I Would Have Made Deathmatch Maps Of My School, Too
Last week, 17-year-old Paul Hwang was investigated by the police and kicked out of school for the crime of being a creative and talented gamer. He's a victim of the paranoia surrounding the recent Virginia Tech tragedy. He had created a Counterstike map of his own school for he and his buddies to play in, and some concerned parents - undoubtably swayed by FUD campaigns by alarmists profiteering from tragedy, alerted the authorities.

It might have been bad timing on Hwang's part, as he probably finished the map before the VT incident took place. But as he seemed to match the media-image profile of the Virginia Tech killer (who was of asian heritage, but not - as too many believe - a gamer). The police launched an investigation, reportedly grasped at a few straws to justify themselves by labeling him a "terrorist threat", but finding nothing worthy of a criminal case, they recommended disciplinary action on the part of others. You know, something that doesn't require the burden of proof of an actual criminal case.

The school board took up the flag, acting in their best Minority Report fashion, and proactive punished the imagined "pre-crime" by kicking Hwang out of school, transferring him to an "alternative education facility" (part of the Fort Bend County Juvenile Justice Program), and prohibited from attending his own graduation. While some board-members later expressed misgivings that they'd overreacted, others patted themselves on the back for a job well done, and covered their butts by saying that they were only doing their job in this dangerous day and age.

Now I get to don my old geezer hat and say, "You know, when I was a high school student, I never made Counterstrike maps of MY school." The main reason was because we had dinky little 8-bit machines that didn't have enough horsepower or colors to even display a decent-resolution JPEG image of the school, let alone anything resembling a first-person shooter like Counterstrike.

Instead, back in my teenaged era, what was going to ruin society and turn out an entire generation of bloodthirsty, psychotic, devil-worshippers was called "Dungeons and Dragons." And you'd better believe there were battles in D&D taking place between adventurers and monsters bearing the names of principals and least-favorite teachers through imaginary facsimiles of our schools!

The key difference between then and now was that what we were doing wasn't so photorealistically OBVIOUS to low-imagination, paranoid authority figures. Well, that, and the game hadn't hit the mainstream consciousness hard enough to become the default scapegoat for all of society's ills. Many enlightened individuals vociferously predicted the horrors that would befall western civilization should this game, like rock music, continue unchecked. But there were still some people who naively ignoring the D&D connection with certain tragedies, and instead focusing on such embarassingly old-fashioned influences like drug addiction and long histories of mental illness.

Frankly, if we'd had games like Counterstrike back then, you'd better believe I'd have been making maps of my school, my house, and the local mall. And sharing them with my friends. Instead, the closest I came was making a "Space Invaders" game where - with my limited art skills - the invaders all resembled a particularly strict instructor (who I eventually came to like, incidentally). But I had a slight thrill exploding bald-headed aliens for about fifteen minutes after I finished the game. Oh, hey, and I also had a bunch of mostly ornamental weapons in my room too - out in plain sight, after a little parental rebellion streak one evening. Perhaps not unlike Paul Hwang's collection of ornamental knives found by the police in their investigation.

Was I actually an emotional powderkeg ready to blow at any minute? I really don't think so. In spite of my geek tendencies, I think I was a relatively happy, well-adjusted kid. I had good friends, good parents, and even grades that didn't suck. And let's get real here... who DIDN'T fantasize about blowing up their school at some point?

When you are a teenager, you are in this transition stage where kids are craving empowerment, but aren't quite responsible enough (or emotionally grounded enough) to handle it. I know that I would have little bits of rebellion to seize some level of empowerment - some measure of control over my destiny in a world where I felt largely subject to the whims of adults. The draw to videogames (and D&D) was a feeling of that empowerment in a make-believe world. In a D&D game, I could play a calm, cool, always-in-control hero to help counter feelings of being very much the opposite in the real world. I was allowed to pretend to be an idealized version of myself.

Of all the settings a teenager would want to portray himself as the competent superhero (or supervillain, as the case may be) , it is only natural that his high school would be at the top of the list. Where else would they feel in more need of empowerment - even if only in an imaginary alternate reality? High school, as much as I enjoyed it at times, was one of the most threatening, self-esteem-crushing experiences I can recall. It was a nasty social Lord of the Flies experiment, complete with violence (though never the lethal kind - at least in my school - though there were always rumors). For the average middle-class American youth not coming from an abusive or dangerous home life, the halls of their high school is probably where most of their personal demons live.

And in Paul Hwang's case, he was able to apply his talents not only in a way to help him cope with this (and make a pretty decent-looking level, I should add), but also apply in a way that would be enjoyed, appreciated, and respected by his peers.

But now we're on the verge of criminalizing that sort of thing in our hysteria.

Maybe I'm projecting too much. I don't know Paul Hwang from Adam. I haven't heard anything yet to suggest that he's anything other than a decent, pretty normal kid who got caught in a witch-hunt. I wish him well, and I hope this incident doesn't discourage him or other young aspiring game designers and mod-makers from exercising their talents.

I'm just glad I didn't have to grow up in their world.


(Vaguely) related yammerings of an obviously corrupted and yet naive adult...
* Teenager and Dungeons & Dragons
* Games As Art: Media's Double Standard
* Why Are There So Many Violent Videogames?
* Rules of Combat According to FPS Games

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Labels: Politics, retro

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 6:00 PM (Permalink)