GamePol­it­ics is report­ing that Jack Thompson is back in the legal fir­ing line, this time for spam­ming one of his sup­port­ers — the Pres­id­ent of the Utah State Sen­ate, Michael Wad­doups — with “offens­ive” images from GTA4. Need­less to say, Mr Wad­doups is no longer quite so sup­port­ive of Mr Thompson and not only has he vowed not to sup­port his anti-​​game legis­la­tion again, he’s attempt­ing to have him sued for mis­use of email.

This sort of thing really makes Jacko no friends, and it’s tempt­ing to think that he’s just a mad old fool who doesn’t real­ise he’s fast run­ning out of them. My take on it is some­what dif­fer­ent though; if you actu­ally look at how the man acts it’s clear that he’s not actu­ally inter­ested in mak­ing friends, or advan­cing his cause, or even in mak­ing money. What he craves is atten­tion. It’s that simple; he wants people to notice him, and he’s real­ised the best way to man­age that is to piss them off. He’s basic­ally a troll, except that instead of hanging around on anonym­ous mes­sage boards annoy­ing Star Trek fans, he’s quite suc­cess­fully trolled the entire com­puter game industry, the US legal sys­tem and is mov­ing on to their gov­ern­ment. Ladies and gen­tle­men, I put it to you that Jack Thompson is not an idiot at all; he’s the most suc­cess­ful troll the world has ever seen.

You have to respect him for that.