A student in Sugarland has been removed from school and placed in an alternative education center because he made a Counter Strike map based on his school. From Digital Village Dispatch:
A day after the Virginia Tech Shootings, a parent of another student called the school to say their child had played a video game which “involved killing” and “took place inside an animated map of Clements High School”. The principal and a counselor found the web site where the map, named “The Official Clements High School CS Map”, was available for download. The creator of the map was a student at the school.
No word on what else that parent may have done to engage with her child about the types of games he/she has been playing. Is this the first time said parent has noticed that his/her child has played a first-person-shooter? Will all the kids who’ve played that map be rounded up for alternative education?
Cops were called. They looked at the site and found nothing illegal, but decided to follow up anyway. They searched the boy’s locker where again “nothing illegal or threatening was found”. They then “retrieved” the boy from class and brought him to the assistant principal’s office where he was frisked by the policeman “for the safety of all involved.”
I am not holding my breath to ask if said child’s parents were contacted prior to the police being called in. I am posting this here and now, if my child ever has to deal with the cops for any incident where no threat was found, and I am not notified first, I will be camped in that office demanding an explanation for their slack-jawed idiotic actions and I will drag camera crews in like a metal-hulled ship dragging mines.
When did public school officials and, more importantly, public school parents stop using their freakin’ brains? Is critical thinking dead? Does anyone know how to follow a line of logic anymore?
The most recent starting point for this knee-jerk, civil liberties-robbing reactions is the Urban myth-laden Columbine aftermath. Pop quiz: What was the “Trenchcoat mafia” and were the numbnuts who shot up that school members? School administrators, parents, and teachers are far too comfortable avoiding any pretense of conflict that the first sign of anything resembling a differentiation from the “norm” that is their bunny-rabbit infested dream state, they hit the red panic button and call in the SWAT teams.
I wore a trench coat in high school. So did half the guys who went to high school in the mid-1980s. I guess Lloyd Dobler was just another disturbed kid who was two ritalins away from blowing away the school, eh?
Should I be scared that colleagues of mine made a map based on Iowa State University for Marathon Infinity? Should people be freaked-the-f*** out that we talked about making an Unreal map based on the university grounds where I worked? No, dammit! They’re video games!
Know your kids, know your students, use common sense, never abandon logic, reasoning, and the liberties in which we are blessed enough to live. There. Simple enough to follow and you didn’t have to cry like a baby to Dr. Phil.
