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Student Arrested for Making Videogame Map of School - tanman writes "A student at the Houston-area Clements High School was arrested, sent to an "Alternative Education Center" and banned from graduation after school officials found he created a video game map of his school. School district police arrested the teen and searched his home where they confiscated a hammer as a 'potential weapon'. ' "They decided he was a terroristic threat," said one source close to the district's investigation.' With an upcoming May 12 school board election, this issue has quickly become political, with school board members involved in the appeal accusing each other of pandering to the Chinese community in an attempt to gain votes."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I have a hard time expressing myself here, there's a lot of inarticulate rage involved due to past baggage that has nothing to do with video games. So, while I close my eyes and think of England for a moment, why don't you read the article.

Here's the crux: A kid built a quake map of his high school and he was called a terrorist and denied education for his trouble.

There is nothing I despise more than people who are willing to sacrifice someone else's chances for a good education. To do it because he made a game map only adds insult to injury, here. It's not a crime to make a map of a public place, is it? My Thomas guide and Google maps tell that's crazy talk.

Did he make models of helpless students, using their real images? Did he set up the map as a massacre? NO. He set the map up for a competitive game, played by millions of perfectly well adjusted individuals, worldwide. He did NOTHING wrong. The school and the police, on the other hand? Well...

As near as I can tell they violated his 1st amendment rights and potentially his 4th amendment rights, as well... and that's just at the federal level. Don't you people get it? You can't act out against game players - they aren't different, they aren't crazy... they're you. 8 million people play World of Warcraft. Millions more play console games and other PC games. If you're between 25 and 45 chances are that more than half of your friends have played games... if they aren't actively playing now (most of them are).

*sigh* You know what, I'm not going to rant - anyone who will listen already agrees, so it's just a waste of time. Instead, I'm going to ask one question:

What does it take for you people to see how ridiculous this is, gamers getting marched off to "showers?"

I feel sorry for this kid, the fact that they yanked him out of school could ruin his future plans, and for what? Nothing. Nothing at all.

When I was in middle school, I was considered something of a troubled child - exceptionally brilliant, but incredibly anti-authoritarian. It wasn't that far from the truth, I suppose - but it wasn't so much that I was against the establishment as it was that I always questioned decisions that seemed to be made in the absence of logic - something I still do to this very day. Anyway, in 7th grade, the top academic performers in the school were given the opportunity to take the PSAT early. I wanted in (yeah, I was a nerd back then, I got better), after all I knew where I stood in the "academics" leader board. It was my right... but I wasn't invited. So I questioned that decision. I got my parents involved and I rose a stink... eventually they let me do it... and were rewarded with some press and increased funding for academic programs as a result of my scoring in the top 1 percentile of the nation, despite taking the thing so early.

No, I'm not bragging (trust me, that was a painfully embarrassing period of my life), I'm pointing something out: I wasn't given the opportunity at first because I questioned their decisions - because I didn't go along with everything they said blindly... But when I fought for the chance and got it, it was the school that benefitted.

Denying your students an education because you don't like what they do in their spare time is ludicrous. Not only do you deny your school the funding you get per child, but you deny the world the benefit of that child's unscarred psyche - his unfettered mentality. Do you really think he'll get over this? For all you people know you just BRED yourselves a school shooter.

The next time that child goes to do something creative, he's going to stop and think "Am I going to go to jail for this? Am I going to lose my chance to get into a good school?" Maybe, just maybe, he won't do anything creative at all. He could have been the next Shakespeare, or the next Da Vinci, but now we might never know.

That's your fault - you who are afraid of video games and willing to corrupt people's lives to assuage that fear. I shudder to think of the world after you're done with it.

Won't you, just once, think of the children?

Sadly, for all you pro-game crusaders, this is not a video gaming issue. I know you feel like it is, I did too, but it goes deeper than that. This is a "why are you afraid of your own children?" issue. This is about a culture that is willing to sacrifice everything for the comfort of knowing they're "safe." This is about sacrificing what it is that makes us American in exchange for a lie, because there's only way to be truly safe... and that's to be dead. Nothing else on this Earth can happen to you after that, right?

This is about breeding a gray nation of children so afraid to express themselves that they internalize until they have no other emotional outlet save explosive and/or violent outburst. This is about lowering the collective education level of the nation so that the bright - but nonconformist - students can be shuffled out of sight, too far from your children to affect them. This about stifling innovation by stifling the innovators, nipping the chance for invention in the bud, killing artists before they can burn for their art. This is about snuffing out the spark of brilliance in your children before it can build into a flame. This is about the new form of prejudice in America today - Ideological exclusion. This is about everything you railed against in the 60s and have turned your back on, now.

I know people who were kicked out of school and forced to turn to continuation schools or GEDs to continue their education. These people then had to spend extra time and effort taking classes at community colleges covering topics they already knew, because no university in the world wants a GED or continuation school candidate. Why were they kicked out of school? In two cases where this is true, they were kicked out over nothing. Worse than nothing - they were kicked out for trying to continue their education.

That's right - One of them was kicked out for transporting a paring knife (a 2" inch blade) to his cooking class (A school district accredited class, of which the knife was mandated materials), the other for attending a computer trade show as part of his senior project at a technical high school (a project required to graduate, that could not have been completed without attending said trade show). Neither one did anything wrong, but one was tossed for essentially being a terrorist (He might have killed someone with that 2" cardboard wrapped, unopened blade!), the other for being a truant (despite having permissions signed by his parents and the school knowing ahead of time).

Whew, thank god those two dangerous malcontents were removed from the environment your kids are in, right? Who knows, they might have taught your children the joys and arts of cooking or god forbid - the power of using the internet to educate yourself. Oh, did I mention that the writing of one of those two is used now, to this day, as an example of excellent writing to students all over California? Yeah. Dangerous punks. Good thing we got rid of them.

Though, it's sort of funny I suppose; both of them became video game designers in the years to follow. Turns out that this is a video game issue, no matter how you look at it. On the one hand, we’ve got a culture that ruins people because of an irrational fear/prejudice against video games. On the other, you’ve got that very same culture pushing people to video games by acting on their irrational prejudices against the bright, but iconoclastic.

In other words, you have an answer as to why people strike out at games: Games are a haven to the people the mainstream culture already fear and hate – bright people who think for themselves and form their own conclusions. You know the type I’m talking about. The real dangerous ones… like writers, artists and scientists.

- Snipehunter
"In Oceania at the present day, Science, in the old sense, has almost ceased to exist. In Newspeak there is no word for 'Science.' The empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc."
- George Orwell, 1984, Book 1, Chapter 9

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