Jan. 17, 2015 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
04:41
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| Tonight on Nightline, The Virtue Vigilante is a Christian conservative lawyer on a crusade against video games he says are evil. | |
| Violent depictions of women being beaten, raped, and run over by cars. | |
| It's not the movies, it's video games. | |
| And now the women calling for change in this multi-billion dollar virtual industry are facing a very real backlash. | |
| And for one man in Florida, it was another sign that American culture is going straight to hell. | |
| Here you're literally stomping somebody into the pavement, and you can stomp them until there's a pool of blood in the street of the person you just killed. | |
| Critics say in these virtual worlds, things often take a turn toward the dark side. | |
| As a player, you can solicit a prostitute, kill her, and if that's not enough, you have the option to run her over. | |
| The sense of violence against women being used as almost background decoration, right? | |
| As texture to make an environment gritty, more real. | |
| The conservative Christian attorney says he is on a mission to protect children from evil. | |
| What is it exactly that's so disturbing in some video games that's making women like Anita willing to face death threats? | |
| Just when you think you hit the worst example or the most misogynist example, you find another one. | |
| When it comes to the company behind some of the most mature titles, he is hardly coy. | |
| I'm out to shut down Rockstar because they're run by a bunch of sociopaths and they're a one-company crime wave. | |
| On her website, Anita dissects these games. | |
| Developers regularly utilize the brutalization of women's bodies, and especially the bodies of female prostitutes. | |
| Her goal to bring attention to what she calls the inherent misogyny in the gaming world. | |
| To him, this is not entertainment. | |
| It is a murder simulator. | |
| You're kicking, punching, ultimately shooting, cutting the heads off of people with machetes of people you don't even know and don't have a motive to be violent against. | |
| I'll teach you! | |
| In Watch Dogs, she points out how women are murdered to give the hero a reason to chase down a bad guy. | |
| You are learning in a virtual reality to be violent, to enjoy being violent, how to kill. | |
| And so you're given an appetite as well as scenarios in which to be violent. | |
| It gets worse and worse. | |
| Reinforces this idea of women as sexual objects, right? | |
| It reinforces this idea of women as playthings for their amusement. | |
| I guess you could say I've rattled some cages and they've rattled me. | |
| They've come after me. | |
| They've repeatedly tried to end my legal career. | |
| Some people have intentionally incited people to kill me, try to threaten to kill me. | |
| I'm constantly aware of the fact that there's an enormous amount of hate directed towards me. | |
| Hate in the form of bomb threats, rape threats, even death threats. | |
| Why such hate? | |
| Why such anger? | |
| I think a lot of it comes from this idea that gaming is a male-dominated space, right? | |
| And that games are for men, by men. | |
| But it's a very misogynist backlash. | |
| We are not meant to be treated with respect. | |
| Somebody call Jack Thompson. | |
| And it makes him an object of scorn in the gaming world. | |
| I'm on the case. | |
| And it's this kind of talk that makes her a target. | |
| And that's when the cyber mob, right, the hate mob descended, bombarding her with mostly anonymous tweets and messages. | |
| Kids who wear I hate Jack Thompson t-shirts can trade blows with his likeness in the game Mortal Kombat. | |
| Someone even created a grotesque game where players can beat and punch a picture of her face. | |
| In a world of make-believe battles, Jack Thompson considers himself a real-life warrior. | |
| How do you respond to critics who say, well, this is fantasy. | |
| This is not reality. | |
| You have to lighten up. | |
| Yeah, that's a fun argument. | |
| How then do you account for the statistics that as the popularity of video games have gone up, violent crime has gone down? | |
| It's not true. | |
| According to the FBI, kids, you know, teenagers arrested for violent crimes fell by half between 94 and 2000. | |
| Games have a huge impact on our society, so it's not just fantasy. | |
| It actually works to potentially reinforce some pretty harmful messages about women. | |
| Game industry lobbyists are quick to point out a total of nine federal courts have rejected so-called studies that video games cause aggression. | |
| They express confidence in the current rating system, as did the parent company of Rockstar Games. | |
| People who blame arts and entertainment for society's ills are always on the wrong side of history, they wrote. |
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