It’s amazing what can happen when a group of ignorant people react to something they clearly don’t understand. A high school senior in Fort Bend County, Texas, has been removed from his school for creating a ‘terroristic threat.’ He didn’t threaten to blow up the school, nor did he threaten to slaughter his fellow classmates — two acts that I could see being branded ‘terroristic threats.’ What this insidious, dastardly teen did was worse than any verbal threat of mass murder: he created a map for the game Counter Strike and modeled it after his school. Yeah, that puts him right up there with the likes of bin Laden, doesn’t it?
Not only was he removed from his school, but, and this is even more ludicrous, the police actually searched his house. If making Counter Strike maps is now grounds to be investigated as a terrorist, then I think it’s time for people with sense to head north and apply for Canadian citizenship. This sort of stupidity is beyond the limits of what I thought possible in America.
Take, for example, this quote from another student at the school:
At Clements High School, student Jordan Schlafer is appalled and
shocked to learn her school was used as a backdrop for a violent video
game.She said, “If somebody can make a map like that of the whole
school, I mean, it does kind of scare me a little bit, and make me
wonder, you know, what else they could do.”
Yeah, because we all know that someone with artistic talent, with the ability to use a 3D editor to craft and shape a virtual replica of a real-world building, is almost certainly capable of the most heinous acts of terrorism. The Department of Homeland Security had better get busy keeping an eye on people at Pixar and those crazy Kiwis over at Weta Workshop. This high school student is an amateur compared to what those guys must be capable of.
Here’s a message to my fellow Americans: the Virginia Tech shooter was a nut case. Period. He had a history of erratic and threatening behavior. Those are the warning signs that people need to be looking for. Gamers with a creative streak often design maps based on buildings with which they have some familiarity. These are not psychotic, mass murdering whackos. Drop the paranoid witch-hunt mentality and stop looking for terrorists in every shadow.
The game industry really needs to do more to educate those who can’t bother to take the initiative to understand games by themselves. It’s so easy to just remain ignorant and accuse those things you don’t understand of being the source of society’s ills. It’s also a really stupid thing to do.
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