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.

There’s a fas­cin­at­ing post over at Terra Nova today, pos­it­ing that reli­gions might qual­ify as vir­tual worlds. It raises some inter­est­ing points, and is cer­tainly thought pro­vok­ing, but I don’t think I’m quite convinced.

Cer­tainly, there are sim­il­ar­it­ies, but I think it’s a bit of a stretch to say that because two things tap into the same human desire for easy suc­cess accord­ing to clearly defined rules of pro­gress, that they must be the same kind of thing. Even if we allow that a reli­gion is false, and thus has a “fic­tional his­tory” and attend­ant cast of fic­tional char­ac­ters, and that it offers a sense of achieve­ment and reward for oth­er­wise mean­ing­less actions, it still lacks what is, in my mind, the fun­da­mental defin­ing char­ac­ter­istic of a vir­tual world, which is, well, a vir­tual world.

believ­ers do not inhabit, or have access to, some other vir­tual realm, reserved for people of faith. They oper­ate entirely within the same world as the rest of us. They may inter­pret that world dif­fer­ently, even incor­rectly, but if you argue that being wrong is the same as being in a vir­tual world, then we have to describe every­one as being in one at all times.

Emphasis mine:

pos­sibly the best rpg this year on PC, 25 Jul 2007 By P. Mil­ner — See all my reviews

Fun: 4/​5

From what ive seen and read about this game it has the poten­tial to be great!!! it has loads of depth and the graph­ics are truly great, a good RPG needs to have a great story and game­play to be great and this looks like it has both over 60 hours of game­play like the days of Final Fantasy 7.

3 dif­fer­ent end­ings which you have con­trol over on your actions in the game.…. RPG fans this is a must!!

im really look­ing for­ward to this and will be count­ing the days!!! i gave this 4 stars because i never give 5 unless ive played and liked it.

Here’s a thought: how about you don’t review it or rate it at all unless you’ve played it? Do you even know what “review” means? Mup­pet.

Oh, it’s a review of The Witcher, by the way.

I hon­estly have no idea what to make of this.

Appar­ently, in Res­ist­ance: Fall of Man, one of the levels involves a gun battle in the Cathed­ral of Manchester, and the Church of Eng­land, upon noti­cing this, has vocally objec­ted.

“Fair enough, “you might think, “it’s their Church, and a like­ness of it has been used without per­mis­sion.” What I’m not happy about is the Thompson–esque nature of their argument:

It is well known that Manchester has a gun crime problem.

For a global man­u­fac­turer to re-​​create one of our great cathed­rals with photo-​​realistic qual­ity and then encour­age people to have guns battles in the build­ing is bey­ond belief and highly irresponsible.

Quite aside from the dubi­ous nature of their claim that play­ing games in which you have gun battles encour­ages you to do the same thing in real life, this raises a more troub­ling ques­tion. If Manchester has a gun-​​crime prob­lem that can be exacer­bated by Res­ist­ance, do they also have the asso­ci­ated alien inva­sion prob­lem? And why haven’t I heard about it?