Take THAT, bitch.

[Clodfobble]

I understand some of you don't follow the gaming world and its little self-contained dramas as closely as I do, but a truly beautiful turn of events has occurred that everyone needs to know about.

See there's this high-publicity lawyer, Jack Thompson, whose main crusade is that video games make people violent, and he has almost completely limited himself to the litigation genre of suing game makers when angsty teens go out and murder people. Recently, he issued an "open challenge" to the game industry, that if anyone had the balls to make a game he had designed, he would give $10,000 to charity.

The "game" he designed involves a father whose son has been killed by a videogame-inspired teen, and now the father is out for revenge. The object of the game involves, among other things, killing, maiming, and "bludgeoning" game programmers, artists, game console executives, and Electronics Boutique and Gamestop employees. You get the idea. The assumption I guess being that we would be too afraid to make a game about killing videogame makers because in our hearts we know that then all the little zombies out there would start to aim at us. At the end of his challenge he says, "How about it, video game industry? I've got the check and you've got the tech. It's all a fantasy, right? No harm can come from such a game, right? Go ahead, video game moguls. Target yourselves as you target others. I dare you."

So, as might be expected from a group of people who A.) knows Jack Thompson's entire premise to be blatantly false, and B.) loves a good dare, within a few days a group of guys finished a pretty in-depth Half-Life mod out of his scenario. They included everything he demanded. All of a sudden, Jack Thompson renegged on his offer of $10,000 to charity, and began backpedaling about how clearly the whole thing was satire from the beginning.

So the Penny Arcade guys, who had been conversing back and forth with this guy since his ridiculous little stunt, decided to go ahead and donate the $10,000 for him. In his name. To a charity called the Entertainment Software Association --which is, you guessed it, created and run by game industry folks to raise money for various child-focused charity programs.

Booyah.