me that my detractors might otherwise imagine. Yes, that is a concern of mine. I realize it’s very difficult for someone affected directly by the shooting to understand or appreciate my point of view in creating a videogame from what is no doubt the most painful experience in their lives. Nonetheless, film directors are embraced for “getting it right” on the Holocaust and I think anyone, including CHS families, who really look at this game will understand that I don’t advocate or endorse the violence but rather am calling for a deeper understanding of the shooting itself. Anyone who rejects outright the search for an alternative perspective is either a fascist or is hopelessly entranced by the emperor’s new clothes.
The difference is in a movie you’re only a silent witness, not an active participant. Would you design a game where you play as a Nazi and get to put the Jews to death? You probably would, but most people with an ounce of sense wouldn’t.
You know damn well that the people playing your game, for the most part, are the mutants who worship those two scumbags and get a thrill out of getting the chance to play as their heroes. And I highly doubt your sincerity that you’re agonizing over the feelings of the victims and their families. As you said previously in the interview, “you sleep quite well at night.”
Here’s what the victims’ families had to say…
“It’s wrong,” said Joe Kechter, whose son, Matt, was murdered in the Columbine library.
“We live in a culture of death,” said Brian Rohrbough, whose son, Dan, was gunned down on a sidewalk outside the school, “so it doesn’t surprise me that this stuff has become so commonplace. It disgusts me. You trivialize the actions of two murderers and the lives of the innocent.”
And Judy Brown, who has been immersed in the Columbine controversy along with her husband, Randy, called it a “sad and sick thing to make a video game out of a tragedy where 13 innocent people were murdered.”
So I guess you can call me, the victims, and their families, fascists for not giving a rat’s ass about the perspective of two mass-murdering scumbags.
You’re not trying to open a discussion about the shooting like you claim. This is nothing more than your concept of hero-worship. It’s nothing more than a tribute to them, and you act like you’re doing society some great service. The only way you could do society a service is if you left it.
I hope you get to meet your heroes.
Bill would limit sale of video games:
Our favorite idiot lawyer from Florida is on the move again. This time he’s in Delaware trying to help State Rep. Helene Keeley, D-Wilmington South, get a law passed that would restrict businesses from selling M-rated games to minors. Never mind the fact that most legitimate stores won’t sell M-Rated games to anyone under 18 and that the majority of kids who get these games are getting through their parents. Jack never lets facts get in his way. Like this little nugget of misinformation from Jack…
Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the Colorado teens who massacred 13 of their fellow Columbine High School students in 1999, “literally trained on the game ‘Doom,’ ” Thompson said.
Sure, they did Jack. Just forget all those tapes they made, showing them at a homemade target practice. I myself, and millions of other people, have played Doom and never picked up a gun in anger but again let’s not let facts get in the way.
Jack also had this to say about the free speech ramifications…
Thompson, meanwhile, said the First Amendment debate is misplaced.
“This isn’t even speech,” Thompson said, holding up a video-game display box. “This is software that enables a machine to allow a player to play a game.”
Does he really believe the lies that he’s spewing forth?
When will politicians, especially Democrats, stop getting in bed with this assclown? It’s making them look worse than they already are.