Jack Thompson...

If there is a general trend that I see with fallacies it is that they are mostly caused by people that think they know more than they actually do. Whether it is due to lack of knowledge or just wrong knowledge in general, people that commit fallacies never have a complete understanding of the topic, and what could be a better example of this than a sixty-year-old man from Ohio trying to talk about video games. I don't really like Jack Thompson so I'm gonna really enjoy tearing him appart right in the fallacies.

First of all, everything that Thompson says pretty much has false comparison written all over it. Shooting in a video game and shooting in real life might be somewhat similar but that doesn't mean that they are the same. This comparison is actually pretty ridiculous. Thompson is basically comparing shooting in real life with moving a dot around on a screen and occasionally pressing buttons. One can argue that there is the psychological factor since you are shooting people in both scenarios but that is still the same type of fallacy. Those things on the screen might look like people but they aren't people. They are simply a bunch of pixels and polygons put together in order to look human. You can't possibly compare this to a living, breathing human made of flesh and bones. However, the fallacies don't stop there.

Jack Thompson also suffers from the use of bad examples. The one that really stood out to me was Doom. Thompson is trying to convince us that this twenty-year-old game in which your only controls are moving forwards, moving backwards, turning, and shooting is teaching young adults how to shoot at people when in the game you spend most of the time shooting at brown and pink demons.

                                         Who needs military training when you have Doom?


These bad examples are what end up luring Thompson in for a third type of fallacy: the fallacy of the complex cause. There are many other reasons behind these kids' behaviors during the shootings. Maybe they learned how to use an actual gun when they were younger? Maybe these kids are insane? I don't know about you but even after playing some Call of Duty, I would still be scared out of my mind by simply thinking of pointing a gun at someone. Of course Jack Thompson, being someone that probably has never held a controller in his hand, wouldn't know this. With this I repeat my initial idea. If you want to avoid fallacies, try to have complete knowledge of what you are talking about.