Public Response to Jack Thompson's Statements Regarding Computer Game Content

This petition has been created in response to the allegations made by a United States attorney, Jack Thompson, regarding his continued, unprovoked and seemingly insatiable desire to see the world reduced to the stage where the issue of sexuality is taken back to a taboo state. Most specifically, the area of computer games, where after taking the creator of Grand Theft Auto, San Andreas to court over the appearance of the seemingly incomprehensible "female mammary glands" in a blurred out form, is now lashing out at the Electronic Art's creation "Sims 2" for violating moral boundaries. Well. The moral boundaries set by himself at the very least.

The labeling of a game as a "paedophile's paradise" is disgraceful. To even comprehend that a respectful gaming company of many fine titles would create a game that would cater to paedophiles is an utter disgrace.

To quote a recent Gamespot.com article...

"Thompson's new conclusion: EA is "cooperating, gleefully, with the mod community to turn Sims 2 into a porn offering."

What gives you the right to slander a party in such a way? To state that you are doing all that you are doing in order to preserve the obviously pure, unscarred and innocent minds of the youth of today is laughable at best. Your responses to THIRD PARTY modifications, which can be downloaded OPTIONALLY from websites NOT AFFILIATED with Electronic Arts, is obviously flawed in logic, and therefore will not longer be tolerated by those from the gaming community who feel your puritanical views are not syncronised with contemporary societal values.

The statement, Cooperating, gleefully, with the mod community to turn Sims 2 into a porn-offering. It is doubtful that Mister Thompson is aware that most video game companies are not aware of third-party modifications are almost never made with the consent of a games original manufacturer. While the video game companies are usually aware of such modifications, they are themselves restricted by tricky legal loop-holes, which prevent them from eliminating such modifications due to the fact that the modifications are often just outside copyright violations. As an aside, the fact that this so called tasteless nudity is in video games, which compared to the copious amounts of it found in movies, television, and pornography itself, has over shadowed the latter forms of media is a farce. By comparative standards, video games are squeaky clean. Sex is a prevalent part of society. Children will discover it one way or another, be it the wrong way, such as movies, video games, or looking in Dads underwear drawer, or the so-called right-way in a school Health class.

Furthermore, by placing blame on the Video Game Industry, and more specifically, on individual companies, parents seem to forget that it is their job to control what their children do and do not see.

By placing blame on the industry, you are relegating your role as a parent to lawyers who do not care to see the whole picture, but only the negatives. Due to the fact that mature content is a factor in today's games, it should give all the more reason for parents to actually look past the rating of a game and into its content.

Our requests are quite simple:

1) That Jack Thompson apologise for the words that he has maliciously thrown at respectable gaming companies, for they are slanderous and without logic

2) That Jack Thompson go out into the real world for a day and realise that it is no longer the 1600s.

Your time on the soapbox is at an end.