CelticBear’s Musings

Another story I just discovered regarding a student and his harmless hobby:

Student Arrested for “Suspected Terrorist Activity”

A teen arrested, arrested, for having created a map for a first-person shooter game (think Doom, Quake, Soldier of Fortune, Thief….) based on his high school. As the article above points out, it’s not at all unusual for people to make environments based on what you know. It’s like using “The Sims” to create a house you used to live in.

He has been convicted of no crime but then the school expels him? I guess “innocent until proven guilty” has no merit with the school board. Even with the authorities finding no evidence of gaming-related causes for the Virginia Tech shootings… It seems that we, as gamers, still are targeted as warped killers.

Reminds me of the kid who was arrested and charged with a crime for writing violent prose:

Write an essay in Chicago, go to jail

On the one hand, in this post 9/11, er, I mean, post-VT world, any sign of teen violence is going to make people very scared and paranoid. In that second instance, the stuff the kid wrote was pretty grotesque. But is it a crime? Especially when the assignment was to write whatever you want and don’t censor yourself?

Violent and disturbing imagery is a part of human art. From Stephen King novels and Quentin Tarantino movies to the paintings of 16th century painter and statesman Francis Bacon. If we freaked out and arrested and treated as criminals anyone who explored this side of natural human nature, a significant portion of the population would be arrested, and half the normal teenagers in America. For instance, back circa 1988, in a different world, I actually won 1st place in a writing fair for a very disturbing free-form poem. 20 years ago I won an award, today I probably would have been arrested. I love action filled, violent movies. I love violent action filled games. And yet, I, like most people I know, abhor the idea of hurting another person. And that’s normal. But we’re starting to overreact to such a degree, as a culture, that we’re treating any sign of violence as criminal activity and a precursor to mass slaughter.

The problem is an extension of the concept that there is a single scapegoat that can be blamed for the ills of society. Rock and roll was what had created drug culture and hooligans. Dungeons and Dragons caused suicide. Metal music created murderers. Nothing is that simple (not to mention that entirely wrong. Studies have shown that suicide rates among role-playing gamers are actually lower than the average–completely counter to the fear-mongering scapegoat seeking knee-jerk reactionary claim.) The VT killer wrote horribly disturbing fiction, very true. But, he also was a paranoid schizophrenic. I think that had something more to do with it than anything else. If we want to look for signs and predictions of actual violent behavior, we’re going to have to go beyond the easy, wide-ranging, ever-present signs that we’ll find in probably half the teenage population (if we were to start looking in journals and diaries as well.) We’ll HAVE to wait until a profile can be established. Did the kid write violent stories? Check. Immediately move to arrest him?! No! See if he has any kind of record of violent behavior. The Columbine killers, surprise, had a long history of both school and public incidents. The VT killer as well. Once you have some possible but very ambiguous sign, like writings, check history. You have a violent history, them maybe a good psyche evaluation might be in order.

But, once we start making criminals out of people, straight-A students with no signs of behavior disorder like the kids above, for what they write–where does that end? When do we start, in the name of public safety and security, start arresting anyone for anything they write that might be offensive or potentially violent. We actually have games out now (in prototypes) that use brainwaves to help control the game, not to mention prosthetics that move via brain impulses, it won’t be long until we are able to create implants that can alert The Authorities whenever someone has a thought identified as violent. Do we start arresting people for that? One may say, that’s a ridiculous slippery slope! That would never happen! 20 years ago I would never, ever have imagined that fiction I’d write could have me arrested. That would have been utterly insane to me back then. Or police blowing up Dept. of Transportation traffic counting devices as suspicious devices because they’re painted a different color than normal.

You can pass all this off as, “Well, we live in different times today.” Yes, but how much of these “different times” are of our own creation?