Dr. Phil filming segment about videogame violence

TV personality Dr. Phil McGraw McGraw (yes, that is his last name) will soon be taping an episode about violence in videogames. Although the news that questionably helpful product of Opra will be educating fans about violence in videogames is scary enough, GamePolitics may have received a comment from anti-game attorney Jack Thompson indicating he was invited to be a guest on the show.

*shudder*

Thompson’s alleged comments on the site:

Dr. Phil’s people called me last week, and at that point they were going to take the show in the direction of video game violence. They indicated they wanted me on the show. I got a call yesterday, and they decided to take the show in a different direction, with the focus on role-playing game addiction. They have a girl who has that problem.

Alleged since, as with many sites where you can post comments, it’s never really certain that is the actual person or someone with a crafty username.

The problem with case studies is that one person does not an epidemic make. Find a single heart-wrenching story that will appeal to mindless Oprah addicts and it may mean a pile of smoldering videogames in your local religious facility’s parking lot. (Of course there is a toxic fumes issue there but you cannot kill brain cells that don’t exist).

Here are Dr. Phil’s comments on an episode of The Larry King Show:

…the problem is we are programming these people as a society. You cannot tell me – common sense tells you that if these kids are playing video games, where they’re on a mass killing spree in a video game, it’s glamorized on the big screen, it’s become part of the fiber of our society. You take that and mix it with a psychopath, a sociopath or someone suffering from mental illness and add in a dose of rage, the suggestibility is too high.

And we’re going to have to start dealing with that. We’re going to have to start addressing those issues and recognizing that the mass murders of tomorrow are the children of today that are being programmed with this massive violence overdose.

I’m not much older than the first videogame systems, but weren’t mass murders occurring before videogames? Maybe it was all that farming with sharp tools that made them go kill crazy.

Besides, common sense is not always correct. I seem to recall around the time (1978) the first Superman movie was released a couple kids getting really whacked on drugs and jumping off of buildings because they though they could fly. Naturally, it made national news, the movie was blamed and there was a bit of outrage. That certainly did not kill the movie franchise, comic books or games based on the fictional flying hero.

Likewise, Dr. “Quickdraw” Phil McGraw will certainly not kill videogames.

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