Have any of you been following the recent Jack Thompson drama online? If you haven?t, he?s a major voice in the belief that video games are a dangerous influence on children. In the last week or two, he?s been contacting various people in the gaming community and essentially sending them immaturely worded cease and desist emails.

The problem is that none of the threatened web sites are reporting anything remotely slanderous; they seem to just be reporting facts. This reminds me of when Infinium Labs, the marketers of the Phantom Game Console, sued Hard OCP for publishing a background check of their company. Luckily Hard OCP won the suit.

The most notable aspect of these two online dramas is that attacking internet communities, notably the gaming community, brings you massive amounts of negative press. So much so, that the victimised community looks in the right, no matter how legitimate your complaint. The attacked party becomes the defiant hero, a rebel against “the man”. Just look at the Linux vs Microsoft struggle.

If I wanted to market a video game, I would create an alias, a pseudonym even, to publicly attack my company and my game. I’d throw around a lot of right wing expressions like ?family values?. Every one loves to hate the right wing these days, especially socially repressed young thinkers like the game community. I bet this sort of publicity would double the sales of any game that could take advantage…hmm