A Kinder, Saner Jack Thompson?

Jack Thompson isn’t exactly popular in the gaming community.  With his crazy, ridiculous rants about Bully’s non-existent “gay sex”, uninformed and callous blathering on how videogames caused the Virginia Tech shooting, and his baseless, frivolous lawsuits against anyone that may have criticized him, it’s really no mystery as to why he’s so reviled (and there’s really so much more than this too).  So it was a bit surprising to see that, rather than simply riding the idiotic and completely unresearched Mass Effect “sexbox” craze of the last few weeks, he actually defended the game, calling the controversy “contrived” (and we needn’t dwell on the irony here).

But perhaps after causing taxpayers to pay up for an unconstitutional bill that he helped write, a still undecided trial against him from the Florida Bar that could actually strip him of his license to practice law, a Take-Two lawsuit against him, an actual request related to his trial for him to be psychologically tested, and receiving a lashing from a judge for submitting gay porn into court record, maybe, just maybe, Jack Thompson realized that he wasn’t exactly helping himself, or his cause, with his usual antics.

And perhaps that, even with 2007 not being exactly a great year for him, that’s not the only thing that could have changed Jack. For his part, Jack Thompson has shown a willingness to actually engage with gamers and the gaming media.  He nearly appeared at PAX last year for a debate, has appeared on a few game-centric TV shows/networks to debate, and apparently, based on the earlier referenced post, has at least a little correspondence with the likes of Kotaku. Is it possible that, while he not agree or even like gamers, that he’s actually been slightly educated by them at the same time?  That is, rather than making wild and uninformed accusations about games, perhaps he actually takes the time to research the games he’s targeting now in part because of his interactions with gamers?

Or maybe I’m just giving him far too much credit here and, while he correctly recognized the ridiculousness of the Mass Effect controversy, is actually just a big hypocrite.  After all, he was wrong about Bully containing “gay sex” (it allows your character to kiss a few boys), but, as we all know, Mass Effect actually does include it (with no real nudity, but it’s still there).  The controversy was certainly overblown because of how wildly exaggerated the sex scenes were in the game, but the scene is certainly a lot racier than the silly kissing that you can do initiate in Bully.  One would think that, even if the Mass Effect critics weren’t actually accurate that it would still be a cause that Thompson could hitch his ride to.

Then again, the world probably wouldn’t make much sense to me any more if Jack Thompson started to be always logical and consistent.