Cheers to Penny Arcade. I know I have sort of a love-hate relationship with them... I visit every Monday/Wednesday/Friday and I love when they do actual funny video game-related strips, and I hate when they spend weeks lost in self-indulgent high school crap that has nothing to do with video games (see: the Cardboard Tube Samurai).
But big cheers for today's events. (And click backwards a few days for the buildup.)
See, the other week that ambulance-chasing anti-social freakshow Jack Thompson issued a challenge to the video game industry. If anyone made a video game detailing a father's vengeance against the video game makers who inspired a young gamer to kill his son, he would donate $10,000 to charity. Apparently, Jack specifically wanted the game to include violent acts taken against game retailers, game publishers, etc. The idea is that no game developer would want to make a game wherein they themselves are the victims, and Jack happily would issue a future press release crowing about hypocrisy and whatnot.
Jack don't know jack.
Because he is so fundamentally unconnected from the pop culture he is trying to shut down, Jack doesn't know that kids these days can make video games like that (:snaps fingers). Several folks did make his game, in scales large and small, most notably one group who created a San Andreas mod. Faced with this info, Jack has now claimed that his challenge was satire and that gamers are too dense to understand irony.
Note that his satire also seems to include the $10,000 for charity.
Asshole.
So Penny Arcade, an online comic strip that has, to date, collected six digits in donations and cash for kids in hospitals around the holidays, today announced that THEY are going to donate $10,000 to charity, in Jack Thompson's name. Tycho included this in his daily posting:
You know what, Jack? We're going to be the men you're not. You said that your insulting, illusory ten thousand dollars would go to the charity of Paul Eibeler's choice. We've got a good guess that he'd direct your nonexistant largesse toward The Entertainment Software Association Foundation, a body that has raised over six point seven million dollars over the last eight years. We've just made the donation you never would, and never meant to. Ten thousand dollars' worth. And we made it in your name.
The links above go to Penny Arcade and Joystiq.com, and both show quoted emails from Jack himself threatening them to remove these articles "or else." This man is truly a grandstanding shitbag of the highest order.
Well done, Gabe and Tycho. I'm sure I'm not the first to mention this, but if you guys hit any fallout from that prick, you will have a world of gamers at your back. This year's Child's Play charity drive will be huge.
