Jack Thompson

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Jack Thompson (1951–) is "humanity's answer to the sarcoptes parasite"^[1] (or rather, was) a lawyer infamous for his agenda against video games, actively intending to create moral panic.

Thompson's legal career

Thompson blames video games as the primary cause of violence and crime among young people, which is why the popularity of Tetris has led to more people killing others by dropping oddly shaped blocks on them.^{[citation NOT needed]} Like others of his ilk, he doesn't care about the facts, and he shamelessly takes advantage of tragedy to further his agenda. He became notorious for popping up as a news network "guest speaker" in the aftermath of school shootings to claim that the shooter practiced killing with violent video games.^[2] He has even accused the U.S. Department of Defense of colluding with video game producers.^[3]

He was disbarred by the Florida Supreme Court, effective October 2008, for "professional misconduct." This ended a long-running feud between Jack Thompson and the Florida Bar Association going back to 1992 (at one point he accused them of having a secular humanist agenda). What actually got him disbarred, however, is filing frivolous lawsuits and defaming various people who opposed him, even accusing them of being involved with child pornography. Having gotten his just desserts, he then claimed to be the victim.^[4]

What, exactly, he is infamous for among various circles could fill an entire article by itself, but his exploits include mass-mailing thousands of game industry employees and threatening to press harassment charges against them when they responded, flooding the judge's bench with over a hundred pages of gay pornography as an illogical and crazy attempted bribe during a case, and other unintentionally hilarious shenanigans. Most of his opponents were deeply saddened to hear that this talented amateur comedian has been forbidden from performing. And if that wasn't enough, a GTAForums user named illspirit took credit for trolling Thompson into believing that there existed cheat codes for The Sims 2 which supposedly disabled the censorship from the game and allowed for genitalia to show up when the titular Sims are unrobed (which as we all know is all untrue; the characters lack any explicit genitals akin to a Barbie doll. There are indeed adult-oriented mods for The Sims series but these are generally walled off from mainstream mods sites akin to conventional pornography).^[5][6] Thompson soon took the bait and complained to EA about the matter, but was met with ridicule both from Sims fans and EA Games themselves, all while illspirit and GTAForums celebrated at the successful trolling operation with popcorn in hand.

Grand Theft Auto lawsuits

During the early 2000s, Jack Thompson litigated in a series of failed lawsuits against Rockstar Games over games in the Grand Theft Auto series:

• On 20 October, 2003, the families of the victims killed by teens, William and Josh Buckner filed a US$246 million lawsuit against the producers.^[7] The lawsuit was later dismissed as a violation of the First Amendment.^[8]
• In February 2005, a lawsuit was brought upon the producers and distributors claiming the video game caused a teenager to shoot and kill three members of Alabama's police force.^[9] The lawsuit was later dismissed.
• In September 2006, a lawsuit was brought on behalf of the families of Cody Posey's victims, blaming his obsessive playing of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.^[10]

Penny Arcade antics

Jack Thompson has had a couple interactions with the gaming webcomic Penny Arcade, to hilarious results.

• Gabe taunts Jack Thompson with Penny Arcade's charity numbers.
• Gabe explains that Jack Thompson would have to sue himself. (Don't forget the comic!)
• Penny Arcade donates $10,000 to charity because Jack Thompson wouldn't after promising to.
• Penny Arcade talk about a fax that Jack incompetently sent to the local police to get them arrested. (Don't forget the comic!)
• Penny Arcade makes fun of Jack's rocketeering raconteuring racketeering *just goddamned stupid legal arguments.
• Penny Arcade has a bad funny hypothesis about Jack's true nature.
• Did we mention that Jack Thompson got himself disbarred on Gabe's birthday as a birthday present to Gabe?^{Do You Believe That?}

Post-disbarment

Since his disbarment from legal practice, Thompson made a living teaching civics classes to inmates in the Florida prison system, including an American history and constitutional law class at the Everglades Correctional Institution, according to a 2016 interview with Inverse. Thompson remains undeterred despite the challenges he faced, though, further opining that if a lawyer like him failed to rein in on what he perceived as an industry peddling violence to children, perhaps someone better can finish what he started and somehow win a landmark case against the games industry, drawing parallels to how the tobacco industry survived decades of research and litigation linking their death sticks to lung cancer and other diseases (never mind the fact that tobacco companies are indeed complicit with smoking-related deaths while links between violent behaviour and video games are tenuous at best).^[11]

His itch to get violent games off the shelves remained in him still as recently as 2018, when the magazine Rolling Stone reported on how Thompson offered pro bono legal advice in relation to Marshall school shooting, again playing on the very same anti-video game canards he had always parroted.^[12]

Thompson, along with his shameless legal career and subsequent downfall, was dramatised in the 2015 BBC docudrama The Gamechangers where he was portrayed by the late Titanic actor Bill Paxton. Rockstar took umbrage at the film's production and threatened legal action,^[13] but Jack Thomson himself was surprisingly silent on the matter.

External links

• Jack Thompson Is So Disbarred...: Mocking the now-disbarred Thompson.
• Remembering the Real Jack Thompson (The Big Picture): A post-mortem of Jack by Moviebob.

Notes

References