Jack Thompson is disbarred, effective October 30th. The world rejoiced. The world, that is, except former Electronic Software Association president Doug Lowenstein, who yesterday wrote a letter to Kotaku calling upon the game journalists of the world to cop to their own part in Thompson's fame and notoriety:

The game press had a schizoid relationship with Thompson. He was the person they loved to vilify and the person they could not get enough of. Time and again, the game press — and mainstream press — would ask ESA to engage with, or respond to Thompson's latest excess. The media knew well that he was a charlatan who wholly lacked credibility. But hey, they said, he was news and could not be ignored. That was a cop out. It gave Thompson a platform he might not have had for as long as he did.

Dennis McCauley over at GamePolitics has just one word for that idea:

Bull.

In a lengthy article responding to Lowenstein's letter, McCauley argues that the line of causality is not so distinct. Rather, he contends that Lowenstein himself exacerbated the situation:

Doug is no stranger to Thompson's tirades. During his days at the helm of the ESA he was a frequent target of the disgraced attorney's harshest, most outrageous vitriol.

But, by refusing to respond, Doug dropped the ball. Thompson, finding no resistance from the top of the video game industry, was empowered to push harder. In retrospect, it's important to understand that bullying is the essence of Thompson's strategy. In fact, one of the tips he offers in his forgettable 2005 book, Out of Harm's Way, is "be mean." And, since caveman days, bullies have pushed and pushed until someone got up the nerve to push back.

Doug never pushed back.

Instead, Lowenstein's ESA operated in a sort of la-la land in which Jack Thompson did not exist. As a journalist, I soon learned not to waste my time asking the ESA to comment on anything Thompson said or did because, ostrich-like, they pretended that there was no Jack Thompson.

McCauley took severe umbrage with the idea that honest games journalism was doing it simply for the draw.

Was there a price to pay for GP's coverage? Yes. Without going into detail, Thompson threatened me with lawsuits on an almost continual basis. Now, you might call that bluster, but that's easy to say when you're not the one being threatened. He actually did add my name to one of his million dollar lawsuits until a federal judge ruled that he couldn't. But he didn't stop there. He vilified me to the newspaper that I write for and to the company that formerly hosted GamePolitics. He reported me to the FBI at least a half-dozen times. For a guy with a mortgage and kids and (back then) a day job, this was quite stressful. Frankly, I'm incensed at Doug Lowenstein's implication that GP did it for the traffic.

Read the rest of GP's response at the link below.

GamePolitics: Former ESA Boss Couldn't Be More Wrong about Jack Thompson Coverage

Llama Food For Thought!

Smaller news and articles of trouble and posturing in game land.

• VentureBeat: Game PR fails to disclose ownership of game review site. Takahashi takes an apologist stance, but the reader should draw his or her own conclusions.
• Grand Text Auto: E-Lit Dead, Film at 11. Let's revive that sucker!
• GameSetWatch:Tell Me What Art Is, and I Will Tell You What Games Are (Opinion). Someone please mail this to Roger Ebert already.

Here's a llama, there's a llama, and another little llama...

That's it for this edition of Drama Llama! Please don't preempt me again, staff writers.