School Board Ponders Student's Counter-strike Map of his School
School Board Ponders Student's Counter-strike Map of his School
May 2, 2007
A Texas school board is divided over the case of a student who played Counter-strike using his high school as the backdrop.Meanwhile, the local Chinese community has rallied in support of the boy.
As reported by the Houston Chronicle, the Fort Bend Independent School District could not reach a decision on whether to reinstate the senior, who was transferred to an alternative school.
The case began on the day following the Virginia Tech rampage, when school officials learned that the 17-year-old boy played Counter-strike on his home computer using a map of Clements High as the setting.
Readers may recall that while the Virginia Tech shooting incident was unfolding, anti-game attorney Jack Thompson predicted on national television that the perpetrator would be a Counter-strike player. A day later the Washington Post reported that 23-year-old killer Cho Seung Hui had played Counter-strike in high school. However, the Post subsequently withdrew that portion of its coverage. It is unclear whether those news reports may have elevated specific concerns about Counter-strike in this case.
Local police evaluated the student's PC and determined that no criminal charges were warranted. School officials, however, decided that disciplinary steps were called for. District spokesperson Mary Ann Simpson said:
This goes back to Columbine. Ever since that horrid incident took place schools today have to take every incident that is reported very seriously. And they have to impress upon students how serious this type of thing is. We can't joke about things or take things lightly anymore.
School Board member Stan Magee, however, believes district officials were too harsh in their discipline:
I think we overreacted as a result of the Virginia Tech ordeal. He did it at his house. Never took anything to school. Never wrote an ugly letter, never said anything strange to a student or a teacher, nothing.
Trustee Ken Bryant agreed that local police needed to be involved but also felt that school officials overreacted:
I don't want to fault our police for trying to protect us. But once the evidence was found and looked at, I see no compelling reason why this child should not have been sent back to his original campus.
According to Fort Bend Now, the student is of Chinese origin. Virginia Tech shooter Cho Seung Hui was Korean. In the wake of the incident, local members of the Chinese-American community have joined in support of the boy. Richard Chen, who heads the Fort Bend Chinese-American Voters League said the student taught himself how to create mods for Counter-strike. Said Chen:
They arrested him and also went to the house to search. All he did was create a map and put it on a web site to allow students to play. The mother thinks this is too harsh.
...The principal has to do something – but how much? We do understand with the Virginia Tech incident…something has to be done. Someone just made a mistake, and we think the principal should understand that.
William Sun told school board members that, in the wake of Virginia Tech, the Asian community faces a backlash:
We urge the school and community not to label our Asian students as terrorists.
No decision was reached on the boy's status because a quorum of school board members could not be assembled for a proposed special meeting on the case.
Joystiq has more. A TV News station in Houston has a video report as well as a copy of the police report.
Comments
Why are you blaming liberals for this? Anyone can see this was not poltically motivated and it is just paranoia and stupidity at its finest.
do somthing about it go here -universalseed.org/
...
There is no possible way to "Train" on a computer game to act out what you want to accomplish.
I can remember a few times in my life when I thought it would be cool to have levels in games that were copies of the places I knew in the real world, not because I wanted to do anything bad but because I thought it would be cool.
I don't see why what he was doing at home was any of the schools business, sure I could understand if he was threating kids, but just because he has a level that looks like his school on a computer game you get to take disciplinary action against him? I mean is this what society is becoming... if you are a little bit different we will punish you?
Different times, I suppose. I can certainly understand the concern, but it seems like due diligence was done and it is time for the kid to get back in class.
I don't know about you, but sometimes when I was in class, I used to day dream... Sometimes I used to imagine big paintball tournys held at the school, where would our "base" be etc, woulda been fun, so I made a CS map.
Its also fun to play in familiar location. Who wants to run around generic Arabian village #22 fighting?
One of those projects was to model the entire University of Limerick campus in the Unreal engine.
When a member of a respected faculty such as UL can see no harm in this, I fail to see why this boy is being reprimanded and investigated. I believe it is just backlash from the V. Tech shootings, where they are seeing an asian kid and linking that with the unproven ridiculous claims of "training" via video games, putting 2 and 2 together and coming out with "He's going to murder us all!".
If the guy had demonstrated the same kind of fascination with hatred and revenge, or the same disturbed behaviour as Cho Seung Hui had, then perhaps there would be cause for concern. When it is just a normal person being creative, there should not be this uproar.
What if he had made a likeness of the school out of Lego? Or drawn a scale map of the school? Would he be investigated for that? As it stands I see no difference in rendering a likeness of the school, no matter the medium.
It is unfortunate that there is going to be a blanket "condemnation" or at least scrutiny of asian students because of this, just as nerdy people in trenchcoats were viewed with suspicion after columbine, or Muslims in neighbourhoods were watched more closely after 9/11.
One last thing I would like to point out about the "training" you can get from a video game. In Counterstrike, you are playing against other players who are shooting back at you. In any school shooting, people will panic, try and escape, some might be frozen with terror, some will hide. In some cases people will show incredible bravery and try to protect others such as the lecturer in V Tech. Are we to assume that artificial intelligence can accurately predict the reactions of people in a situation such as that? It's laughable to even suggest this.
Like some of the other posters here I thought as well it would be cool to have a game map of my school or neighborhood when playing. Nothing beats playing on a map of the someplace you really know.
I've often thought about real-life places in terms of FPS-ability or even in terms of paintball-ability. Using familiar locations, or real-life ones, in cops-and-robbers type of play is not a crime.
This kid's only crime was being an Asian-American that plays Counter-strike after VT.
What I think is more of a problem is now people's liberties are going to be violated over these "infractions." I mean so now if you were to make a CS map of a public place you're going to have the police involved? What happens if someone downloads your map (maybe only plays it once) and then goes and flips out? Are you liable?
We all know that computers are used to train airline pilots. Therefore, computers can train kids to run around with guns and shoot people. It's a perfect one to one correlation. They both use a simple point and click interface. There is your connection!
Here's an idea: Rather than punish him, encourage and reward him. Hell maybe even help him get into computer programming or video game design school. He's obviously shown an interest in that field. According to the Joystiq article, he won't even be allowed to take place in "graduation ceremonies". Does this mean he won't be allowed to graduate? This would be even worse!
I think we've all thought of places that would make interesting maps. Counterstrike in school or the mall? Halo in a theme park? The Airport? Movie Theater? A store? Building these maps wouldn't mean you were gonna go on a shooting rampage. It would just mean you would love the challenge of going down the toy aisle, while worrying of an ambush coming from sporting goods. You should only worry if they populate the map with avatars based on real defenseless people, where the objective is to kill them. If the objective is to protect them, you may have a little issue for worry, but it could just be an interesting challenge (or a way to act out the powerless frustration we all share at the Virginia Tech shootings).
I'm not familiar with map-building. Could you even put people into the maps? And, if so, can you place mission objectives on them, like kill or protect?
Everyone with The Sims has recreated their family/home. Everyone with a Wii has used the Mii Channel to recreate his/herself, family and friends. Look how many real-life theme parks have been recreated in the Rollercoaster Tycoon games, and how many cities you find people have made in SimCity. This is no different.
Basically, when people are given access to any kind of map building tools for a game, they will always want to recreate the familiar.
Personally, I built my college's music department using the rudimentary editor in TimeSplitters 2, and the Resident Evil mansion on Unreal Tournament 2004. I'm about to start learning Hammer (the Source world building tool), and I will probably do something similar.
As for the school shooting "training simulator" issue, exactly how is playing a tactical game of terrorists vs. counter-terrorists online especially representative of shooting up a school?
It really depends on the game.
Some games allow you to place NPCs in the game some don't, I'm not too sure about Counter Strike but I would imagine you could place the same objectives that you have on any other maps Counter Terrorists rescue the hostages and terrorists do what terrorists do.
I still don't see why this was any issue with the school, I mean he was on his own computer playing the map is that really the schools business?
When I was in high school we played CS, UT, Starcraft and quake 3 in school and no one cares, now you can't even play it at home without these people being on your case.
I do not think they overreacted. You need to check on any possible threat to a school's safety. However, that's the police job, not a school board job. Once the police investigated, found that no criminal charges were warranted and that the kid was no threat (according to one of the two papers) the school board needs to come to their senses and readmit the kid into their school.
They're not people qualified to decide if he is a potential threat, the police is. Once the police has made sure he wasnt planning a school shooting the school board should not punish the kid because of their own insecurities. Like school board member Bryant said "I don't want to fault our police for trying to protect us. But once the evidence was found and looked at, I see no compelling reason why this child should not have been sent back to his original campus,". He's one of the two sane members of that school board.
And personally, I'd love a mod of my workplace. Not because I think it would make a great setting (it would) but because I need vent about it a little. I'd even like some skins of a few of my bosses but I would never think of bringing a gun there. I don't own one and wouldn't even know where to buy one (that's Canada for you). Maybe a knife, so I can slash their car tires, just kidding.
How times change.
I wonder what's the students' reactions? I hope they're better than the adults around them.
Everything that is done there is so hypocritical and hysterical, i'm rooting for that guy. Glad to be living in Canada!
Unfortunately, the government doesn't seem to think so, and will likely take this into evidence that video games kill people. It seems the constitution is very selective about who gets what rights. In this case, it seems that protection from unlawful search and seizure applies only if you aren't part of some ethnic group that was recently involved in a school shooting, no offense to Asians.
QFFT. Seriously, I cant think of how many custom maps of real world locations we made for games. I think we had:
my highschool
my grade school
2 local shopping centers
US Airways arena
Local waterfront
and many more realistic locals. Were they perfect scale replicas? No not at all. However, real life provides amazing architecture to use in games. It is also much more fun to sit down an play when there is no question of knowing the maps(we lived in them).
I totally believe he did this just to do it. How many artists practice by drawing what they know, how many authors draw from personal experience in their writings. Same principle, different medium.
This school district stepped WAY out of line. This was an invasion of privacy to the extreme. Yes, the school needed to notify the parent, but that is the extent of their jurisdiction. This was done at home, distributed on private servers, nothing to do with the govt at all.
His punishment was the responsibility of the parents, not the state. Yes the parent should sit down and talk to the kid to see why they did it. If he was seriously just learning and had no issues, that should be the end of it.
The Police have said this person is no danger, but, apparently, school officials know better than specially trained officers of the peace and can feel free to ignore their opinion.
Is this how low the average schools opinion of the Police is?
According to the Houston Chronicle story, the school learned of this from a report made the day after the VT shootings. I'm guessing another student knew about this custom map prior and freaked when he heard about what happened in Virgina, and reported this kid.
On top of that, schools are ideal for that sort of thing. I remember when Goldeneye came out, it occurred to me that the layout of my high school would be perfect for a multiplayer map.
it sounds like it would just be an interesting place to play out a terrorist vs. military tactical assault scenario.
the second he skins his principal and that girl who spit on him in third period as characters on the opposing squad is the moment you go in and take him to a counselor.
See, did anybody think about that? If a terrorist situation DID occur at the school, anybody playing the map might know the best points to move in at. *shot at* Seriously though, people only seem to want to focus on the Terrorist aspect of Counter-strike, and not the counter-terrorist aspect.
I do think the school board overreacted with the suspension, though. Especially because if he does transfer back to his original school, the rumor mill's already beaten this one to death and his last few months are going to be hell.
-P
If this is the level of ignorance towards students that this place normally shows then they genuinely have something to be concerned about, their own paranoia and discrimination, if applied as a general rule, could create the very situation they are trying to avoid.
Look at it this way, say there is a kid at that school who really does have anger management problems, he or she wants to talk to someone about these feelings of rage, but they've heard about this kid and how he got ostracised, humiliated and kicked out of the school because they were paranoid. What do you think the likelihood of that student talking to the school officials is going to be? They could have changed their ability of helping someone rebuild their life, and instead turned it into potential for another disaster.
That is a BIG can of worms to open up.
Video games are not the issue. At all, in any way, shape or form. Some nutcase with the psychotic tendances (like the v tech shooter, or the ones at columbine) were born / manufactured into insanity by thier environment. The argument that games are solely responsible is just plain stupid.
Alot of the time these maladjusted individuals with deep-seated psychiatric problems seek out bloodthirsty material, be it music, books, films, games or whatever.
There is no hard evidence that Cho Seung Hui played counterstrike - just blind rumours started by everyone's favourite simpleton attourney, corroborated at first by a newspaper, then retracted. But thats beside the point.
In this case the important questions weren't asked - does the kid own one or more handguns? Is he socially malajusted with tendancies towards (real) violence? Has he been 'flagged' by any teachers or classmates as a potential mass murderer?
America - if you want to stop these kind of mass murders then stop allowing these sick people access to guns. If they don't have this access to firearms then they can't go on rampages leaving the corpses of children in thier wake.
Media is an outlet for these psychos, but not a cause, because the causes are in thier genetic makeup and early childhood.
I feel sorry for this kid - he's just learnt that creativity and innovation is wrong. And the judgement was, in part, made by someone (Mary Ann Simpson) who repeated 'incident' twice and 'things' three times in three short sentances.
Normally I’m all for taking precautionary steps to prevent school shootings. However this is ridiculous.
A student from Clements High School in Sugar Land, Texas is in hot water after making a Counter-Strike map based on the layout of his high sc...
What I am trying to ask is where does proof of an act to commit terror actually begin? I believe that no one truly knows until clear-cut threats have been made and detailed plans are found. Until then, you are infringing upon a person’s natural rights.
Wait, the kid was transferred to a different school because not enough board members could be bothered to show up at the meeting?
They didn't show up because the "meeting circumvented the district's disciplinary process." Aka, "we're right, no discussion." And they sent him to the M.R. Wood Alternative Education Center. I HATE IT when are "potentially dangerous/problem kids" are thrown into the special ed schools. HUGE difference between autism and what you believe this kid and capable of doing. The biggest threat to the students is this school board's poor decision making.
Gawd forbid these people find out I looked at my University's Engineering building and went "Wow, what a great location for a lasertag/paintball tournament." That place had so many twists and turns, and hiding holes, and dead ends, and mutli-level open areas, that it would have make a fantastic CS map...
What's next? Turn in the next art student whose abstract paintings of murder and mayhem "disturb" the general population? Or the next death metal group whose lyrics talk about death and mutilation?
ID Software, Valve and any other developer who depends on the mod community for their continued wealth gathering should immediately come out to speak in behalf of this kid. As well as ECA and ESA.
there's nothing wrong with this.
People see something and associate it to other, similar things in their memory. This isn't just normal, it's a vital tool for surviving in life.
Out-and-out racism would be one rational way to view their decision, given the past history of the area. Otherwise, these people do not seem to be thinking rationally.
I can see the gray area here -- an FPS is a whole lot different from a top-down NES game, and I can see how it might be more unnerving seeing someone walk down the halls of the school with a gun in a 3D, first-person view. I can see how this might be worth investigating.
But if the guy has no history of psychological problems, doesn't own any guns, and in general does not appear to be a threat, this is no grounds for expulsion. Legally, they don't have a leg to stand on here.
he has made art based on his experiences.
what else do we expect of people? this stuff should be in a museum. his experiences are most likely very similar to every other kid in the western world. i personally made a doom map of the university i went to over 10 years ago and suspect that countless others have done the same since.
anybody know where we can download the map to play it?
How about we secure our schools instead of taking away our freedoms and rights?
And seriously, what if the guy was living out his fantasy? What if his fantasy is to be a special ops soldier who saves a school full of kids taken hostage? Is that a bad thing now?
30 GOTO 10, etc.
Who needs basic training for weapons? All you need is "WASD" and a mouse and you can kill using an gun!
I know how to operate M249 SAWs now, yay!
Time to train how to use an gravity gun in HL2...cause I might see one of them in reality...
he just made the maps for fun so there is no harm in that and sadly that is how society is getting these days and thats how it is if you are strange then you get treated like you have very few rights or none at all
Besides, I'm not so sure that this kid didn't expect any of this to happen if he made a CS:S map based on his own school.
In counterstrike source, both teams are punished by loss of money for damaging or killing the hostages. In no case is there a "target" other then the opposing team in which you are to kill.
Myself along with a few other student have had plans to model our school library and science/engineering building for CSS because of their unique layouts. The one building is a maze, students who have studied there for three years still get lost in it when trying to find a room. We even thought of skinning the hostages, to look like some of the professor's (we decided however this was impractical)
It had nothing to do with disliking them, or wanting to shoot up the school it just was a really cool "what if". Unfortunately the buildings were to complex for the source engine at the time, We had only one of three floors mapped without textures, but the FPS and lag when playing just over the LAN made it worthless.
We also had plans to make scaled maps of Baghdad along with a couple other cities, that was just the first. Again we started, but unfortunately again it was in to much detail. We actually had the map, but we were never able to run it because it had more then 2500 models in it. We actually talked to professional modeling group and send in a help ticket to EA and one of their modelers just laughed when he saw our map.
If a counterstrike map is enough to suspend a kid and throw him out of school, what does making a map of a city make me? We make life like maps for fun, because it is entertaining as an idea, Not because we are planing action by them.
That someone would choose to create a map where these challenges exist is not at all surprising, nor is it indicative of any kind of malicious behavior. That someone would choose to model work they do upon something they know intimately, or fills them with some kind of narcissistic pleasure is also unsurprising and not at all indicative of malice, as evidenced by the large number of avatars in Maxis' theSims. Finally, that he would choose to allow his fellow students and net-friends to use this map implies that he does have a supportive and hopefully healthy peer group. It is ostracization (if that is a word) and a sense of either self-loathing or righteousness that seems (at least at first glance) to prompt these acts of wanton peer violence. That is to say, that he desired to share this content with his peers is evidence that he is at significantly reduced risk for such an act.
The only thing that is even vaguely suspicious is the possession of those decorative blades. Which, as the police point out, are rather more edged than a lead pipe, though probably not much more dangerous.
Oh, yeah, oy. During the Renaissance, the Puritans came and shut down theatres and Shakespeare plays. But later the fans got back at them, oy.
Has anyone gone through the Fort Bend comment thread? Everyone here is talking about the overreaction of the school officials in the context of VT, but many of the Fort Bend posters seem to think it is nothing more than political posturing due to their upcoming BoT elections. Nobody is talking about that here, and personally, if that is the case, I find that to be despicable on a whole other level.
Quite often you use what you know or have access to, as mentioned above. You are also forced to be selective on what you choose to build as there are limitations to the engine. If I were more creative I would have built a map from nothing, but lacking that creativity, I generally choose to use things I've seen as reference or inspiration.
I dont understand how video games are used to "train" killers. They can be used to strategies but not to train. Common who hasnt wanted to try out a football play they made on Madden? Or try to come up with some security setup u couldnt get pass in splinter cell? Hell I used to think it would be fun if people / "terrorist" attacked my school and I new the layout and I was able to beat them all.
Video games cant teach you to reload a gun in under a min. All we do is press a button. and yes we all can jump 10 feet in the air. And carry an arsenal of equipment up our a** like you do in Metal Gear. and learn how to fire a rocket launcher.
I m just waiting for when they start arresting LARP people because they enacted a scene at school that could be harmful if they didnt use nerf guns.
Heck, when i was in high school, for a about a week or two a bunch of budies and I played a variant of the live action game "Assassin" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassin_%28game%29 ) using the map of our school and water guns, plastic pea-shooter, nerf guns, and plastic disc guns, cardboard tubes (swords), etc (Basically anythign you could get your hands on and conceal that you could use to fire some harmless projectile accurately). Well actually we didnt use the map of the school, we just played it while at school during breaks and such (and sometimes not, its all part of the danger of being a teenager). This was all just a stepping up of earlier water gun/etc fights in the woods and fields out back behind one of our friends houses, transposed into a more familiar and more risky setting. While obviously that is technically against conduct rules (disruptive effects etc, plus im sure they had some rules about squirt guns on campus, and maybe even cardboard tubes), that no more represents a terrorist/shooting threat than anything this guy is doing by playing the same sort of thing but in a digital world - in fact that is better since he wasnt potentially breaking any rules of school by doing it during school time (i presume at least) because he was playing at home and in his spare time. Although that was all pre-Columbine, so im sure if we'd got caught today (which we didnt then either) wed all be kicked out of school because we were somehow threatening the school with squirt guns and cardboard tube samurai swords. Its just plain silly.
So instead of trying ot keep the violent games out of our (gamers) hands (when for the most part gamers have shown that they are as near to well-adjusted and 'normal' as the bulk of the population), they should be working to keep the games out of *their* hands. Because frankly, if an anti-game zealot really got into playing CS or GTA or something like that I actually am pretty bloody worried about what might happen given that they seem utterly unable to separate imaginary play from reality. (Or perhaps after they played a bunch they would suddenly be abel to surprise surprise tell fact form fiction and imagination from reality and problem solved)
horray...
They're not even that good for practicing strategy, especially if you're playing against other people. As much as CS looks like it could possibly be realistic, and has realistic elements, having untrained people playing both sides makes it useless as a tactical simulator.
Take your example of trying a play out of Madden, but substitute the idea of designing a play for Madden, without knowing the real intricacies of football. For example, you might design a play where you blitz all three linebackers and a safety while all four linemen also rush. It might work in the game, but in the real world the odds are that they'll all run into a big jumble and leave two or three guys open underneath.
That's what playing an FPS against other people is really like. You may be able to take out a bunch of other guys who don't really know what they're doing, but if you try something on actual trained people, you'll be boned.
Seriously this is screwed up, and that school board needs replacing. Kids enjoying playing in familiar locals. This is just the high tech virtual version of running around the playground or the neighborhood with squirt guns. We don't blink an eye at teenagers having a good time paint balling, or playing laser tag so what's the problem with this? It's the same god damn thing, only done in a way that doesn't entail any mess to clean up.
Anyhoo, you can have my map editor when you pry it from my cold, dead hands. Or something like that. :p