Despite Jack Thompson's fervent allegations that mass-murderer Cho Seung Hui had "trained to kill" using videogames, reports are now coming in that Thompson's allegations, as most of us gamers thought, are false. We've previously reported on MSNBC's doubts regarding Thompson's campaign. Now, here's a bit more from Bloomberg.com.

Bloomberg's Demian McLean reports that evidence gathered in the past week shows Cho had practiced at local shooting ranges. Gameworld Network notes that this, combined with the revelation that not a single video game was to be had at Cho's dorm room, even after a detailed police search, should be enough to vindicate video games as being involved in the tragedy.

The police findings that he trained in a shooting range before the tragedy, instead of an FPS map, only weakens Thompsons accusations. Following the logic of the overtly concerned, is a new campaign against shooting ranges perhaps needed? Well?

Now that evidence shows that Cho Seung Hui didn't own a single video game at the time of the Tragic shooting, a new article over at MSNBC questions Thompson's fervent accusations. This is in light of his recent interview wherein he responded to IGDA criticism.

The MSNBC article notes that contrary to Thompson's claims of counterstrike being a "killing simulator" for youths, Cho didn't need much skill to shoot as many people as he did. Eye witness accounts indicate that many of the victims were shot at point blank range.

Moreover the article notes that Sternheimer, a sociologist at the University of Southern California and author of the book "Kids These Days: Facts and Fictions About Today's Youth" points out that before this week's Virginia Tech massacre, the most deadly school shooting in history took place at the University of Texas in Austin way back in 1966, before the days of pong.

The article says that nobody realises that since the advent of videogames, violence rates in the US have declined "precipitously." Sternheimer even notes that it is likely that any 23-year-old man living in America has already played a videogame. How many 23-year-old men go out on a killing spree?

The MSNBC article goes on to note this nice gem:

For those who didn't grow up playing video games, the appeal of a game like "Counter-Strike" can be hard to comprehend. It can be difficult to understand that the game promotes communication and team work. It can be hard fathom how players who love to run around gunning down their virtual enemies do not have even the slightest desire to shoot a person in real life.

As a commenter on Digg noted, the truth is that massive multiplayer killing fests are really just slightly more complex and themed versions of cops-and-robbers. An online and engaging visual form of "tag" wherein players "tag" one another in the form of virtual kills, in a world where there are no real consequences. A game of tag in a world where death isn't really malicious or evil, or "desensitising" - death only means waiting for the next play round or respawn.

It is a competitive environment where sportsmanship is still the norm; where it is expected that after all the boasting and chest-thumping is done, the winning party will get up and shake the losing party's hand and say "good game."

It seems that Jack Thompson has said another mouthful about the Virginia Tech Massacre in a recent interview on MSNBC. He has singled out Counterstrike in this specific interview and went on about how it should not have been released to the public. Yup, it's more of the same.

What should interest most people is the fact that Jack Thompson actually called Jason Della Rocca, the executive director of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), an "idiot" and a "jackass". This was because of a statement Della Rocca gave: "It’s so sad. These massacre chasers — they're worse than ambulance chasers — they're waiting for these things to happen so they can jump on their soapbox."

Those are pretty strong words coming from Mr. Thompson who has recently settled with Take-Two Interactive. Check out the full interview and listen in on what Thompson had to say.

  

A recent article posted on MSNBC (via the Washington Post) claims that homebrew communities blend hackers and gamers together in an effort to make the most out of their devices, saying that "Independent programmers are working on ways to listen to Internet radio and wirelessly check e-mail through the handheld Nintendo DS game device. Elsewhere, some jokers figured out how to get a playable version of Doom onto the iPod.". The article says that rip-offs of games such as Lumines, which appeared on the GBA as LumineSweeper when it wasn't released for the GBA, are regular occurrences in the homebrew community basically stating that many homebrew games are illegal.

The article goes on to the PSP, claiming that the PSP homebrew scene was "nearly dead" until the 2.5/2.6 downgrader was released. Obviously this writer, Mike Musgrove, hadn't done his research. Before the downdater was released more and more games were being made available on firmwares 2.0-2.5 with Fanjita's eLoader, and still loads of games and applications were being developed for firmware 1.5. I'm afraid the PSP homebrew scene was far from 'nearly dead', it was growing.

One thing the writer did get correct is this "if any recent game title for the Sony device has generated as much excitement online as this underground developer's announcement, I missed it.". That is correct. I bought my PSP to play games on it, and didn't even think about homebrew until a friend told me about this site about a week after getting my PSP on the UK launch date. And since I've been into homebrew, no UMD game release has really tickled my fancy apart for GTA:Liberty City Stories, which lasted a while.

The writer then moves onto the subject of the up and coming Xbox 360 homebrew/hacking scene which is in it's infancy. "Console makers dislike this sort of tinkering because it opens the door to piracy. The same tricks that make an Xbox more functional to power users are the same tricks that override the controls put into place to keep users from playing illegally copied versions of games."

This is also correct, but when you spend your hard-earned cash on a product, you want to get the most out of it, and this is what the writer seems to have missed out on. I have definitely had my money's worth from my PSP, because of homebrew. If I didn't own a PSP I probably wouldn't be writing this now, and this site wouldn't be as big as it is today. Homebrew helps us to use what we own in a way that the makers of it couldn't even think of. Homebrewers don't make money out of what they do, they do it for the programming experience and to get more out of their consoles. There aren't any big corporations trying to take your cash from you in the homebrew scene, and that's the beauty of it.

In other news, the article seems to have gone missing from the MSNBC website. Why this is, we are not sure, but all I can get is the "page not found" error. Either they have server problems (highly unlikely for MSNBC) or they have removed it. Whatever the issue, they cannot escape Google Cache!

Link: [Original MSNBC article] Page not found error
Link: [Google Cache version]
Link: [Original Washington Post article]