Jack Thompson, Miami Attorney at Law and self-appointed videogames watchdog, has received a lot of flak from the videogaming fraternity of late - flak which he has not been averse to returning - for his stances on violent and sexually explicit videogames, and the manner in which he sometimes puts across his message. Anyone who will listen has been hearing about the man since the summer of 2005, when he jumped on Grand Theft Auto makers Rockstar over the third-party mod "Hot Coffee" for GTA San Andreas. The mod unlocked some (rather amusing) sexually explicit scenes in the game, which was then rated M for Mature (17+ in the United States.) The establishment got in an uproar, the game got an Adults Only rating in the US, and thus began the toughest year in modern videogaming.

Regulars here will know all this, as I covered the row a while back. Since the summer, Jack T has become a pariah for videogamers, and any sentence from a gamer containing his name usually includes a lot of vitriol. Rather more disturbingly, the videogaming press has also been railing in his general direction, without even bothering to ring the guy up and ask what's behind the strongly worded press releases.

Since those in glass houses shouldn't really throw stones, I've been less than impressed at much that I've seen from my peers on the videogaming side of the fence - a side I was almost exclusively on myself during the summer, when I was working for The Inquirer. Journalists are supposed to intelligently research something, craft a view of a story and then submit it to the public at large. The readers can then draw their own opinions, which are usually in some way informed by what the journalists write. Instead, the gaming press has, for the most part, simply joined in on a self-appreciating orgy of harsh criticism, feeding off one another and feeling rather good for slamming "that bastard Thompson" whenever he passes comment.

"Well, I guess this means I must be doing something right" said Jack Thompson about this t-shirt

Make no mistake: Jack Thompson can be a piece of work when he likes to be, and is not above fighting dirty himself, using some rather questionable methods. But journalists are meant to hunt the news, and the news in this case rarely has anything to do with the man behind it. The gaming press has been concentrating on the man, with the issues he raises as a sidebar, rather than the other way around.

Excuse a little self-appreciation here, but I think I'm one of the few members of my fraternity who has actually bothered to take the telephone number at the end of the guy's emails and apply a bit of intelligence to it. I didn't like the way in which the man was putting across his opinions, and I'd read a lot of bad things about him, but I figured what the hell, it's not like if I ring him I'll lose more than a few cents on Skype.

Turns out the chap is quite human. After an in-depth, half-hour phone conversation I still disagreed with many of Thompson's positions, but we came to agreement on the big issue: a videogame rating system for the USA that actually works. The current system is somewhat crazy, specifying only a year between a "Mature" videogame (17+) and an "Adults Only" one (18+).

Now we could sit here all day and debate whether a 17 year old is any more innocent and impressionable than an 18 year old, but according to US law, after Hot Coffeegate, an 18 year old can go car jacking and watch a bit of sex along the way, but a 17 year old can only do the car jacking bit.

Thompson may or may not want all videogames exterminated from the face of the planet, but he's a realist, and what we both agreed on is that the ratings system in the US is just plain stupid. Over on my side of the pond, Hot Coffeegate barely made a stir - the ratings are 12+, 15+ and 18+, and that's that. GTA: San Andreas is an 18+ game anyway, so who cares if a pair of tits are showing?

The US needs to wake up and adopt a similar system. Some states already are, but without a blanket federal-level endorsement, one discovers a number of issues. In the UK, an 18+ game will be sold in any outlet that sells videogames. In the US, an 18+ videogame is frowned upon, and many major retailers won't go near them. This is why car jacking with a 17+ rating is so much more advisable from a business point of view than car jacking and sex.

The second thing that Thompson and I agreed on, and this applies to the UK as well as the US, is that enforcement of these ratings needs to be much more stringent in retail outlets. Currently, a young teenager can walk into just about anywhere and buy a mature (17+ in the US, 18+ in Ye Olde World) videogame without anyone behind the till batting an eyelid. Of course that still leaves the problem of online age authentication, but I'm sure some industrious types will solve that one and make themselves a few pence in the process.

There's still a lot of room for myself and Thompson to disagree, but it sure as hell beats everybody just stuffing their fingers in their ears and shouting "LALALALALALA!" The fact that the majority of videogame journalists haven't bothered to do more than jump into a mud-slinging match with Thompson sets back the industry's goal to create a perception among observers that it is a mature entity.

The videogames press as a whole will have to try to recover some of its lost professionalism over the next couple of months. However, I'm sure that there will remain those who would simply prefer to stick to the Counter-Strike like instant gratification of calling the industry's detractors names and posting opinions veiled as news, rather than engaging them and reporting the stories instead.