Written by John Scalzo  on April 24, 2007

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Peter Hartlaub of the San Francisco Chronicle has laced into Jack Thompson today for his continued assertion that video games had something to do with last week's Virginia Tech shooting. This comes on the heels of a similar article that appeared on MSNBC's website.

In a letter to Mr. Hartlaub (and copied to Gaming Target), Thompson continues to bluster on about how "science" proves his claims. Here are a few choice quotes from the letter along with the actual truth:

The New York Times reported Sunday that Cho's parents desperately wanted him to get out of the video games. What are the chances Cho, with no parental supervision did? Slim to none, and Slim just left town.

Did Thompson just paraphrase the great Bruce Campbell from Army of Darkness? Probably not, but the fact remains The New York Times only mentioned Cho's high school game playing in passing: "[H]is parents drove him to school with guarded expectations. Perhaps he would no longer retreat to video games and playing basketball alone the way he did at home."

That's it, no mention of desperation and no mention of "getting out" of anything.

you apparently are not aware of the demonstrated, known long term effects of these violent games. The research on that has been done at University of Michigan. You might want to check it out.

Just to satisfy my curiosity, I did. The study is a reaction test that took 39 male undergrads and gauged their brain waves after showing them violent images. The study showed that students who played violent games had less of a reaction to the violent images. A followup test asked participants to blast an opponent with sound and the subjects who played violent games were "more likely [...] to behave aggressively in the reaction time task by blasting their "partner" with loud, unpleasant noise."

No actual game playing took place during the study and other forms of media (horror movies for example, another favorite of undergraduate males) were ignored.

More telling is another recent study by the University of Michigan, performed by the same researcher, Brad Bushman. Researchers performed another "blast test", this time after having students read a violent passage from the Bible. The results of the study showed that religious students were more likely to act aggressively in the blast test after reading the violent Biblical passage.

Bushman concluded, "Even among our participants who were not religiously devout, exposure to God-sanctioned violence increased subsequent aggression. That the effect was found in such a sample may attest to the insidious power of exposure to literary scriptural violence."

He would go on to say "[T]his does not mean that reading the scriptures leads to aggression."

So if violent games lead to desensitization to violent and violent Biblical imagery leads to exactly the same conclusion, we can only conclude that religion is the problem. Or, we can agree that maybe both studies need to be looked at closer before they're labeled as "proof" that video games cause anything.

Finally, Mr. Thompson states that he believes Cho's roommates were wrong when they said he wasn't playing video games at his computer. Thompson angrily blasted them, saying how could they possibly know what was going on his head? From the letter:

"[H]ow fascinating that "suitemates" who did not share Cho's study and computer room with him now seem to know everything he was doing when in fact they had no earthly idea what this guy was into. He had two guns. Did they know that? He was into hookers? Did they know that? He was a stalker. Did they know that? He was setting fires. Did they know that? He was adjudicated nuts. Did they know that?

They didn't know any of that, and yet here you are telling us that they knew he was just into poetry on his computer. Amazing.

While the roommates may not know the inner workings of Cho's head (and no doubt, did not want to), the facts show that Cho was no longer a gamer during his college career. The search warrant released by the Virginia State Police prove that no video games were confiscated from Cho's room.

I also could not find any news article claiming Cho visited prostitutes as Thompson claims.

That looks like three strikes and that means Jack Thompson's totally unfounded theories are out.