I’ve seen details at various sites, but basically a Chinese student had designed an Unreal Tournament level of his high school 2 years ago, and a parent of another student found out about it and complained after the VT shootings. The school immediately expelled him, labelling him a “terroristic threat”. He was arrested, and police searched his home. They confiscated a hammer (which had been left on his floor after he fixed his bed with it) as a “weapon”. He now has to enroll in an alternative school, and may not graduate next month.
I hate stories like this where they only interview a bunch of high school students or other assorted dipshits. High school students should never be interviewed for a story with more gravity than prom night.
I have a hard describing how bone-deep stupid this is.
Dear Mary Ann Simpson: You are the terrorist. Seriously. The only thing to be scared of here is the consequences of your over-the-top pants-wetting paranoia. He made that level two years ago, if he was secretely a terrorist he would have actually done something by now.
Can you believe they actually gave out maps at my high school to help you find classrooms on your first day? That was before we all knew better. Thank god those days are over.
The sad thing is, a couple people at my school have been wanting to make a Counterstrike level of our campus (they tried to get me to do it, but I’m too lazy and would have to learn something about Counterstrike.) What a strange world…
When you’re learning 3d modelling, one trick is to build representations of things you know. Like, say, a place that you spend 7+ hours a day at for several years.
My high school would’ve made a great CS 1.6 map. I was too lazy to learn the map making skills though. I guess that’s a good thing, in hindsight…although, I probably wouldn’t have shared it with people I know at school.
Shoot, even way back in the days of Doom 2 and Quake, I wanted to build a game map of my high school campus. I’m the last person who’d want to shoot up a school RL; it was just a neat idea to have a recognizable map to play in.
I’m so glad I got out of school when I did. Narrowly missed this era of paranoid psychosis.
I, too, would have loved a map of my first high school. It had (has) a great layout: a circular center with circular commons around it, then more normal halls and classrooms in wings connected to that. I always imagined defending it a-la Red Dawn against invaders.
I also wanted to map my childhood home on the original Doom engine.
If a computerized map is so useful, why didn’t Pirates! on my Commodore 64 lead me to tons of real-life buried treasure?
As a general protest, everyone who is capable of making CS, UT, Doom3, etc. maps of their high schools should do it. Then they can host it on a site:
“SHOOT UP YOUR HIGH SCHOOL IN A COMPUTER GAME NOT IN REAL LIFE BECAUSE YOU ARE NOT INSANE AND UNDERSTAND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN PIXELS AND REAL GOBS OF FLESH CALLED PEOPLE.com”
For fuck’s sake, can the next young mass shooter do it some place other than a school already? And wear rainbow striped tights and shitloads of make-up? Imagine zero-tolerance on facial cosmetics at all shopping malls. Heads will explode!
I always wanted to do exactly this as a Doom map, but I was never a good enough mapper to do it (plus our school had more than 2.5 dimensions, unfortunately).
I guess I dodged a bullet on that one.
Geez. I wish stories like this had a little button you could push that would allow you to contact the administrators involved so that you could tell them how painfully stupid and embarrassing they are to the human race.
So what do you think if Acme Game Company designed a first person shooter as a simulation of a school shooting at a fictional campus? The object is to kill as many students and teachers as possible. Is it protected by free speech?
The argument here isn’t that the student did or did not have a right – it may be, but that’s not the argument I see being made. IMHO the argument we’ve been making is that what he did is demonstrably not terrorism.