Dr. Phil is a good friend of mine. He’s full of nonsensical hillbilly analogies and great advice on how not to beat my wife. But for Terry, a gamer on Microsoft’s Xbox Live service, Dr. Phil has “valuable” advice on dealing with racist cyber-bullies.

Terry explains, that as a black gamer on Xbox Live, he endures heaps of racist verbal abuse, and on Tuesday’s show, Dr. Phil filled Terry with joyous psychobabble and helped heal his wounded gamer heart.

Terry admits to being a loyal 360 owner, but questions how long he can go on now that his headset is full of racism. He claims to have been called “monkey” on several occasions and was even told he was going to be lynched.

As a father of three, Terry fears for the safety of his family. He no longer allows his children to play online for fear they will also be harassed or threatened.

So what’s a guy to do? Well, he submits several complaints about the offenders, as well as calls customer support to report them. I wonder if “I’m being verbally threatened” is a phrase Xbox cool dude Max understands.

Apparently, Microsoft didn’t do anything, or at least not enough to satisfy Terry. The next logical step, obviously, is to call up Dr. Phil. I don’t mean to make light of his troubles, as I surely do not condone this type of behavior, but seriously, anyone who has played on Xbox Live has probably heard the n-word multiple times.

While it certainly is offensive, I don’t think anyone out there is actively hunting people through Xbox Live in order to find out where they live and attack them. Most people who use racial slurs on Live are idiot kids who think it’s cool because, well — they’re idiot kids. Going on Dr. Phil’s show just gives Terry’s favorite pastime an even worse reputation than it deserves.

Xbox Live has a system in place to block, report, and avoid users. While I don’t expect that Terry could prevent these things from ever happening again, at least he can get rid of a few bad seeds. In my experience, the system actually works quite well.

Of course I think Microsoft should do something about this, but the guests on Dr. Phil’s show think it crosses a more severe line. Larry Walters, a First Amendment attorney, believes that these online verbal threats are a federal crime and should be investigated by the FBI.

If somebody online is making threats to engage in some sort of violence toward this person or part of his family, that is absolutely a federal crime. The FBI should be all over it, and I’m surprised that they’re not.

If the FBI actually made cases out of all the morons on Xbox Live, or the Internet for that matter, they would be doing so at the detriment of more important issues. Isn’t the FBI doing a horrible enough job already?

Dr. Phil says he contacted Microsoft, who is now willing to make a case for Terry.

We explained to them that you have filed multiple complaints. You have the numbers; you have the tagline of the people who are doing this sort of thing, so Microsoft has said they are going to set up with [you] one of their security team members, and they are going to discuss this investigation regarding your complaints and try to get the ball rolling. So we have gotten them, at least, to assign an investigator specific to you, so they can sit down and start this ball rolling.

Great job, Dr. Phil. You got Microsoft’s security team to say they will think about doing their jobs. I’m sure Terry is very pleased to hear that.

You can go read the transcript from the show at Dr. Phil’s website, or just travel back in time and watch the show yourself.

The recent story we reported about the kids supposedly using Mortal Kombat moves to kill a seven year old girl has got me thinking: How do people go about linking videogames to real-world violence?

I read today about a woman picked up for stealing videogame merchandise from a Wal-Mart in Cocoa, Florida. The article also mentions that the 23-year-old woman was previously in trouble with the law for neglecting her son to the point where he wandered off and was found dead in a ditch.

Obviously the woman was charged with manslaughter on top of the neglect, but the case was thrown out of court due to “insufficient evidence”.

So here we have one individual that was involved in two totally unrelated crimes spaced almost four years apart. How easy would it be to associate one behavior with the other?

People like Jack Thompson and Dr. Phil love to search the history of people involved in violent acts and automatically associate their videogame activities with their real-world actions.

Exhibit C: Douchebag

It is my opinion that the aforementioned “Mortal Kombat” killers are associated with the videogames for three reasons:

1. They’re young. Thirty years ago it would have been Black Sabbath instead of Mortal Kombat.

2. The young man used videogames as his alibi, stating he wasn’t involved.

3. Money. The gaming industry is larger than Hollywood, and lawyers want a piece of that pie.

At this point in my life, I’ve read significantly more stories about violent crimes not associated with anything than I have about violence associated with rap music, heavy metal, videogames, or cartoons.

The bottom line is that I do think videogames can be “inspirational” for deeply disturbed people to do deeply disturbed things. Violent people are naturally drawn to violence, even if it’s only digital.

I also submit to the idea that videogames increase aggression, but no more so than any other competitive activity like football or even bowling, and it’s not a permanent effect.

A Fine Example of Pleasant Conversation

A normal kid is not going to kill his parents because he spent 8 hours straight pushing buttons on a controller. If anything, I think it’s quite the opposite.

I personally find videogames to be therapeutic. Whenever I may get the urge to kill people, I can take out that aggression on digital characters without the real-world consequences of guilt, jail time, physical harm to myself, or blood on my new pants.

If someone happens to do something violent and happens to also play videogames, that does NOT mean that videogames actually cause any violence.

This is a clear case of simple stereotyping, and we all know that’s a no-no. So I say to all you stereotypers out there: stop being dicks, or I will kill you.