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
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
Either that was sarcasm, or someone is trying to remind us of a certain someone through (weaker) example.