LATEST VIOLENT VIDEO GAME: “BULLY”
Miami attorney Jack Thompson, the nation's leading activist against the marketing of violent video games to minors, has done it again. Today's Miami Herald is reporting that Jack Thompson has persuaded the nation's fourth largest school system--Miami's--to vote this week to try to stop the release of the "Columbine simulation" game Bully from the makers of the hyper-violent Grand Theft Auto games. In Bully a virtual student in a virtual school whose slogan is "Dog Eat Dog" bludgeons his classmates and teachers as a bully.
Columbine's Klebold and Harris trained on a video game, Doom, to kill as did Paducah school killer Michael Carneal. The FBI and Secret Service identified the key role of violent entertainment, especially violent video games, in a number of school killings. Anti-bullying experts in the US and around the world expect more bulling in schools because of the game Bully.
Thompson has sent his Bully game Resolution to school boards across America, as he attempts to turn up the heat to stop the game's release.
THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE MAY BE HELPFUL FOR SHOW PREP:
MIAMI HERALD
Secretive new video game might inspire school bullies
By MATTHEW I. PINZUR, Mar. 13, 2006
A secretive new video game about school bullies could be targeted by Miami-Dade School Board members, who fear the repercussions of a game that is set in a school and includes fights, slingshots and possibly much more.
Little is actually known about the game, Bully, which was scheduled for release last fall but has been repeatedly delayed. Opponents of violent video games have been driven largely by its pedigree -- the game is being developed by Rockstar, the controversial designer of the ultra-violent Grand Theft Auto series.
In those games, which have been top sellers for years, players steal cars, hire prostitutes and brutally beat and murder enemies, police and bystanders. Opponents fear that Bully will bring the same graphic violence into the virtual schoolhouse.
''This game is built entirely around bullies and is staged in a school -- it's the antithesis of everything we're trying to promote,'' said School Board member Frank Bolaños, who introduced a resolution urging Rockstar not to release Bully, asking local merchants not to sell it and asking parents not to buy it.
A board committee unanimously approved his resolution Thursday, and the full board is expected to vote Wednesday. If it's approved, Miami-Dade's would be the first major school system in the country to take sides against Bully, according to Jack Thompson, a Coral Gables attorney.
''The goal is to make it such a negative thing that the retailers won't carry it,'' Thompson said. ``This thing hasn't really reached critical mass as a [public relations] problem yet; that's what I'm trying to do.''
Bullying and video-game violence have been hot issues in public education, and the new game captures the passions of both. Numerous South Florida incidents have personalized questions of teenage violence. A then-14-year-old Michael Hernandez is charged with the 2004 killing of classmate Jaime Gough in the bathroom of Southwood Middle School, and three Broward County teenagers have been charged with murder and attempted murder for attacks on homeless men this year.
''As I've championed and the board has unanimously supported measures improving student safety, it becomes more and more apparent that some external factors impact it,'' Bolaños said.
Rockstar has said little about Bully.
''We all have different opinions about art and entertainment, but everyone agrees that real-life school violence is a serious issue which lacks easy answers,'' Rockstar said in a written statement. The company refused to answer other questions.
The statement said the game is ''still a work in progress,'' and the company's website describes Bully as ``humorous tongue-in-cheek storytelling.''
One of three screen shots released by Rockstar shows a thuggish teenager in prep-school clothes kicking another student in the back. Other images, published last year in industry magazine Game Informer, show a fistfight, a slingshot being fired and one student holding another's head over a toilet.
But a reporter who saw parts of the game previewed last spring said it was hardly a ''Columbine simulator,'' as Thompson put it, referring to the 1999 killing of 12 students and a teacher by two classmates at a Colorado school.
''There are no police chasing you, there's no AK-47s -- this is a game they said they're trying to create as lighthearted and fun,'' said Andy McNamara, Game Informer's editor in chief. ``Anybody who went to high school and was a nerd is familiar with these things.''
But Bolaños and Thompson both said Rockstar might just be promoting the game's most innocuous scenes.
''Once the game is released, it's too late,'' Thompson said.
The leader of an online group of Miami-area video-game enthusiasts said the resolution would be an overreaction that could keep the game from millions of people because of a handful of violent incidents.
'I don't think it's the School Board's business -- it's more the parents' issue,'' said Ali Wallick, 16, a Palmetto Senior High student from Pinecrest who runs the Miami Gamer group on the MySpace social networking website.
McNamara said Bully is being judged unfairly because it comes from Rockstar. ''Rockstar's got a ping-pong game coming out -- are they going to go after that?'' he asked.
The Grand Theft Auto games were rated M, or mature, and many retailers have policies banning the sale of those games to children under 17. McNamara said he believes that Rockstar will try to release Bully as a rated-T game, which the Entertainment Software Ratings Board considers appropriate for children 13 and older.
Thompson, however, said those policies are spottily enforced. He wants to apply so much pressure against Bully that retailers such as Best Buy, Circuit City, Target and Wal-Mart refuse to sell it -- which could give Rockstar second thoughts about releasing it this spring.
Rockstar was especially troubled in South Florida when Grand Theft Auto: Vice City -- set in a 1980s-era clone of Miami -- included dialogue urging players to ''kill all Haitians'' and ``kill the Cubans.''
Protests were held, and the dialogue was removed from later versions of the game, but retailers brushed off calls to stop selling the game.
''More and more people are beginning to recognize that the stories in video games have as many themes and plotlines as books and movies,'' Rockstar's statement said.
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/breaking_news/14084718.htm
ABOUT JACK THOMPSON…
Pictured on the cover of the book he wrote entitled, “Out of Harm’s Way” (Tyndale House Publishers, Nov. 2005), a book highly critical of Howard Stern, Jack Thompson is a 1976 graduate of Vanderbilt Law School, where he was a classmate of Al Gore.
Jack Thompson is a former “hands-off-business libertarian” and “First Amendment absolutist” who subsequently became convinced that the entertainment industry must be forced into taking responsibility for the brain-altering and deadly results of the violence and indecency it is spewing into millions of homes, families, and minds.
An attorney specializing in litigation against the entertainment industry since 1987, he has been interviewed for hundreds of radio and TV programs about the link between violent video games and teen violence. His legal successes include: securing the first FCC decency fines (1989); securing the first verdict that a sound recording is obscene (2 Live Crew case in 1990); forced Time Warner to pull rapper Ice-T’s “Cop Killer” from store shelves worldwide (1992); and received ACLU’s “Top Ten Censors of the Year Award” (1992).
Recently, Thompson has represented parents of three girls shot at a school in Paducah, Ky., by a 14-year-old video gamer. He also got shock jock Howard Stern kicked off all Clear Channel radio stations and Clear Channel fined $495,000 for illegal indecent broadcasts. He also successfully predicted a “Columbine-type” incident on national television one week before it occurred, and he also predicted that the DC Beltway Sniper triggerman would be “trained on a sniper video game.”
A frequent speaker on college campuses, Thompson lives with his family in south Florida where he is a lay leader in his Presbyterian church.