Needless to say, the Hot Coffee incident has now gotten everyone to pitch in their two cents. It’s impossible to link them all, so I’ll just link the good ones I’ve found.

Ron Gilbert points out a Game Revolution article that discusses the overall trends in violence and teen violence. He mentions the same data that I off-handedly mentioned earlier (that teen violence has been steadily decreasing since 1993 and is at it’s lowest point ever), but sorts through it more carefully, and provides helpful charts to illustrate it. Money quote:

If I may quote directly from the D.O.J. report, “Recently, the offending rates for 14-17 year-olds reached the lowest levels ever recorded.” In other words, the Playstation era has, in fact, produced the most non-violent kids ever

Johnny Pi over at Design Synthesis really has his dander up, with four different posts on the topic in the last two days. The best article discusses the truth about the research that Jack Thompson cites when attacking the industry. Not surprisingly, Jack is fond of taking quotes out of context, using them to suggest that the research came to the opposite conclusions that it actually did.

The second good one challenges some of the assertions on Jack Thompson’s website, Stopkill.com, focusing on an amusing assertion from Jack. Here’s the snippet from StopKill:

A recent Gallup Poll found that any American teen who has played this one game is twice as likely to be engaged in an act of violence than those who have not played this one game.

Because we all know that Gallup Polls specialize in establishing a causal effect in a very nebulous area of media impact research! I’m sure the man on the street is the perfect guy to ask! (Needless to say, Gallup’s findings are merely grossly misrepresented by Jack Thompson).

Josh over at CathodeTan continues to bang the drumbeat about what he percieves as the largest lurking issue: whether this episode will result in the sunset of open-architecture games built with modding in mind. He largely quotes this Wired article on just that topic. I’ll go ahead and say it: Rockstar attempted to sell the mod community up the river, and it was truly classless of them (as was almost every aspect of how they handled it). Losing player mods of popular games would, as I’ve argued previously, greatly stifle innovation in the industry.

Josh also asks, “Why all the Rockstar hate?”

Politicians and lawyers just succeeded in getting a major video game title pulled from the world’s biggest retail giant, and lots of major voices in the industry respond … “good riddance”? Harsh.

It’s quite simple, really. Games enjoying first amendment protection and non-government oversight depends on the ESRB being seen as effective. Rockstar attempted to sidestep the ESRB, and greatly weakened the industry as a result.