Judge reccommends guilty verdicts for infamous anti-video game advocate

It seems that everyone’s favorite anti-video game pundit/lawyer Jack Thompson has had the judge responsible for his trial release her report.  Within the report, Judge Dava Tunis reccommended 27 guilty charges out of 31 possible ones.   This is according to Ars Technica which heavily quotes www.gamepolitics.com which has apparently been tracking the trial.   In the absence of details, it is hard to say much about this.  However, Jack Thompson has been notorious for some wacky behavior and extensive use of hyperboles.  Apparently he hasn’t changed.   Ars Technica reports that Mr. Thompson has included gay porn and a surreal coloring book, among other things in his 400 additional “…pleadings, letters and missives(including pictorials)…” which Thomopson has sent to the Judge.   As I find more details, I’ll editorialize a little more.  But based upon what I’ve read so far, it seems as if Jack Thompson has been anything but professional during the trial.    Putting every other flaw Mr. Thompson has, it’s telling that in such an important trial, he has, according to reports, acted like anything other than a lawyer or even an adult.   Of course without Mr. Thompson, who will we have to compare the executive of Take Two to the NAZIs?  Heavy on the sarcasm of course.

Bioshock: The Movie? Won’t someone think of the children?

Rumors have been floating around the web about a potential Bioshock movie. Specifically, I read a post on the potential movie on slashdot. Essentially, 2k Games made an agreement with Universal for the rights to the movie. Names have been floated around as to who might direct. But all of that is premature considering how unlikely it is for a movie to be made. For those ignorant of the game, Bioshock is a game made about a crumbling underwater city, founded by a wealthy industrialist in an attempt to establish a utopian, objectivist-based city.
As much as I enjoyed the game itself, I must confess that I was rather dismayed to hear it might be made into a movie. First, the game itself features somewhat complex ideas which, while not necessarily focused specifically on philosophy, are unlikely to be included in a major studio released movie. It’s far more likely that the questions of free will and morality which dominated the game would be stripped down into some simplified caricature. But that’s not what really worries me. The major moral dilemma of the game centers around a group of brainwashed little girls which play host to a parasite that produces Adam. Adam is a substance which allows for a person to alter their genetic structure, which then allows the person to gain “super powers”. The “Little Sisters” as they are called, are protected by large, diving suit clad guardians called Big Daddies. The player must destroy the Big Daddies, at which point they are confronted with a choice. Remove the parasite, causing the girl to die, or “heal” the girl, destroying the parasite but restoring the little girl.
As much as I would love to believe that the people in charge of making this film would utilize such a powerful moral act, I can’t help but believe it will be thrown away. The film studios prefer to traffic in comfortable cliches, not powerful moral questions. Even if the studios were true to material, it’s even more likely that the film would be attacked as being morally reprehensible and rated as NC-17 by the film rating board, thus dooming the movie to a re-edit. It seems that any Bioshock movie would be doomed from the start to be a simplistic, boring movie as a result of our inability as a nation to deal with complex moral issues, especially one as difficult as destroying the life of a child in the interest of one’s own self-preservation. I hope I’m wrong.