Slashdot Mirror
Games in High School?
Joe Griego of Bishop Union High School, CA asks: "I'm the Director of I.T. for a small school district, and we've implemented a 'Game Night' for our kids. We open the lab once or twice a month, and let the kids sign up for the lab computers (we have 34 of them), and play LAN games until the wee hours. It's a lot of fun for the kids, and I enjoy seeing them use the computers for recreation, as opposed to purely academic purposes. However, my question would be - do other high schools even do this?" Judging by the post-Columbine reactions from the government, parent's groups, school systems, and the media, if a school is doing this, it's probably on the QT. Personally, I think this is a great idea, it keeps kids off of the streets and their parents know where they are. What do you think?
"I'd like to know what sorts of games would be best for this activity? We play Age of Empires II, Starcraft/Broodwar, and MechWarrior IV. I would have liked to include first person shooters (for the gameplay), but I'm limited by parental concerns, and perceptions in the community. As a school administrator and parent, I understand these concerns in a way the kids perhaps do not.
Are there other games that would be suitable for a school sponsored event? I'd love to hear about experiences at other schools."
HELL no
.cig - what you do after winning a good flame war
That is really cool! At our school, we have a Cisco networking class, and we do something similar, except it's out of school. As long as they have parent permission, I think it's a great idea. Unfortunately, around here it isn't possible.. as we live in a very conservative area.
How many schools actually have computers that are good enough to play Unreal Tourney or Age of Empires?
It's less violent than most games kids play these days, it requires a fair amount of real thinking (as opposed to just running around and shooting anything that moves), and it's more addictive than heroin.
I'd suggest any RTS/Strategy or Fantasy games, even something slightly violent like Diablo II. I'd stay away from the FPS's, they're going to wind up causing trouble with overbearing parents. Still sounds like a great idea, we never had a game night sponsored by the school when I was in high school years ago.
Is your browser retarded?
or at least the CS dept.
S C- fa01/
The local ACM chapter sponsers gaming events every so often where we take over one of the labs and have people play lan games. usually tournament style.
we even take pictures. here are some from a starcraft tournament we held.
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/acm/pictures/gaming-
At the computer club at my high school about 10 of us would get free run of the mac lab and play marathon for hours. Lots of fun.
I believe that stragedy games would be the most accepted all around. As a parent I think that some of the more violent first person shooter type games should be limited to the home and not at a school sanctioned game night.
Nothing is impossible. It just hasn't been figured out yet.
we didn't have "network games." Heck, we didn't even have a network. But in college... this sort of activity would get you booted from the lab.
That is, if the lab admin ever looked up from his network game.
it's not going to stop until you wise up, no it's not going to stop. so just give up.
This is a great way to make use of idle resources to provide students with a safe after school activity. It even provides for more human interaction if you assume (probably correctly) that these kids would be otherwise playing alone in their rooms.
I'd suggest Civilization (which ever version is the latest). I always liked that...used to play in the computer lab at college when I was supposed to be watching the front desk.
At the public schools in my area (Ontario, Canada) this is highly uncommon. During normal hours you get in trouble if you are caught playing games and the admins would probably laugh at you if you proposed the idea for doing it at night because people would be messing around installing DirectX and loads of other stuff on their carefully configured boxes. Besides, people kept stealing the mouse balls so the admins super-glued the mice shut. The balls stay in there but you can't clean them, thus the mice get clogged with crap and are no use for gaming.
I think this is a great thing you're doing - I have friends in similar positions at schools, and we were just discussing doing this sort of thing. It does keep kids out of trouble doing other things, and it really lets kids see how computer labs at schools can be used for something besides "school stuff". Games I would suggest would be like Quake, Doom, Unreal Tournament, etc. Granted - you would definitely have to have parents permission first, but then I think it would be ok.
... I tried to get something like this implemented in my high school, but they never went for it. We had to settle for illegal copies of Doom installed on shared Novell drives, and Scorched Earth in 'hot seat' mode.
We didn't have a 'game night'.. But I did have 3 seats set aside purley for hacking and experimenting.. They were allowed to try to break the school network, write their own code, and generally be geeks without fear of getting in trouble for violating the school code..
The only rules were that you had to use those 3 seats (where I could easily see them) and if you cracked my network security you had to show me how you did it, and no DoS attacks on the school servers..
Death and poverty like me so much, they've brought friends!
My school district would never consider anything like this. We have a gaming cafe with decent rigs though. It's mad expensive, but the "leet hacksors" never pay anyway. It uses a system called Netimo for the fare and it crashes constantly. It used to be open 24/7 but the owner closes it on sunday now. Lots of violent matches get played every night, and a couple fist fights have broken out. Idiots. A lot of people go there, I've even seen some old people there. They always weird me out, but they leave when they realize the most common shouted phrase is "YOU CAMPING FAG, EAT A DICK." It is pretty social overall. Sorry for being off topic, but I meant to say that even the most violent games can bring kids together, I'm glad a school system realizes that and encourages it.
.cig - what you do after winning a good flame war
It's win-win!
I helped to set-up/maintain a small (6 computer) LAN in a classroom which we use to play Quake, AvP, and CS beta 7 at lunch time. Sometimes we'd stay after school and play too. The computers wern't used for much else.
It got a bunch of us into LAN gaming big time, and we held lots of off campus labs...
Ahhh high school, where I never went to class because there were always computers to fix because the distric couldn't afford to hire techs with IQs greater than 3...
Linux is dead.
LU
Great idea, hopefully this is non-profit. This is great b/c its giving the kids that don't have any major social outlet one, if anything its helping then vent their anger through friends with common interests and games... and isn't it jocks that beat up geeks?
Carpe meam simiam!
I just graduated from HS. For the last two years I was in a Cisco class taught by the track coach. We had to do about one chapter a week, but everyone got an A regardless of thier test performance. The 'lab' had 5 decent computers connected to a hub, but we had some good times playing Quake and Q2.
we did it unofficially..and our source of entertainment wasn't games per-se, it was more along the lines of:
user a:
c:\net send a you suck!!!
user b:
c:\net send b your mom!!!
Those who can, do. Those who can't, go into business for themselves.
I think it's nice to see somone that says "do something for the kids" as opposed to "Blame the video games, TV, blah, blah blah". Tie game night to grades. You get good grades you get more LAN party time! How's that for an idea??
cluge
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
It's going to be fun watching Jon Katz's brain melt when he reads this article.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Need a UNIX/Linux/network guru in the Boulde
I had a great art class in my senior year of high school, back in '96. The instructor was very flexible, and I was the "computer person" on campus, who helped the library admin when issues would come up.
I arranged a week-long excursion for our art class to spend each day in the computer lab, to "immerse ourselves in a Three-Dimensional simulation of Medieval Architecture, interactively generated in Real-Time," a.k.a. Heretic. We played deathmatches through class and lunch all week, in the dark computer lab with Danzig's Black Aria playing for ambience. If schools did more stuff like this, it would only be beneficial!
I know I would have loved it had my school done this. Of course, lacking that, we would just all congregate at a friends house and set up a LAN party there, or spend our evenings crawling through the UNIX servers of our ISPs or using BBSs (this was the days before TCP/IP at your workstation -- it was a terminal program dialed into someone elses machine and everything was text based).
In retrospect, it would have sucked to have our school do something like this as all the machines there would barely play Doom in the lowest possible resolution and with all the features turned off. No, much better to stick to our machines.
But we were geeks. YMMV.
...how I managed to get through that program without apparently meeting any other CS students or participating in any of these "fun" antics.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
We had game nights, but our teachers were really restrictive, and we really couldn't afford licences, so we had to quit.
Are there other games that would be suitable for a school sponsored event?
Ummm...chess, go, basketball, baseball (need I go on?)
Given the propensity for computer games to become addictive, it's kinda inappropriate for schools to encourage this kind of thing.
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
I organized an event like this for my high school. We did the fps though. Half-Life, Quake2. Quake3 was in beta at the time, so we played that. A lot of racing games, some starcraft. It was good fun, and as long as it was supervised the administration was relatively cool about it. We never made it abundently clear we were doing the fps thing though.
-- the computer doesn't want any beer, no matter how much you think it does. NEVER, EVER feed your computer beer.
homeworld cataclysm would be a perfect game for a highschool lan party.
We played lots of starcraft after hours in groups of 20 or 30 in a lab :)
-- dieman - Scott Dier
I work for a rather large school district in Michigan, and the sysAdmin here came up with the idea of having LAN games for fund raisers. We had everything worked out: projectors, machines, security, etc. Then, of course, the administration shot the whole thing down. Too violent. And I thought all they thought about was money.....
-Tolerate my intolerance
When you consider that these kids are going to do this anyway, it's better IMHO to have them do this in a social setting where they are actually talking to each other face to face in the lab between sets.
You can develop good social skills when you get to talk face to face over the pizza and trade "How did you do that" stories.
And if you are really worried about the blood and gore, use the paintball simulators...a FPS where no one gets hurt, or the Nerf Game based on the Unreal engine.
If they sit at home and play these games, there is very little interaction, but in a lan party, it's more akin to a RPG session where at the seventh inning stretch you can talk
-- Wiccan Army, 13th Airborne Division "We will not fly silently into the night"
a local isp used to host lan parties, there was a small fee but it was for beer(pop for the minors) and pizza. it was great fun, and we weren't limited in the games we played. i'm gonna have to suggest this to our local school district too. Great idea
More recently, there's a lab on a local campus that a group of local geeks our age (and some actual students, too) take over for massive Netrek sessions on Fridays.
Hmm. There's an idea for a game -- set up a Linux box and some clients, and play Netrek! Or roll your own network game as a project for the AP CS class....
A friend of mine is a math/science teacher at a local high school and he arranges such things. I've never been there, but it sounds like it works well. Also, I'm a tech at a small college and me and my co-workers and some of our friends do the same. It's convinient that art departments require high power graphics cards ;)
Science may someday discover what faith has always known.
You have licenses and the parents permission. Also, use it for a reward for classwork.
I think a great game would be Army Men RTS, it's like starcraft, but you play little plastic army men. It is the COOLEST thing! Sure there is violence, but no blood, just blobs of plastic! Check it out here.
Sigs are out of style, so I'm not going to use one...oh wait..
You won't be able to get them to leave. That game is like a drug... you play it once or twice and you're hooked...
--Forest C. Adcock--
In our cad lab in high-school we had a free day every month or whenever the instructor got lazy. We would usually have about 2 or 3 guys eating my super-shotgun in DOOM II. Those were the days, before all that new-fangled gl stuff. Now we have to thow our own lan parties.
It's amazing... Finally a site that has more bandwith than /. can throw at it!
Well, we used to play a lot of Advent[ure] and Star Trek back when I was in HS, but... ;-)
Anyway, I don't see this as any different than having a rpg game session at the school, etc. It sounds like you have a good selection of games already, but you might consider Age of Wonders and Space Empires IV as two more, turn-based strategy thingies. Dungeon Siege is okay for multiplayer (although, like any Diablo-esque game, ultimately kind of pointless). If you have the right group together, you could even do Baldur's Gate II (pretty involved). Oh, and Worms World Party is fun, too.
Back in the late 80's, my first High School used to open up the labs for whatever. Although they didn't have PC's, they did have a VMS Mainframe upon which many thousands of hours of Moria were played. It got a LOT of kids interested in programming (myself included).
When I moved to a Voc-Tech high-school, and I became the student sysadmin, I got the school to open up the lab after hours, and to allow students to make their own curriculum during the last 2 years of computer science.. Some great games came out of those minds, and a lot of great games were played.
So the short answer is: Yes, if they are progressive enough.
The Dopester
"Yes, I'm a Karma Whore, but I'm doing it to pay my way through school."
When I was in highschool, we used to play games during free periods and after school on the network and we had a lot of fun. Eventually, they started banning games on school computers because they felt the computers should be used for academic reasons and didn't like having games installed. I feel, that in moderation, gaming should be allowed at school as long as its at a reasonable time.
;-)
Look at it this way: If you allow gaming once in a while, they won't view your rules as hardball. Even students need some time to unwind, and (at least back when I was a highschool student) the only place you could play multiplayer networked games was in school because that was the only place the connection was good enough.
I don't see how it can hurt. You aren't running a prison camp
Volunteer Mozilla developer, RPI Student.
, I think this is a great idea, it keeps kids off of the streets and their parents know where they are. What do you think?
I doubt these are the type of kids that need to be kept off the street, I mean a kid thats willing to be locked in a school, on a weekend, to use computers, for many hours on end...
Yep, these are the bad boys that your momma warned you about, thank god there's a program like this to keep these bad asses off the street.
Otherwise they'd probably be into secret, underground lan parties and D&D games, where authority couldn't monitor them!
Chicago2600.net more than a lifestyle, its a survival trait.
Given the fact that lots of games are violent, I think most parents would put the kibosh on this. However, the concept is not in itself a bad one. Think about it. Schools are places for learning, and it's long been thought that certain kinds of play are healthy and neccessary for a well balanced learning expierience. This is why gym is called "Physical Education". Now what about computer game play? It's not physically athletic, but certain kinds of games do stimulate the mind. And with LAN play, you have the opportunity to teach teamwork skills. I'd be against school sponsored "Resident Evil" tournaments, but what if a computer strategy game could be created that could teach kids to think on multiple levels? A game that didn't involve blowing things all to hell, but required good motor skills and teamwork as well? A game that was truly a kind of teaching tool. That kind of scenario I'd be in favor of. It would be a great way to have team challenges as well.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Our TA in high school was also the computer science teacher. Every month or so, we would take over the computer lab for an afternoon and play net DOOM, or Rise of The Triad, or Descent, or whatever. It was a blast. Mad props if you're out there, Mark.
You can change many first person shooters to be less violent.
Chex cereal released a quake or a doom mod, where you shoot a teleporter beam at monsters who wanted to eat your cereal.
Change the weapons and the blood and gore Look.
My mom was not happy with the look of quake, but if it were changed into throwing bibles at the devil she might let it go.
(My mom isn't quite that bad)
Please use [ informative / summarizing ] SUBJECT LINES
Flame me here
So far as fair use policy goes, I think it's about time that the administrators realize that gaming is just another form of *productive* recreation like basketball or other type of sports. If a school feels fine about opening up its gym after school so kids can play sports, then what's wrong with opening up the computer labs so kids can also play games?
No more violent then acctually skateboarding, and it won't cause all the planters and lunch tables at your school to get scraped up.
-- The Hoss Man
and repremanded - he was a IT tech as well, and one night one of his supervisors came by and noticed the games were "of a violent nature" and basically shut down that program - much to the dismay of many parents - since it was a alcohol, and drug free place for their young geeks to hang out.
When I was at the high school here associated with the University of Illinois (a while ago -- I graduated in '94), we actually played games in history class a couple times a year. One of the teachers there had actually worked with some former students to develop a couple of somewhat primitive but very fun and educational games for his classes. I don't know if they ever were used elsewhere, but they were all really good.
:)
The same teacher ran an extracurricular group where we played Avalon Hill wargames and also had a couple board games of his own devising that we played in class as well. Very cool stuff. As for LAN parties at school, that never really happened, although the last year I was there there was a good deal of rampant MUDding going on in the lab at all hours.
Most lan party centers buy their own games to make sure they have enough legitimate versions. High schools won't buy games as they are "misappropriation of funds" and they won't let kids (officially) install their own games, as that would be misappropriation of resources.
My HS allowed us to play doom2, and fully knew we were doing so (during class even); but I very much doubt any place is doing this sort of thing "officially"
My highschool computer club used to get together and play Mech2Mercs, duke3d, and war2 every wed after school, often times with/against our cs teacher. This lasted until the admin found out about it and canceled it with out giving us reason. I think this kind of thing is great, it really got me in to computers because we'd have to fix the problems that were wrong with the machines and all the various problems that would always crop up with dos networking.
Develop SimSchool and let the kiddies play that in the comp lab. Maybe one or two of them will catch the irony and go out into the real world and do something real, like go out on a real date instead of SimDate. (Wait, geeky high school kids, dating.... input does not compute!)
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
when i was in high school we played doom on the school network. except we didn't call it 'game night', we called it 'AP Comp Sci'.
Except it was at a college, on Saturdays, and was usually kids vs. parents... we'd sneak some parents in on a Thur or Fri night and give them pointers... One thing to watch out for is licensing issues...
Ever Onward, Forward Bound
We do this at our private college. At first it was on the down low, but now we actually have it put on by the Student Activities Department.
Tons of fun and way cheaper then a bar.
iRepairIT - iPhone, Mac, & PC Repair
You don't need a fast machine, the graphics are so cheezy that you can't see any blood, and it r0x0rZ my b0x0rZ. Oh yeah, and you can multiplayer on, like, 1 machine.
Do they do this: yes
;)
Do they do this intentionally: No
Do they try to stop it: yes
While they don't go and let kids stay for a while, schools allow kids to do this when they don't hire computer-literate teachers. I had a class in webmastering at that school (I wanted to learn the server side of things, I already knew HTML and the like... this was years ago) and the ordinary teacher had quit to go to a different job (for some reason, I think it was even lower-paying). Anyways, they brought us a sub who didn't know a thing about computers. Not a thing. The result? We played a lot of Descent and doom, and then even brought in our own games from homes (Those of us who had macs) and then stole the internet connection from the next room and got ourselves networked.
The next year they had a PhD in Comp Sci teaching Comp Sci (with new Wintel machines) and if we finished our work, we'd go online (the content filters were horrible) and dl games and the like. I remember a sub in that class egging me on to get bigger guns in the GTA2 demo.
When the admins and the teachers aren't looking the smart kids will figure out how to get games and the like and show everyone else how to do it. It's even educational
Back in the day we would play bolo tell they kicked us out and told us to go home, How ever even back then they ended up making rules banning games, something to effect of we where distracting people trying to work.
Kill the pillbox!
MY BUILDER!!
---"Some where in the heavens they are waiting.."
Besides, its just easier to tell someone to lay down a supressing fire rather than type it. ;)
But who says kids have to play violent FPS? Why not something constructive? This is one of the few if only multiplayer markets that is untapped. The typical multiplayer game centers around killing and destroying. Why not something less zero-sum?
The kids would really enjoy a game of Hitman.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Seriously, I would like to see kids get off their collective asses and do some physical activity outside of gang banging and skin slapping. LAN parties promote the opposite of physical activity. Now with so many kids suffering from adult diseases due to obesity and societal cost of obesity outpacing smoking, I think forced physical exercise would be better than fraggin' their classmates.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
When I was in high school, the teacher who ran the computer lab would let us come in and play games like Zork and King's Quest.
There were no network games (no network either) but one of the most educational and fun times I had there was when she brought a bunch of text based games written in Basica and let us fiddle with the code. She would walk around and help you if you needed it, or provide a crash couse in Basic if you didn't know how to program using it. It was great.
It was a great way, I think, to get students interested in programming at an early age and keep them interested. It was a much better approach than, "Okay class, we're going to print our name to the screen 5000 times..." I would like to see all schools doing something like this.
I like the concept of game nights, but I think they should also use that Java tank game and teach kids something about programming and have fun at the same time.
RTS games like Starcraft, Total Annihilation, and so forth are always popular, and shouldn't raise too much concern with parents. As for choosing the games themselves, why not just let the students vote on it? Buy a new game every Christmas for the lab, either with school funds or by "game-lab dues" paid by the students.
Simulation games will be moderately popular too, but multi-player games are usually nicer.
I actually think that adding a few select FPSs (like Tribes) that emphasize wouldn't be a bad idea, but I agree that that probably wouldn't fly too well with the parents.
As a third option, you can load SDL on all of the programming course machines and encourate the students to write their own game(s). This wouldn't replace store-bought games, but would be a neat side project that the students would be enthusiastic about and would learn a lot from. I know I had a lot of fun doing this in my high school days (wrote a Tetris clone and a version of Battleship that worked multi-player by using files in a shared directory to communicate).
I did have one teacher in high school who would let you play games that you wrote.
When I was in high school, we had an advisory period during the first 20-30 minutes of school. I was in the computer advisory class, and all we did there was play Quake, Duke Nukem 3D, and Command & Conquer every day. We always maxed out the number of players possible in Quake, and it was awesome at the time to play with no ping on the LAN! Ahhh, memories...
This is a really nice idea but unfortunately our school is struggling to keep teachers because of lack of funding, a situation I'm sure many schools in my state (TN) as well as others are in. The sad fact is that if they're firing teachers from lack of money, there is no way they're going to risk anything on a great, innovative program like this.
Of course, this is what we were doing when we weren't using an "Interent Simulator" to learn how to use IE and Netscape. Living in poor Mississippi sucks.
If you can still find a copy of it. It's a dogfighting game - but of model airplanes. You fly around inside a house - under chairs and over railings etc. A very fun game and not bloody.
My other Slashdot ID is much lower.
BZFlag is a fun and simple network game that is a essentially a first-person shooter, but simply involves tanks - very much like Battle Zone, so parents shouldn't mind. It runs on Windows and Linux.
Just make sure the kids turn on the UDP option so they don't lag the other players out!
We've never received any hassles about which games we're playing (Q3, UT, DFLW), but then again, considering who shows up, they're probably playing the same ones at home, but with just a much higher ping time.
Sleep is just a poor substitute for caffeine, anyway. -Bob Lehmann
I had a girlfriend. I knew there was a logical explanation.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
While FPS is the preferred network game style of choice, it may be unpopular with parents (who like to blame their child's violence on someone other than themselves), so I would avoid them. I think Mechwarrior 4 is a great choice, but as a Precentor in the Mech Lord League, I'm probably biased in that regard. MW4 is a good mix of 'shooter' with strategy, with a small tad of design too. Civilization 3 is amazingly addictive, but I have no idea how it plays multiplayer.
Alpha Centauri maybe? It's not the NEWEST of games, but that doesn't preclude quality. Actually, one of the Star Control clones (may I suggest Timewarp?) would be really good, since matches can be fought in minutes, and is both addictive and extremely enjoyable to play multiplayer.
Why not also have games like Diplomacy, Risk, Axis and Allies, and other strategy board games for groups of people as well? It might be low tech, but a full game of Diplomacy is more fun than almost any computer game still.
We open the lab once or twice a month, and let the kids sign up for the lab computers (we have 34 of them), and play LAN games until the wee hours.
...
We play Age of Empires II, Starcraft/Broodwar, and MechWarrior IV.
Wow, who paid for 34 copies of each of those games? Seems like that would have bought a fair amount of teaching supplies...
Wait, you didn't pirate those games, did you? Probably not a good idea to mention it on Slashdot, then. That's okay, I'm sure Microsoft will understand.
-Mark
I actually think that adding a few select FPSs (like Tribes) that emphasize teamwork wouldn't be a bad idea
:).
Figures I'd screw up the one time I decide not to preview
At my workplace, which is a private K-12.
It was a class even.
Title: The Jollity of the History of PC Gaming
Synopsis: Promoting learning of games through looking at how games have
evolved in terms of development (wads replaced with pk3), what goes into
game creation (gameplay, AI, graphics, multiplayer, etc.), and explore
the mirth of the games themselves. We will look at multiplayer games in
these terms, as well as in terms of game genre, to better organize the
learning experience.
* Exploring the evolution of game development and what games are
compossed of (WADS to PK3, sprites to models, etc.)
* Looking at how game series have progressed and changed betwee
each sequal and the kind of thinking that goes into early stages of game
planning (gameplay, graphics, multiplayer support and the like)
* Discuss how game mods have helped progress game development and
help shape the gaming industry, as well as how game modifications occur
I and three student leaders worked on the structure, and we did it for 4 days. Quake3, UT, some Red Alert 2.
/start sarcasam "they'll kill everyone! because of the games" /end sarcasam i think it's a great idea, i live in a very small town, and if you aren't an alcoholic, there isn't much for recreation, i got about around 5 friends of mine together for little lan parties once a week or so, great way to spend time not doing what we teens shouldn't
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
ugh... i help out with a teeny tiny role playing convention in tennessee and we have a computer-gaming room of 6 computers we set up... we contacted various computer gaming companies asking for (A) permission and (B) gifts (like posters of upcoming games, promotional material, etc.) and for the most part they were very nice, but a few (in particular Blizzard) were complete psychos, demanding that we pay $1,000 / day in licensing just so we could play StarCraft on six computers. Not only that but they further threatened us that if they found out we were playing SC without paying we'd be slapped with a mondo law suit... So... uh... keep that in mind when you're doing this, OK? it's one thing for a club to get hounded but no one likes to see a school get harassed.
I think this is a great idea, it keeps kids off of the streets and their parents know where they are..
Why are the streets bad? Why shouldn't the kids be on the streets? If a school district has nice enough computers to play high graphic lan games I doubt they are in a bad part of town.
I personally don't have a problem with this, but my neighbors would. I think it's wonderful that your school can do this, but understand that it may only be temporary. Parents can threaten everything inside a school, no matter how good the intent or results.
The current political climate doesn't bode well for schools (no, I don't mean vote for Reps/Dems/Greens/etc). Schools are constantly being told what they can't do by parents, by the board, by courts, and by state and federal governments. It sucks. Much more time gets spent on what is wrong with our current education system than what's right and what will work in the long-term. Those are big political issues.
You are likely going to soon face some disgruntled parent who wants your gaming (with his/her tax dollars being used) to end. This person could be quiet about that, but likely the principle will get a phone call. And then if it doesn't end, the board of education will consider the matter. And they will kill it because by this point the initial parent got 100 other parents upset because the games being played are "evil and detrimental" to kid's development.
Mind you, the initial parent upset won't have ever let his/her child go to one of your gaming nights. Actually, this person is a terrible parent but likes to believe that he/she is a wonderful parent and thus has the right to tell every other parent how they should raise their own kids. That's just how these things work.
Really, though, I'm supportive of you. I wish we could do something like that here in my hometown with the HS kids. I think this could even be a neat way to get kids to interact with college students in CIS, engineering, etc as well as others in the tech industry. But it won't ever happen here--not on public grounds.
Oh--and you might want to find a few other games that are considered "non-violent". All the ones you listed involve some type of guns/missiles/bombs and the destruction of other's in the game. Obviously, first-person shooters are out--but maybe Civilization or Starcraft? Yeah, I know these have war as part of the game--but the goal could be considered as more constructive than simply shooting others. Heck, even silly computer card games could be "options" but not played--so at least students would be given a choice (might help when that parent complains).
Long, cute, or funny Sigs are just another form of over compensation, used by geeks, nerdz, etc.
Another use for programs such as this one:
:)
At the private high school i previously attended, they had something kind of like this. Every friday afternoon after school, the lab administrator would stay a few hours late and allow the "game club" to meet. "Game club" basically consisted of, they set up a special NT user named "games" that could only log in to the school network between 3 and 8 PM on a friday and that had special permissions to run nonstandard programs. The kids would bring in games and leave disk images of the CDROMs on the games account's network drives.
So, when game club started, all the kids that liked computer games would come in to the computer lab, install the game they decided to play that day off the network drive, have a little LAN party for a few hours on the school's really very fast computers, then delete the game off the hard drive and go home. It was fun. (They usually played Counterstrike.)
Why did they do this?
Because before the creation of games club, they had a real problem with kids coming in to rooms with school computers that had been left unattended, or the terminals in the corner of the library, and playing computer games. So the lab admin guy decided to implement a no-computer-games rule, and set up the game club as a safe-zone time the kids could just cut loose and play whatever they wanted.
The trick was, his condition was that he would only run game club if everyone agreed to follow the no-computer-games rule the rest of the time. Game club was the kids' reward/bribe for ensuring compliance.
This turned out to work beautifully. The lab admin guy couldn't be everywhere at once and police every computer, but now suddenly he had the game club-- which consisted of the school's most computer-saavy users-- doing the policing for him. If some new kid came in and started playing games, the other kids would notice and make him stop, because they were afraid of losing game club.
Unfortuantely, the year after i left, the lab administrator guy was moved to the local middle school and replaced with some new guy. The new guy didn't like the idea of game club, and ended it. I am told that in the time since then, it has become invariably true that if you go into the non-monitored computer lab during lunch, there WILL be kids playing networked computer games..
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Our computer teacher would give us passes to get out of study hall to play Wings of Fury! on our state of the art Apple IIe's. Anyone remember them! He also taught CAD/CAM but was off running around for the office most of the time so literally, out of the 9 weeks of class, all but 2 days were spent playing either Wing of Fury or Montazuma's Revenge... Ahhh... those were the days.
Ascalante: Your bride is over 3,000 years old.
Kull: She told me she was 19!
I know that most games have more of a competative focus than a cooperative one, but perhaps some of the strategy games with team options would be good. Also any head to head sports games would probably go over well with both parents and students alike. Organize a hockey/basketball/soccer tournament where there are timed games and brackets. Something like this could be done across several days.
I know that this is about fun and encouraging people to get into the computer lab, but as a school you should also be working on learning something. It could be team dynamics, leadership skills, creativity... There are lots of fun ways to foster these skill sthat often get left out of the daily curriculum.
Another thought I had when I read your post is that along with games, graphic design and music composition drew me into the computer lab at my high school. Perhaps designate a few of the computers on such a night to less competative and more creative pursuits or offer another night for the art geeks at your school.
These suggestions all come with the comment of GOOD FOR YOU! It is important that youth understand that computers are tools that can be used to achieve many goals. This encourages non computer users to get into computers and also helps computer geeks to develop social skills in an environment where they can feel comfortable and showcase the l337 5k1llz that they've spent years in their basement developing.
"A witty saying proves nothing." -Voltaire
i think this is a good idea because a lot of kids cannot afford computers with high speed connections, especially those with hardware to play current games.
this is good for them because they would be supervised and it would show students that school is about more then just learning.
spend money here
Are there other games that would be suitable for a school sponsored event?
Yep, Grand Theft Auto 3.
...in my high school, we were left with nothing more sophisticated than that Q-basic bananna game.
At least you could tweak the settings to throw "nuclear" banannas.....
I don't know about in schools, but I used to manage a fairly large (60+ employees) IT Department for a bank, and we used to have "UT Fridays." Basically, interested parties would use their lunch hour to play UT instead, as an endorsed activity (i.e., several people even higher in the food chain than myself were aware, and did not object.) Generally at least 4-8 people would jump in, sometimes including visitors from international offices - and a lot of people who didn't/wouldn't play would move to a location that they could watch the fun over someone else's shoulder.
Since we limited the festivities to about 30-45 minutes or so, it wasn't very adaptable for longer playing games like AOE or what have you, but it was a nice break.
Anyone who considers doing this (and can I stress enough how important it is to get management buy-in before attempting!!!) - should perform some network monitoring beforehand, you don't want to get canned for halting trading or the like. UT had a pretty tiny network footprint, dunno about other multiplayer games.
I'm not one to preach about the amazing benefits (or perils, for that matter) - of FPS games, but there's no arguing that we enjoyed a little enhanced teamwork & cohesion as a direct result. And there are few things as amusing as a dozen frantic people on speakerphone, trying to shout out battle commands (in team play) or howling in agony after a frag...
Here in Peoria, IL, we had a dance club for teens called Revelations -- up until last year. The name isn't suggestive; the owners were Christians and their motive in providing the club was exactly that. Dancing, peers, and no alcohol even available. But the community had concerns about adults being allowed in and dancing with teens, as well as the subtle nuances of curfew violations for different age brackets.
Eventually the place closed, although this year a different group of Christians -- teenagers, this time -- organized a replacement called Club Saturn. It takes place in a building on the riverfront intended for private group meetings once a month, charges admission to cover the cost of renting the place, and has plenty of chaperones on duty to make sure the dancing isn't too lewd and that nothing unconscionable happens on location. Curfews are enforced.
Nevertheless, the city had a bone to pick with them, too -- this time about the money issue. It seems to be cleared up, at least for now, and Club Saturn continues.
However, it makes me wonder if there's a general stigma about teens in this city having any kind of publicly-advertised party. I'm not even sure it's parents of the kids involved that are concerned; it's probably parents and adults without interested kids who make the noise. Then again, that's just the way people are.
My point here is that if you want to have a LAN-party club at a high school, you'll probably have to observe a few rules:
The best way to avoid any "Columbine" concerns is to keep it open to parents, monitored by adults, and free of profanity and virtual blood. You'll probably still catch flak, but at least you'll be able to deflect it.
We never did this at my school unfortunately.
But I agree with the other posters who've recommended strategy games. I suppose since this is a school you should try and set a good example - that is, use the facilities for education purposes. Strategy games are educational in a lot of different ways.
I'm partial to anything involving sci-fi so my recommendations are:
Stars! - this is even play-by-email meaning the players wouldn't even need to be in the lab at the same time.
Master of Orion II - it's old so you should be able to find it on the cheap.
Btw, though not multiplayer, Orbiter is a great game that could be very education since after all it's based on realistic physics.
Personally, I think this is a great idea, it keeps kids off of the streets
/.'ers!
Personally, I want my kids on the streets.... playing hockey. You haven't been a kid if you haven't yelled "CAR!" to get the hockey net moved out of the way.
:-) Seriously though, gaming at school a couple times a month is a cool idea. I'd rather him game with friends than gaming with a bunch of strange folk online who could be stalkers, pedophiles, or even
I'll have something intelligent to add one of these days...
I'm a former student at DBHS, and, we used to play Quake 1, StarCraft, Diablo, Shadow Warrior, Marathon, and other games before, during, and after school on a regular basis... Was a lot of fun, though, it wasn't exactly "school sponcered" either... And, it was in the days before Columbine, so, we didn't have many problems with parents complaining (partially because they didn't really know)... May I suggest just a "permission slip" that is signed by the parent, letting them know what games are on the list, and, asking them to go over with their child what is acceptable... Use feedback from those to compile a list that the lab uses... Get feedback first, based on a wide list, and narrow it down... Eventually, you'll come up with a list that the parents find acceptable, that the students should enjoy, as well...
-PhaseBurn Welcome to Linux country. On quiet nights, you can hear windows reboot.
I think this should be implemented nation wide:
... ... ;)
we can train
UT / Counterstrike: future soilders of america, specializing in counter terrorism (ha)
Star Craft / Panzer General: future leaders of america (hey, resourse mgmt will be so efficient in the government, we will have TONS of tax relief; and nobody can beat our military)
Crimson Skies / Wing Commander: future pilots of america (maybe will get picked up for "the last starfighter)
Sim City/Park/Earth/Zoo/Chicken farm: future pretty much everything of America
Capitalism: future M$ of America
Barbie's makeup party: future cosmopolitian of america
Lesure Suit Larry: future... erm...
Roger Wilco:
Fallout / 2 / tactics: i am sure it's necessary for future survival too... just not sure how yet
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Well, one day, he was in the lab alone, in a hacker forum somewhere on the net where he told everybody how l33t he was and how they should all bow before him. In about an hour the real hackers had the school networks shut down.
Xaotik Designs
... Five of us who were in AP Computer Programming played fun LAN games (Novel Netwars, registered Descent and unregistered Doom) after school, with the permission of three of the admins. We stayed until 4 or 5 PM about two days each week.
When we got a second computer lab -- with high-speed 486's -- a bunch of other people wanted to play games in that lab. Unfortunatly they were a rowdy bunch. They brought in pirated versions of all kinds of network games. They infected the lab with several viruses, and messed up several computers so the admins had to rebuild the entire network. There was an official ban on computer games because of this.
The admins -- who knew the original group of us five because we always got permission and played games with them, even let them win sometimes -- told us that we could hang around doing AP Computer Programming stuff in the 386 lab on the days we had class there. We did all kinds of fun stuff with the teacher, like build fractals and even built a ray-tracer that wrote to screen (in VESA 256 colors). 45 minutes after school ended, they would let us play games. This was with the school's permission -- but under very specific rules for 5 kids.
Now that I have a MS and am looking back at those schools, I think they were right on both counts -- the should have banned the games that they did. The games they banned were violent, stolen warez. They allowed games when: (1) both a teacher and administrator were DIRECTLY responsible for the students, (2) the students had already done their homework for one class, and even did extra work for fun, and (3) the teacher was present and ensured that all software was legal.
That was 8 years ago, but I think their policy was reasonable.
If you make sure the software is legal, make sure that network problems don't happen (viruses, hacking) and have a little supervision, it can be a great thing
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
5 years ago when I was still in HS, they had a quake tourney... don't know if it got canned or not.
rock on. if I ever work at a school, I'll be sure to push for something like this.
Looking for Book Reviews? Check out Literary Escapism.
... way back in '94-96. We had a small cluster of 386-33's in the library that were used for research. There wasn't any internet access on those at the time, but they were networked via Novell to a small server that had all the library researching programs.
:) Ahhh... the joys of having 5000 turns a day, alliances and backstabbings, maxed ships. :)
:) Bolo was a big drawing point to our little group. One of us would make a new map every month or so and we'd all play on it. Dang it, you're bringing back all these fond memories.
I was the resident computer nerd at the time and had gotten addicted to TradeWars on a local BBS. So, with some sweet-talking of the librarian in charge of the server and a promise to help out even more than I already was (I was the only one around that whole district at the time who could even remotely fix any of the Macs that were in some of the labs), I had TW set up on the system. For the two hours after school, a small group of us would play that. It was fun setting up the universe and all that and it got us talking and enjoying those dull hours between the end of school and dinner. (Except the nights some of us had to work on the school newspaper...)
We tried a bit of Doom and some of the other BBS network games, but the afternoons of TW will always stick in my memory.
We did that and also used the printer-networked Mac Classics to play Bolo... LOTS of Bolo.
So, yeah, keep the games nights. Make sure to enforce fair play and decently long breaks for socialization. And keep the gore to a minimum. There's plenty of fun games out there. And also don't be afraid to do contests with single-player games... for example, we'd have Sim City races... first one to 10,000 population and $5000 wins. The Sim games can be good for those. Just be creative and don't fall into the same game every time. That keeps the minds fresh and the options interesting.
-Jellisky
If the school has sufficient funds for computers of this calliber, then perhaps it has spent funds poorly. Give the teachers a raise. Learning typing, word processors, spreadsheets, or programming requires far less capable computers.
Good computers are just greater incentive to misuse the resource.
Of course, I've never actually played the game, so it might not be any fun, which is the most important factor in any game.
A few years later, I did some on-site after-hours tutoring for the school and noticed that all the PCJr's in my old computer classroom had been replaced by Pentiums, with a gaggle of students all engaged in a multiplayer session of Descent.
Now adays, nearly all the cool multiplayer games required a 3D card. I don't think the schools are paying for them, so I wonder what the new sensation is for the students...
-jc
Well, I'm just about to graduate from a very nice private boy's school in an undisclosed part of the nation - I won't say where, because the rest of the description would probably give it away.
In any case, our publications department (newspaper and yearbook) got a major upgrade this year, ending up with 7 G4's with 17" flat screens to share between us. (Hey, I said it was a very nice school). The yearbook team are incredibly dedicated and really love their work. I was on the newspaper.
In any case, as seniors we got a lot of authority: the chief of yearbook even got root access to our whole net, which was separated from the rest of the school's (PC-centric) system. Plus we all had passcodes to get into the rooms after hours (Yearbook spent over 40 hours straight there once).
I introduced Unreal Tournament (demo) to these systems.
Yearbook soon had LANparties going most days as soon as the last class ended. As long as it wasn't obvious and after school, none of the faculty associated with the room really minded. Of course they weren't there.
We were TRUSTED. DON'T let anyone do this who you can't trust.
Oh, and Unreal doesn't have to be installed on the Mac, just unzipped. That probably helped us as well. We have had a lot of fun this last year.
Chances are if these kids have the desire to play the games they would not have to wait on the school to allow it. I think that this a great idea. At least this kids in a moderated evironment when they do it. As for the the types of games I am sure that they lean to rpg games and not First Person Shooters. Think about it how many high school computers do suppose have a GeForce 3 or the like to push games like Quake the way they were designed to be played. Lighten up people. I whis I would have had a computer lab like this when I was in high school.
~~Some people never go crazy what truly horrible lives they must lead.~~ Charles Bukowski
This will last right up until the school district's attorneys find out it's happening.
All it will take is a single jackass parent to turn this into a huge expense for the school, which means a huge expense for anybody paying taxes in that district.
Until the problems with America's courts get fixed, I wouldn't recommend this.
Our Cisco Class has LAN parties. We play Quake, Unreal Tournament, Halflife, Counterstrike, etc. It's a lot of fun, although we only had two parties the whole year, and they were only from 4pm until 11pm. Not at all like the lanaholics LAN parties, but still fun. The Cisco teacher likes this kind of stuff. It's cool.
If the school had computers back in 1985
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
I am still fairly fresh out of HS and I think that is a great idea. It does keep the students of the streets and gives them something they do that they can really enjoy. At the same time as that is gives them a chance to see computers in action with full networking capabilities. They might even get into the field of computers just for that or even how to program their own games. I wish they had that at my school when I was there. I have seen a few saying Civilization 3. That would be a great game. It teaches you many aspects of how civs grew up and the issues that were delt with to a great theme and awesome gameplay. I remember as I was graduating my english teacher was declined while trying to create a class to teach HTML, for they said is was not anything that could be used in real life. Games may not be used in the business, but at least it gets them into computers. Saying how they pratically run most of modern day society.
Some that I enjoy:
Empire Earth
Think AoE but with somewhere around 12 ages to go through.
Cossacks
Again, similar to AoE but a much more limited time period.
Jedi Knight was a game I always had a lot of fun playing over a lan (any of the three versions). I spent way too much time playing JK with my roomates in college. One of the nice things about this, though it is a FPS, is the jedi powers. They add a whole new level of strategy to the game. Having a badass gun isn't near as useful when someone can just rip it out of your hands. :)
"All the things I really like to do are either immoral, illegal, or fattening."
- Alexandar Woolcot
Games I would use
- Basic Strategy
- Employs realistic physics (can base a lesson on predited/actual outcomes)
- Uses more the motor hand/eye skills (like math, history)
- Is cooperative in play (Very important here in a school setting!)
- also of someone is doing too well assign then to help those who aren't to encourage teamwork.
If the school has a programming class or club, they should have the opportunity during that time to do network program testing/development too (access to a networked system while learning programming is a good thing).
I think it is a tremendous opportunity for the kids to really learn something useful.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
By the way, is this school district, like most in this country, so obsessed with "zero tolerance" that they will not even let the students have a gun charm on their keychain, a picture of a gun, or hold their hand with the index fingure extended and the thumb up and say "bang"? If so is there a problem with this additude and lan based games, or is there some politically correct lan based game?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Personally, I think this is a great idea, it keeps kids off of the streets and their parents know where they are. What do you think?
Hmmm... I have no idea what the Slashdot population might think about school-sponsored computer gaming. I also wonder what members of the NRA think about gun control laws and what members of Planned Parenthood think about a woman's right to choose.
i live in south uk at a averae senior school (high school to those in US), we have 4 decent (ish) computer 'labs' with at least 20 boxes in, this would be great, if only our admins didn't suck all the pcs are win98 with some crappy winsuite program on to stop us messing around with them to much, the servers are NT4 (iirc), the hardware is alright its just the software is crappy, it takes longer to logon than it takes to boot (which takes longer than normal) also our AUP sucks, we're not allowed shortcuts to websites (any website) on our personal space, i was once banned for havin a shortcut to paint! if the admins had some decency then a 80 ppl odd LAN party would be great, say those with good grades can go on (i know it has been suggested already), the only problem is suppose is supervision, i dont think parental permission would be a problem for most games (most parents dont care what games we play) all i can say is that school is damn'ed lucky, ive never heard of any school in this area which has anything like that
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 is a good LAN game that your kids would like. It's pretty non violent and clean. it isn't just your people group versus others, lets face it age of empires and warcraft and starcraft are pretty much the same principal.
This also may attract a differant crowd of kids which i would consider a good thing.
controllers for this game are highly reccomended for gameplay ease. maybe a local retailer could donate some?
$.02
Hell yea! Or frat used to sign out the labs for "training" and run bolo tournaments!! (remember Bolo???)
Then Doom came out, and that's when the headaches started.....
One of the most important things our schools can offer to their students is applied learning, and computer games make that happen. Bravo!
Descent: FreeSpace
FreeSpace 2, which I cannot recommend enough, I love this game.
Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator (yeah, yeah, I hate Microsoft but that's still a fun game)
Any EA Sports games, NHL 2001 gets high personal recommendations
Heroes of Might and Magic 2 and 3
And on an encouraging note: What a great idea to do this. Maybe more schools will follow suit.
Little Johnny comes home from school and his mom asks him what he learned that day. Little Johnny replies "I smacked my bitch up in GTA3, I found some neat ways to get more accurate sniping action in Tactical Ops." Shortly there after little Johnny's parents started home-schooling him.
Order a few copies of America's Army from the U.S. army and let the kids play it. Do you really think the gov't is going to acknoledge that a game that they made is/would be harmfull to children? ;)
In junior high my computer class had a fun teacher who did units on video games as part of the curriculum the games we played
SimCity 2000
Tetris
Breakout
Puzzles
we would get zero for the assignments if he found any signs of cheating especially in Sim City 2000
and these wherenot short each game had about a week of it except Sim City where we spent a couple months on it
I was a sophomore in the same county as the Columbine when the shootings occured, and my school allowed small LANs. The other lab techs and I would install CS or UT after school was out some days and frag away for a few hours. The teacher over the labs freely let us do this. Moving it to a more formal thing where anyone (not just lab techs) could do this sounds like a great idea.
We're lucky to be allowed on the internet in our school. We can get a saturday detention if we're on the internet and not ok'd by the teacher or are on a "un-approved" site which is anything except about 15 educational sites. Although, we do have a somewhat lazy admin (I can't really say if that's good or bad, because most teachers make us save our data on the network) so she doesn't notice the extra traffic from playing a few LAN games of Quake II. ;-)
A quite realistic WWII flightsimulator called Aces High could suite you. It is free to download from the internet and allows free 8 player head to head ( the last I checked it out anyway ). The only downside I can think is that it requires a joystick to fly and is Microsoft Windows only.
// ville
We're a fairly large community college with roughly 29,000 students a semester.
The computer centers at the seven different campuses usually close at noon on Friday, leaving 30 to 40 PIII 800 machines sitting idle at each campus.
We didn't see any reason why gaming shouldn't be considered an intramural activity. The idea of campus vs. campus competitions really excited everyone. If support and interest grew, we'd be willing to challenge other colleges (your college sucks).
We've got one beefy server sitting at each campus, more than enough horsepower to host a large game. Our WAN is on fiber, with 100mb internal, which should provide some pretty good pings all around.
We haven't met any resistance with the concept and everyone thinks it's a great idea.
Licensing is the difficult part. While educational discounts are available for most productivity software, games are a different story. I don't think Quake III or Medal of Honor go that way. Things are pretty tight all over and the budget isn't looking good. Money is the only thing holding us back at the moment.
I gave myself to Jesus, but now he never calls
The closest we got to this was teacher sanctioned playing of SimCity in my business classes. (Yes we we're graded on this, and yes kids tried to cheat) And of couse the (non-teacher sanctioned) ROTT fragfests at lunch.
Jason
There is a war going on for your mind.
I can understand why some would be sensitive to the whole FPS game genre (first person is more graphic). But why not allow them to play any FPS game as long as they don't kill anyone. I'm thinking of games like Deus Ex and Thief where it is possible to play the game without ever killing. Then you can argue you're actually teaching the kids something (Victory through Non-Violence).
About six years ago my dad was deputy headteacher at a school in Northampton, UK and during the summer holidays they would let the kids who lived nearby and went to the school come in and use the LAN. I remember playing Doom (the school had the full version) with some of the sixth formers when I was ten. I have no idea if it still goes on though.
Unless you are playing free as in beer games, who pays for the licenses? Do the students bring in the games and delete them when they are done? Have fun but watch your back :)
prosebeforehos.com
Although it was quite a few years ago, from grades 7-9 on wednesdays, we were allowed to go down to the computer lab, and from about 3 until 5 we were allowed to play games. There was alot of warcraft, and decent being played (on 486 25's and 33's) Inorder for us to be able to play doom, I needed to open up the wad file, and edit out all of the blood, I changed it to a green goo. I think that schools should allow students to play games on their computers, outside of school hours. All schools have sports teams, drama clubs, and band groups, but for the student who may not the best basketball player, and not outgoing enough to act well, they really dont have any way to have an identity belonging to the school. Schools allow use of their fields, their gym's, and their class rooms for extra ciricular activity, why should the computer labs be any different. By allowing students to play games on their computers, a school provides another way for a student to accell, and be accepted by their peers.
Back in The Dark Ages when I was in HS, our computer lab was a trio of teletype terminals with paper tape readers hooked into the district mainframe. These are what we used to learn machine language and Basic programming. What fun!
Still, after hours, we would have game time, playing Trek and CivWar for hours on end. I still have a yellowing roll of printout where I managed to change history by getting the South to win after 6 battles....
Back then, before the two Steves started playing around in their garage, computers were pretty much a brand-spankin' new thing. Discovering they could be used for more than moving the contents of register A to register B was part of the familiarization process. There was an academic justification to playing games, no matter how tenuous. Today, kids already know that computers can be used for a myriad of things. Games nights, no matter how fun, don't really have the same justification of earlier times.
Personally, I think having a games night is a fine idea, from a purely social aspect. But it's a much harder sell to school boards and PTAs...
We had an AD&D club in highschool. I'm lookin forward to this one for bringing back the junkies.
I would have liked to include first person shooters (for the gameplay), but I'm limited by parental concerns, and perceptions in the community.
Simple just use Textmode Quake! I'm not sure if it's multiplayer but I don't think the parents will complain about it being too graphic!! (sadly enough that pun was intended)
I stole this Sig
That's a great idea, certainly better than those traditional gym lock-ins where you are off the streets but hurling a dodge ball at the geek's face. Of course, you don't get as much exercise.
Have you considered taking this one step further and having your kids play against others on the net as well? Perhaps a our-high shcool vs. your-high school game night?
I was at a school that had several Apple IIs for the computer lab, and they let students come in after school to play Choplifter, or whatever other games they had at the time. I thought it was the coolest thing ever. This just sounds like an extension of that idea, I'm definitely all for it.
Palaces, barricades, threats, meet promises
I went to a private, parochial high school (over 10 years ago, just to date myself), and they'd worked a deal where they bought some computers with some state money, provided those computers were NOT to be used for any religious purposes.
I took great delight in writing wee basic programs that looked like this:
10 i=1
20 print "I prayed to Sheeba", i, " times today!"
30 i=i+1
40 goto 20
This infurated him to no end, which was great fun.
However, I my program never prayed more than 65,535 times in one run. Took me a while to figure that one out.....
The director of technology in the CS department of my University organized LAN gaming every friday night. As most geeks tend to be socially inept (no offense intended for those who are not) this was a great outlet as in addition to the gaming, we would also hook up a VCR/DVD player to the proxima projector and run movie night in another room. It provided a great atmosphere for all of us (especially those of us who started college at 16 or younger) and provided the opportunity to forge lasting friendships that exist very well outside of the hallowed halls of education.
Heck, my clan (Clan Flying Bovine) still gets together every few months to hold poker parties and most of us graduated 2+ years ago and are scattered all over the place.
-- You don't shoot to kill, you shoot to stay alive.
Back in the day (okay, it was only about 10 years ago) we used to be allowed to use the mac classics (one of the first color computers I ever used) to play network games of Bolo (a tank strategy game) in the computer lab after school for an hour or two every wednesday. It was great fun, although they occasionally kicked us out for getting a little too rowdy (the computer lab was right next to the library).
Quite possibly the coolest RTS game in existence.
It's about time that schools started doing something like this. I wish my HS had done this back in the day. We had to sneak into the college computer labs across town to game, and then we'd usually get in trouble with the 2.5-0 (campus security). Kudos for giving kids something fun and safe to do!
Sapere Aude - Homer
At my highschool, if you're caught on a website that has nothing to do with your class, you lose your computer privledges for a month. If you play a shockwave game, you're off for the rest of the year. If you try to install a game from home, you recieve a suspension and lose computer privledges for the year.
The paraniod lackeys at my school are scared to death of anything we might do to our pentium 133s. DeepFreeze is on every computer in all of the labs (except the one iMac lab, but those things have 32 megs of physical RAM on the most bloated system install i've ever seen - they're pretty much crippled to begin with).
Come to think of it, the only decent machines that we have in my three year old highschool (they spent how many 10s of millions building it?) are the 10 our IT department put together specifically for the administrators - they have 1ghz pentium 3s and Geforce 3s. Nobody under the vice principle can use them. The students, on the other hand, are stuck with horribly equipped machines that can barely run Netscape - this comments page would take about 60 seconds to render- or the CISCO router config utility - keyboard lag of about 10 seconds.
So, basically, your students are very lucky. I think you have a good idea. But if we even suggested doing this at my highschool, we'd probably violate our acceptable use policy.
"Upon attaching the waterblock to my penis, I began to notice that I know nothing about computers." -- JRockway
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I agree with your assertion that teacher salaries are generally sub-standard, but many schools also have separate technology budgets that are funded from disparate sources. A large endowment from a wealthy donor, for instance, may be earmarked solely for technology investments rather than general fundage. This would effectively tie the school's hands where redirecting the funds is concerned. Unfortunate, but sometimes true.
Shit, 34 computers? What do you have those for, an expected glut of exchange students? When I drove through lone pine (~40min south) a few years back their graduating HS class had four students: Valedictorian, Magna Cum laude, Cum laude, and Billy-bob.
Is that one computer lab for the entire district? Or do you buy computers in order to teach classes once every four years to satiate the board of education?
Bishop is a cool town, a great place to stop on the way to mammoth, but crikes.
to email me: take my
What hypocrisy!
Everyone thinks someone ELSE will have a problem with it. Well what if they put up some Christian games or Jihad games in Arabic? Is that cool. What about a game like GTA3 where you get to mow down people and beat them with a bat. Is that cool? What about a pack that modfies Quake where all the bad guys are Rabbis. Good so far?
"It's not that I have a problem with your anti Canadian grafitti, but I have to give you a ticket because it's supposed to be in French too - - " (Eugene Levy in Canadian Bacon)
Yes, i have this problem, I am a computer nazi at my school and we have a standard NT and 98 system, (with linux boxes for the lab staff) and we have the problem with kids only playing games. The problem is that web games, although more stupid, are wasting the bandwidth that other people really need. To disable java is not the answer, and i really hate blocking sites, e.g. macromedia (although if any kid with half a brain can get to whatever site they want). What i would like to do is have a LAN party some day after school, as a school function, but i know the administration would not act favorably upon this. Also it would be difficutlt to keep kids from not playing the games during school hours. However, if there was a way to lock the programs up (without using Fortres or somethign stupid on thos 98 machines) that would be very neato, and then we could possibly have a cooelr student body and population. Although i dont think that many people (e.g. the district) really likes Quake 3 all that much.
-a
"If a man watches 3 football games in a row he should be declared leagaly dead" - A
I think that is the first time I have EVER heard that statement. I know he is talking about the school computers, but he has to realize that these kids probably aren't newbies to the gaming arena.
I sure do miss the company-wide 1/2 hour lunchtime Quake Mega Team Fortress games at my old job. We even had a map of the floor plan that our office was on. *sniff*
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
... and load up M.U.L.E. Or, even older, Hammurabi.
In my old high school, some departments would hold one huge one or two day LAN party right after finals were over, after each semester. In order to come, you had to do only two things: 1) Get a "C" or better in all classes, and 2) Not be caught using the computers for games during class times during the year. That way, students had a good reason not to mess around with things they shouldn't be during the school year, and then the students (and even a few teachers) would go all out at the end of the year. Having games installed didn't matter because the computers would all be reimaged at the end of the week from the images downtown (the entire district ran on a Gigabit network where the central office downtown had a huge NOC, which connected to the 5 middle and high schools, which in turn each connected to 4 or 5 smaller elementary schools).
-James
Millersville University in PA opens up the CS lab most every Friday of the year for some gaming. Mostly people play FPS's such as CS or mohaa, but occassionally a hacked war3 beta makes its way in.... My highschool wouldn't have ever considered this, a bunch of us installed BW on the programming machines my senior year but only played for about a week (always during class cuz it was low-level c++ stuff that we all finished too quickly) before the admin caught on and deleted it :-(
Huntin for frags since 1994
Back in the day of Doom2, DEcent and Marathon firends and I would break into my high school's largest (sweeeetest) computer lab and play till 3am.
The notion of school teachers letting me near computers any more then the minimum required to learn was inthinkable...much my own fault...I did a lot of "learning" on those systems.
"Oooh! That's what the System Folder does!"
JLC
You ARE showing your age :)
Say, do you remember when Scorched Earth was still called Bombs and it had that bug where a shot at 800 power would tunnel through dirt indefinately?
In my highschool ma guy got expelled for hacking because he changed the dos prompt to read " Rules:>". So I'd say we probably didn't have a liberal computing environment.
When I was in High School, we played Doom II, Descent, and Duke Nukem in our programming class. We had people working on levels for Doom that looked like the school. We had a bunch of really crappy old 286s, but we had a few Pentiums that could handle it.
In Middle School, we played Sim City 2000 and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis in homeroom, science, and English.
In Elementary School, we played Wolfenstein 3D, Nibbles, Gorillas, Oregon Trail, Number Munchers, Carmen Sandiego and a whole bunch of pirated Apple II games in various classes.
We never had a game night, instead we had teachers who would not care about what we did, or who would let us play every once in a while, or who would make us play educational games.
t'nera semordnilap
. . . except it was called "CCNA Training"
Libraries are starting to offer game nights, and might have ideas about games that have a parental seal of approval. The ones I know about offer mostly sims and low- or cartoon-violence RTS games.
If the school has sufficient funds for computers of this calliber, then perhaps it has spent funds poorly. Give the teachers a raise. Learning typing, word processors, spreadsheets, or programming requires far less capable computers.
I would say that if a school doesn't have computers better than these requirements, then it spends funds poorly:
Starcraft/Broodwar:
Windows 95, 98 or NT 4.0
Pentium 90MHz or higher
16MB RAM
80MB of free hard disk space
DirectX compatible SVGA video card
2x CD-ROM drive
Mechwarrior IV:
Pentium 2 300MHz processor
Windows 95/98/ME/2000
64Mb ram
650Mb hard drive space
8xCd rom
Age of Empires:
Windows 95/98
166Mhz Processor
32MB Ram
4X CD-ROM Drive
200-300MB free HD space
16-bit PCI/AGP Graphics Card
16-bit Sound Blaster compatible Sound Card with Speakers
256 Colour Monitor supporting high colour(16-bit) at 800x640 resolution
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
The game is dirt cheap now. Also pick up the game sack, its $10 from store.bungie.com and has all their original Mac games, which will run great on just about any powerpc level machine.
Myth, for me, really brought in some more immediate challenges than starcraft, because it wasn't just build orders, etc. It was about physical placement of units, who had the higher ground, etc.
And get them into making levels. My highschool had a 3D design course, a programming course, and a bunch of other things, and it would have been really cool if one could be able to tap into all of those resources and work on developing a mod for a game. There is the usual "create a q3a map of your highschool, down to the principles office housing C'thon" theme, but I don't know how well that will go over post columbine. But it could make the meetings more exciting, as each month they meet, and work on / debug their level, with a party thrown for them at the end of the year.
And then all their work would be rolled into next years project, so students following them would have to improve on that, etc.
I tried getting my school to do this a couple years ago. I wrote a proposal for using the computers as a fundraiser; $3 per person per day, and would be open during the weekends, with procedes going towards our technology budget for better computers. The proposal got all the way through the district, until, as I was told, "the District Executive of Saying No To Things" said no.
Anyway, the University of Washington has a very loose policy; as long as someone else doesn't need the computer, you can play games on it. There are Starcraft and Half Life games going all the time.
I am currently a student attendint Archbishop Moeller High School in Cincinnati, Ohio and every once in a while they set up a similiar sort of gaming deal on the network we have there. A few guys bring in their X-Boxes and hook them up to the LAN and play Halo for hours. However, I do not partake in such Microsoft rituals.
I am intern/ net admin at a private all boys high school. A few students orginized the logistics of the event and requested that all students raise like $35, most of which was given to the red cross. We have 800 students in the school, and about 50 showed up for the event. We brought most of the larger TVs into the library and set up a gallery of video game machines. We had a local supermarket donate a rediculous amount of food. 3 of us (IT pros) worked the event, i was in charge of LAN games. Unreal Tournament was the most popular game, and I even had a chance to play and frag the floppy jamming little punks for a few hours. We had a few kids playing age of emipres and we had a few games of Starcraft going. We had a great chill out room with a projector, surround sound and movies. We even came very close to landing DDR (dance dance revolution). The event was great, and although it was a pain to get things going at first, once the show was on the road, things ran well. All students had parents sign a release form. Since I work at a private school, I suppose we are a special case, and our students are usually very trustworthy and well behaved, but from my experience, students eat this up and understand just how special those kind of events are. Also, I don't think you'll run into too much trouble with the geeky class of student, aside from playing techno just a little too loud. Scott
While I was going to high school there, we had a computer club which was set up, which was suposed to primarily be for geeks to meet in teh maclab and work and learn about computers and stuff like that...
needless to say, by the first meeting it had become a gaming club, with network games of marathon, doom and other assorted games.
became somewhat popular, but after a while i believed it ceased to be.
It not only was a great social activity, but it was also a very good way to relieve stress from the school day.
Hopefully its something that will be coming back, if the new administration isnt having too much of draconian policies still being implemented
Stop over-analyzing your analizations
We have had very successful gaming times at my school, the TBA CTC. The only restriction we have had has been making us use headphones. (Those with 300 watt amps just to play counter-strike ruined it for us all. The neighbors called the cops to make us turn it down.)
DRINK DUFF (responsibly) DRINK DUFF (responsibly) DRINK DUFF
Keep kids off the street!!, you've got to be joking, the only kids that will be kept off the street is kids that WEREN'T on the streets in the first place.
Hell, these are the kinds of kids you want to put ON the street!!, gaming once in a while is ok, but asking kids to spend their evenings at school until the weee hours playing video games is pretty much condemming them to become unsocial gamers.
Worse thing is, if school is emphasing gaming instead of say programming ( or say unix, etc.), these kids will end up like many people in their 20's who still spend hours in front of computers and have no real technical skills to show for it.....
oh wait, some people I know have MSCEs...
Back when I was in middle school (I'm graduating HS in 3 days) we would have maybe a couple days a month dedicated to Marathon 2. (These were generally Fridays when we had finished the week's curriculum) Was it unproductive? Probably. But my fondest memories of middle school were having heated debates with my teacher about why the missile SHOULD have hit him. It was great fun. When Infinity came out, we made our own levels and physics models. This was all on Performa 5400s or something like that. And it was educational, in a way. Whenever a computer wasn't on the LAN, we had to troubleshoot it so we could play. I'm still not sure how the administration allowed this, but my guess is that they didn't know about it. By the time the Thurston HS shooting happened (here in my home state), I think we stopped playing. But what fun it was.
heck yeah ... this is just a fun game overall ...
09
Then you get imagination, problem-solving, and interaction all in one. Yeah, yeah, Dungeons and Dragons is Satanic, so say the Fundies. What about science fiction/real world role-playing games like Traveller or GURPS Time Travel? The latter could even be educational. "Your team's mission: prevent the First World War. Where do you go? What do you do?" Get kids focused on using imagination instead of letting the computer do it for them.
Potentially Neverwinter Nights could be a good game to run. There's lots of educational angles that could be played on this like:
- Developing new modules
- Programming scripts
- New 3D skins and frames (art)
- Developing plots and story lines
- Roleplaying (acting)
Also, the department could develop some of its own modules that emphasize problem solving instead of just killing demons. I think this could be really cool. My high school region had a competition using the pen & paper Robotech RPG. I thought it was a great way to combine fun with problem solving. Neverwinter Nights could offer the same thing with a computer interface.
Who said Freedom was Fair?
Free, cross platform, (semi)educational http://www.inl.org/netrek/netrekFAQ.html
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
As I post this, I'm at a meeting for my schools computer gaming club.
We play a couple games, including some strategy games like Myth II with blood turned off and Tribes one. We are somewhat limited by the hardware we have, but our schools PTO has given us some money to buy games and upgrade our video cards.
We had no problem starting the club, and its a lot of fun with 15 or 16 members.
One of the concerns that the faculty advisors have is of course, blood, and liscencing. We have to buy every game we get so we dont get audited or something horrible like that, and to play an M game we need to turn off blood and get parental permission.
When I joined the club here at my school, I was concerned that we might be shut down for the reasons you mentioned in the question, but its actually not such a big problem.
Our school's webiste is here.
Idle hands are the devil's workshop, but idle minds are much worse
People shouldn't play computer games because it makes people violent. The Romans played computer games which made them violent, that is why they liked seeing people spill blood in the arenas. The crusades began when some people were playing doom deathmatches and a fight broke out and all hell broke loose. World War 1 was caused by people playing computer games and becoming violent because of them and starting the first World War. If Hitler didn't spend his childhood learning violence through video games, we wouldn't of had World War 2. The muslims want to have a jihad against the christians because they have been playing too much Quake. India and Pakistan are at war over the Quake vs Unreal controversy. Come on people, it is obvious that computer and video games are the reason there is violence in this world. Without them, this world would be a much better place. How stupid are you not to see this? -Your local soccer mom.
At the same time they began offering a digital art class which was basically just adobe photoshop and illustrator, of course the teacher teaching this didn't know anything about either (nor much about computers in general).
So in our off time in the class we installed Quake2 and would play on the LAN. After about a month of watching us blow each other into gibs, the teacher decided that said game was too violent and so on and that we should find something else to do.
Our solution: Set the weapons to 'middle' handedness, which effectively removed the gun from the screen. We told her we were playing 'tag'. Once while watching over my shoulder I gibbed a friend and she even commented 'oh, did you tag him?'
She never had a problem with it, so long as the gun wasn't visible.
-
When I was the president of my highschools computer club, we ran a fund raiser. after school for 50 cents students could come in and Doom their hearts out (or any other game) on the network. Made a heck of allot of money that way.
We were shut down after about a month when they caught onto us. (never did get a good reason why we couldn't)
I would rather be ashes than dust!
At my old high school (www.wies-hs.odedodea.edu) our tech teacher would allow games during lunch. It was great! People who looked at us as being geeks would stop by and get intrested in what was going on, frag a few and check out the electronic projects that were on display. I think that help defuse the stereotye of geeks.
Best part was in the spring he would bust out the grill and everyone would bring food!
I know that a lot of teachers did not like our tech teacher for his style, but he were the top DoD tech school and he did get the top US teacher back in '98, I think.
Looking back I wish I took more electronic courses.
hmm... for fun I enjoy launching DDoS attacks against 127.87.42.5
I graduated from St. Paul's in Louisiana about 2 years ago but while I was there I spend one period a day acting as the assitant sys admin. As such, I had a lot of sway with the computer teacher and the sys admin and convinced them to open up the library (which the computer labs were a part of) to allow a bunch of guys to set up a LAN there every few weeks. Since the school computers at the time were Pentium 133s it was very much a BYOC affair but still a lot of fun.
First -- I wouldn't discount board games. In particular, _Diplomacy_ and _Empires in Arms_. The former is quite simple, and emphasizes the human element -- naive people get crunched, but so do obvious monomanical conquerors once their neighbors gang up on them. The latter is incredibly complicated and requires thinking ahead (e.g. want to build a fleet? Well... it'll be finished ONE YEAR after you start, whereas militia are available in a month, regulars in three, and cavalry in seven or so), plus logistics (Want to invade Russia? In winter? Hehehehe... BWAHAHAHAHA you'd better guard your supply depot chain well, and pray for a QUICK victory).
Computer... well, there's Master of Orion I/II (pretty flexible, cooperation helps considerably, not too complex), Space Empires IV (more flexible, more complex, logistics do matter somewhat) and their ilk. Balance of Power is ancient, but may be interesting... Netrek is pretty fast-paced, and cooperation is vital against a team with even the slightest amount of clue. Rogue Spear/Urban Ops requires close cooperation between teammates, and severely penalizes gungo-ho macho-wannabes -- you can be downed in an instant, and you're not going to respawn. Bolo is another game that requires some thought and teamwork, and it's been cloned for the PC.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
your brother's school's computers are almost as good as the computers I use at home and at work...
I can see (not that I agree with it) where school administrators may feel that there is no need for higher-end computers in the classroom, especially in elementary and middle schools. There aren't too many games that are designed solely for educational purposes that are huge resource hogs, and P1s can still run older word processors, spreadsheets, etc. Plus, it doesn't take much of a computer at all to surf (unless you have mod points here, but that's another story).
As for gaming on the older machines, I can still play RollerCoasterTycoon, Civ 3, and SC3K on my Pentium 300 with 128 megs of RAM and a non-3d video card, and I can run word processors, databases, and compilers on it (as long as I'm not trying to, say, play MP3s on it at the same time).
Denver Isuzu Suzuki
I want to come out and show my support for this idea - with all the problems young kids face when left to their own devices, this is a constructive, positive, and economical way to provide entertainment for them. I agree with many posts that Civilization would be a great game - especially III, which really makes you think about creative ways to win a game (the only drawback is that it usually takes a really long time to win - saving games will become a priority)...
We have one each semester. for the last few semesters I have been organizing them..
;-)
This year I made a school map and we had a deathmatch and counterstrike in our school. We informed the kids it was purely for entertainment and that it shouldn't be taken seriously..
We really did push our bounds but even the administration at the school came and had fun.. We also hooked up a playstation 2 to a projector and played it as if it were a BIG screen..
It was all in good fun.
My high school had it.. sort of. We had the Computer Game Club. Anyone could join, and on Wednesdays(when we had half days), and occasionally on other days when we could get permission, we would load up our special game club hard drives(which the school provided) into the lab computers, and game for hours. All it took to get permission to do it was that we agree to review all the games we played, so the school could justify that we got something of value out of it. I myself was the president of the club for about 2 years, and it was great. I think all schools should have something of this sort.
FPS, Quake era graphics engine with some very interesting DM maps, and no blood. Google still has www.nerfarena.com indexed but either the server is down, or my firewall/proxy server thinks that it is too work-unrelated.
Of course, at the time it was 4 man Doom matches, and we only had 12 computers, but yes, some other schools do this. They weren't promoted or anything, but if you came to the computer lab during the week leading up to it, the lab instructor would tell you about it.
A Trenchwars Site
It's an old networked game, but has the most teamwork oriented play I've seen. It's also less likely to irritate the "doom causes violence" crowd.
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
They should create a lab full of Apple II's and get some Oregon Trail action going on. ;)
Wouldn't it be great if that game could be networked? Then it'd be a race to see who reached the end first.
The coolest voice ever.
do you have liceneses for all the games? or ensure that the students bring them? otherwise you're up a shit creek (sp?)
-- Note: These Comments are Generated by ME! Not You! ME!
We play Age of Empires II, Starcraft/Broodwar, and MechWarrior IV.
These are clearly bad games for high school students to be playing, here's why.
Age of Empires II:
This causes kids to think they can become a King and run a monarchy. Eventually they will build farms, trade pottery with other local towns and gather up hoards of archers and sailing vessles to take over the world.
Starcraft/Broodwar:
This will make high school students think that breeding hoards of zerglings or refining their psionic attack powers will be a solution to all their problems.
MechWarrior IV:
I shouldn't even have to talk about this one. The last thing we need is 15 year old johnny thinking that jumping in the 10-story-tall 2 legged family war machine is a good way to vent daily frustrations.
Instead you should be teaching kids to play things like football. Kids need to be taught that they will never be able to accomplish anything in life if they can't physically tackle someone to the ground or body slam another student. Also, kicking an oblong sack between two vertical posts is the only way a kid will know that he will be someone important someday...
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
What the heck is QT?
Loren Osborn
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Of course the thing is that most of the adults that are interested in computers have their own computers at home. So mostly it was the kids coming in after school and playing games. Many grumbled about how the center was becoming an arcade, but if it weren't for the kids coming in we would have next to no one there. The centre didn't have to pay for the games since the kids would bring them in. When a major release came out like starcraft or quake 2 the place was packed. Those kids were good too... some of those capture the flag games were intense.
People would complain about how the games were violent. But I say screw it. I know most of those kids would have never had hung out with each other if it weren't for the games, and some of these kids were the really "bad" kids. I didn't really know which ones because they were all polite to me. I guess they knew I'd kick them out if they gave me any trouble.
I don't know how much they got from the games, but I know they learned about teamwork. throw 8 kids in a game of quake and you'll soon see teams form pretty quickly.
Also the kids placed a value on the computers (more value than they placed on anything else at the school). None of the kids would do anything to harm those computers and many did school projects which involved the computers. I gave some of the kids (the ones who beat me at chess) administrator priviledges. They were more than happy to help in the administration of the computers which made my job much easier.
Unfortunately after I finished working there some of the kids have since emailed me to tell me that the centre "sucked" after I left. I guess the people running the place now aren't as helpful in installing new games and the computers are beginning to show their age. And I was forced to change all the passwords before i left since they thought the kids would use their priviledges to damage the systems (yeah, right).
Maybe I'll volunteer some time to get things back going when I go home later this year... I'll have to brush up on my Starcraft skills first though :)
my highschool has about 400 computers, they are all dells, 450mhz 128mb ram, 100bt network. they run unreal tournament pretty good too. geek dream
we used to play ut after school with about 15 people and it was really sweet. i attempted to organize tournament night and charge admission to do some fundraising - for a good cause. well, everything went well (we got 30 people signed up with clans and everything) until the principal freaked out and banned unreal tournament. only game we could play was one that doesnt involve any people dying, firearms, or any cruelty whatsoever. that means all fps, even strategy games are out. not even worms were allowed! worms! game of blowing up little pink things with bazookas! so thats about it... we can play something like... chess? SUX!
High Heat Baseball, Civilization II, Tom Clancy's Politika, Command &Conquer Red Alert II, Age of Kings II, and Baldurs Gate II as well. I would go one step further and get the computer teachers involved and offer extra credit or courses that focus on creating new scenarios or levels.
I have to say I'm really impressed with your district's think outside said box approach toward learning.
Have a part of the event where students who have written their own video games or video game mods can demo them... it'd be encouragement to do something educational!
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
We did it too, against the wishes of the policy, but we had an OK from the teacher. See, once they installed a new Security program on the network after winter break, it wouldn't let us complile anything. So we hacked it.
You already have a lot of experiences recorded here...here's mine.
/.ers might think everyone does this, but a better understanding of the hardware/software relationship (for example) would be a very real side effect.
When I was in High School ('87-'91) we had lunch-hour gaming. However the games were paid for entirely by individual dues (the school didn't pay for the games). The games were pretty tame at that time (Hardball!, Impossible Mission II, etc.), so the issue of violence in the schools was hardly relevant.
It was a good time, and a number of people became much more familiar with computers than they would have otherwise. And even though computer literacy is obviously much higher now, I'd imagine that still high schoolers get educational benefit from the experience. For example, understanding the difference that certain hardware makes. How come this machine with 128MB RAM and a 64MB video card performs better than one with 256MB RAM and a 32MB card (as a very weak example)? Maybe try to get them to tweak their settings to maximize framerate. We
Maybe some games allow for the creation of 'bots. (God knows, I don't know many games any more.) Set up bot tournaments! Very educational.
This does split up the party a bit, but bringing a 4-player console and a party game can be pretty fun. And emulators can be all kinds of fun, all you need is a CD full of ROMs and a few gamepads.
This does bring up another point... Can't PC developers make a good FPS that doesn't involve committing gruesome acts?
A rolling stone is worth two in the bush!
are you insane? the kids who are are whining about how jumping is ruined in the newest counterstike patch are hardly out smashing windows all night.
-=tonyt=-
It's a pretty cool game, and it has a whole lot of historical background, for example in the tutorials. I don't know how well it will run on a 4MB S3 video card...but as has been pointed out by several people, the upgrading of computer labs today is facilitated by fairly reasonable prices for good and fast hardware. Soon PIII's will be becoming more and more prevalent, I imagine.
After Columbine in April 1999 (I think), we quietly put a stop to the games for the rest of the school year, and the kids were surprisingly understanding. They really didn't protest much, and a couple of them really agreed with us putting a hold on it, because a number of these guys fit the Trenchcoat Mafia profile, if you know what I mean.
That May, we passed a $40M bond issue and immediately upgraded that computer lab to 40 Dell P3/450's running NT with 128 megs of ram. Of course, we didn't get the machines until June, but it was a pretty high priority to the district to get that lab up and running so they could show it off to the taxpayers (smart idea). Instead of hiring some consultants to come in and set up the lab, and instead of doing everything with my dad (who's the building tech coordinator), we contacted these kids over the summer and told them the machines were in. About five of them showed up at nine in the morning (which is a serious accomplishment for any male high school geek in the summer) and spent the next two days setting up machines, throwing away packaging, illegally dumping cardboard in nearby recycling containers... willing to work their asses off because they knew, when the lab was set up, they were going to have an unbelieveable LAN party on machines that were (at the time) much better than anything they had seen before. And we did, and it was great.
What we (my dad and I) realized is that not only can high school students have incredible technical abilities (which we already knew), but many of them are willing to bust ass for the benefit of the school if they have some sort of ownership in the situation. Our school's tech support is largely done by students from my tech classes during periods when they'd normally have study hall, and not only do we save unbelievable amounts of money (we have over 600 PC's running the whole variety of Windows - our tech support issues are constant and almost overwhelming), but the kids who are doing the work are learning skills they can actually use at home and quite possibly in a job some day.
So, to get back to the original question - I would recommend making sure that if you let these kids play games, get some work out of them in return! The best way to justify letting them play games is to tell your critics, "Hey, I'm letting these kids play Unreal Tournament because they spent the last week fixing machines and installing software for us, and that saved the district time and money." If you play it off as a reward, you can do a lot for those kids (our principal at the time bought a new motherboard for the kid who programmed our attendance system) and few people will complain. Also, always get the blessing of your principal before you do anything, and you might want to consider having another teacher or even a parent chaperone around so you don't get accused of being a pedophile trying to keep young boys at the high school until the wee hours of the evening.
Incidentally, we tried to put together a Quake II tournament in our high school two years ago where the kids would have to pay a couple bucks, and half the money would go to the winner while the other half would be used to purchase new equipment, but we couldn't get enough kids that were willing to put up the money (like $5), and a couple higher-ups balked at the idea of students participating in a "deathmatch" tournament. So, it didn't happen, but I bet I could have pulled off a StarCraft tournament this year if I'd had time.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. -- Gandhi
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. -- Gandhi
My high school does it. One teacher always let kids do "stuff" (as long as he didn't know about it), but this year, they hired a college kid to supervise the labs. That means we have a lot more freedom to mess around with the computers, and if we mess one up, he just images it. We actually have an "internet club" that meets almost everyday after school (except for Wednesdays when our web design club uses the lab). We play Half-life, starcraft, and DoD. The school owns about 10 copies of half-life. We have a computer lab for each department, all running 800Mhz PCs. A few labs even has All-in-one Wonders installed on each machine, and they are all hooked up to the TV. All in all, it's nice not having to always follow our acceptable use policy, which is probably more restrictive that most schools.
So much so I donated web hosting to the organization mentioned below!
In fact I agree with the 'keeps them off the streets' idea, though I feel that in reality it is more about teaching them to be comfortable with technology. My two boys go to a local Boys and Girls Club after school. They have a nice computer lab and I know my kids play game there (AoE, *Tychoon, etc.) Strategy gaming is a good thing for developing minds. I played my share of "Risk", "Pente", "Battleship" and the like in my youth, I see nothing different about Age of Empires or Civ. My sons also play chess & Risk (both analog!) on occasion too, so it is not all about technology. These "games" are really just a training ground on how to use strategy and tactics to solve an artificial problem... once the problems get real those mental muscles will have been trained. Such skills come in handy in every profession, not just the military.
--chuck goolsbee, VP, digital.forest
Hey, I thought I had Katz filtered out! What the f-- oh, Hi Cliff.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
We downloaded some games on the computers at school. (sans teacher permission of course..) Eventually the hard drives started getting full and we had trouble logging on. The tech guys (who absolutely hate us now and talked about how they wanted to "break our [expletive deleted]ing necks" Right in front of us too...) took about 3 days to go to all the computers and clear them out. So basically if we were to ask for a game night they'd probably castrate us on the spot. Good thing school's almost out and I can play Jedi Outcast at home whenever I want..
One of them was fairly unofficial, but half the
teachers came in and joined us. It was long enough
ago we were playing Doom. Then again, in another
one, when we were doing Networking class, Doom was
played, but because the machines were 486's.
The other thing is that safe-grads often book the
computer lab for this very purpose.
Hardware, software, and blinking lights!
Just by looking at the title of this comment you would think 'That's a very interesting high school name'. I'm graduating advanced technologies academy high school monday. This discussion was close to me cause it sounds like something we would do at my school. ATECH is wired with fiber from room to room and on average 20computers a room. I wish they would open up late night gaming for us, but they havent. My coworker, also graduating from atech, talks about him playing Quake in his LAN class to test the LAN setup they just learned in class. I think the use of games in a LAN enviroment for learning is pretty interesting.
I played Wolfenstein 3D and Leisure Suit Larry in drafting class in high school. Of course, they weren't approved by officials.
mbbac
I rember having a similar thing in my Highschool. Unfortuantly however, it was done on the sly and during class hours.
Having such an activity would be great fun for kids outside of an acidemic computer usage enviroment, however running such an activity with most school districts acceptable use policy will be difficult.
Well There's the Civilization: Call to Power (I and II), Civilization III maybe, Total Anihilation, The Red Alert Series.
Some sports games such as EA's NHL series play over the lan.
Other games based on board games as well can be played over the lan such as Risk, Axis and Allies.
My high school did this. Anyone was allowed to participate and the games we played more than any others were First Person Shooters: Action Quake2, the early betas of Counterstrike, Half-Life. It was mostly a small group of gamers/techs that worked in the labs that were interested, but there were occasions where other people popped up and played, everyone from the schools star football player to one of the assistant principles; one of the teachers (incidentally, the one who showed me /. for the first time) played regularly. These games were organized several times a week, we, the students, would see each other around school and get an idea if anyone was going to show up that day. From the schools perspective I think it was a reward for the work we did. It was a nice conclusion to a day of work at school, and allowed us to go home in a good mood. It really didn't cost the school anything and made us more willing to work on whatever needed done around the lab/school. Definitely a win-win situation, I highly recommend it.
"Buy a new game every Christmas for the lab"
You surely mean purchase several dozen new games, all of the same title every Christmas, because after all, it is clearly illegal to purhcase ONE copy and share it with all the other members of the lab.
And as it's clearly illegal, of *course* you'd buy one copy per machine. Duh.
I doubt the school would jump and down with joying knowing that they would have to shell out $50-$60 every christmas PER STUDENT in the 'game club'.
a) Per machine, not per student. And given that you typically have a 3 or 4 player maximum for RTS games, you'd actually only need to buy 4 copies. Set up one quartet of machines with the new game, leave the others with the old selection.
b) Do you read?
either with school funds or by "game-lab dues" paid by the students
Even if we're buying one copy per student (i.e. we have that many machines and we install on all of them), you have a year's worth of dues to pay with. $5 a month for 10 months is... surprise surprise... about the cost of one game per year per student.
Please read and apply common sense before responding.
this sounds like a great idea for all schools. i wish my school were this cool. we can't even play streaming video games, not even tetris, on our school computers. no music on them either, no anything other than typing or using the internet with a teacher there watching. network nazis suck :(
Back in 1986, my middle school in a suburb of Washington, DC did this. The math teacher that ran the computer lab stayed after school until about 5 PM once a week, keeping our lab open for the students to do whatever they liked. Of course, back then the lab consisted of Apple II's, and the games we played were either public domain "learning" software (Oregon Trail, anyone?), or games that we brought in ourselves (Moebius!). As far as I know, the program ended only when the teacher got too busy in her personal life to babysit us kids. It was great fun, and gave me an extra push to go into the computer business. To sum it up, I think it's a great idea. My wife is a former elementary school teacher, and she did this with her students occasionally as well. In her case, the games were all "edutainment" titles that the school already owned... but it's still gaming, right? Not to mention that the kids DO love it!
All Your Memory Are Belong To Java
I wonder - Would some FPS games be acceptable?
There was once a game (I think based on Unreal) called Nerf Arena Blast - From what I heard, it kinda sucked, but it's an example.
Then there is Star Trek: Voyager - Elite Force. Quake 3 engine, and no gore. Plus I don't think we're going to have to worry about our kids picking up a photon torpedo launcher in imitation of the game for a LONG time.
There are probably others. Except for RTS games like Warcraft/Starcraft, FPS are the only other popular games for LAN parties.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
ah yes, sometimes I attribute my shreds of geekdom to the occasional middle-school dance where i got tired of dancing with the tall girls and went up to the computer lab which was open for games and such...
i think having troubleshot the appletalk network to let us clobber each other with callboxes and big spheres got me my first job
***Foucault is watching you..***
So when's the first MathBlaster Quake Mod coming? ;)
I wish my lawn was emo, so it would cut itself.
...except the one-time cost to buy machines is nothing compared to the recurring payrol.
Yet it's nice to see that there is a school with sufficiently advanced stuff to play games.
Another suggestion - try Total Annihilation. No violence, a tiny bit of strategy, highly competitive, requires patience and perserverance as well as learning to balance things. And plays nicely over the network, even if the computers are not quite bleeding edge at all.
Jobs? Which jobs?
I think it would be a great idea. It seems to me that many students are a lot more interested in computers, programming, gaming, etc., now then there were when I was in school 10 years ago. As far as the violence factor, I would think that a parental sign-off on a per-user basis would be able to cover that. I mean, chances are the kid plays the game at home already right? so why not at school?
Dang, kids these days have it good. When i was in high school, i think my school had 2 AppleII computers in the library. no network. There was this game, some side-scrolling rpg-type game though. I was the only one that seemed to get to play it, because I was the only one (in my class of 54) that actually went to the library to check out books for more than assigned homework.
I'll have to talk to the Network Admin of the school in my area. Considering the school is across the street, and he brings me cool school equipment (switches, servers) for the LANs in my basement, I bet he'd be willing to go for it, and maybe the administration would too.
If you can read this, you are most likely close enough.
Why not if you do well at game night you get good grades? You know... just like the football team.
mbbac
At my high school, FAIS (also in California) there is a very open computer policy. There is the computer lab, where there are about 30 computers dedicated to doing homework, watching flash movies, listening to MP3s, etc. (headphones or low volume sound only) Basically, anything other than playing games.
:) It's actually a very efficient system. The computer lab is kept quiet and orderly so you can concentrate on your essay, or whatever you're doing, and the multipurpose room is noisy anyway, so no one gets disturbed.
:(
However, there are also about 5 computers in the multipurpose room (the lunch room), which are essentially designated gaming computers. So every day during lunch, we play Quake 3.
I still can't get over how open this is considering at my middle school, MCDS, we weren't even allowed to use the many high end computers to browse the internet!! Let alone play a first person shooter... What a waste
if you are looking specifically for multiplayer games, so the kiddies can interact, there are a few games out there that are both fun and intellectually stimulating, while not being all about 'killkilkill!', and are not quite "Oregon Trail".
Someone suggested CIV III, which is a great choice. Some others:
Black & White (community building, resource management, influence)
Empire Earth (diplomacy, resource management)
Tropico (civil planning/management, resource management)[single player]
GTA#....oh, nm.
When I was in middle school, the "Intro to computer programming" teacher usually opened the lab after school so we could go play games. This was like in 1993 and we were playing games on Apple IIs. Eventually i got tired of playing just games and started inquiring about how to program stuff.
Some of the most notable games I used to play on there every day after school were Taipan and Montezuma's Revenge.
Taipain is the one where you were a trader in China(?) and you got to sell opium if you wanted, but beware of the Patrol Fleet, and on the other side you had to give "donations" to the "Temple of the Sea Goddess" or pirates would come after you.
Montezuma's Revenge was one where you had to get this guy to unlock all these doors to the dungeons in a temple while avoiding being destroyed by weird creatures.
Anyways, once I got into High School, I didn't really have a chance to play any games on the computer's there. I know that one of the teachers that ran a lab let kids go there during lunch and after school.
Also in the computer lab where i had my high school programming class they had Duke Nukem installed on the computers, but you had to know the password, or have a handy Mac OS CD to start up from, so you could bypass At Ease. Our Computer Programming teacher said it was ok for us to do that so long as we didnt mess anything on the computers.
The only bad experiences I've had was in that particular lab where kids could play during lunch. I had a very bad time once because I needed to print out something and there were all these kids swamping the computers playing games. And they were rude so they wouldnt even let me on there for a second to print something out.
So I think its good to expose kids to computers by gaming, but also lay out some basic rules on when the computers are available for gaming and when they're not.
Also the selection of games is important. You also want to choose games that are not biased towards one gender if possible. One interesting thing about Starcraft is that its never really clear whether you are playing as male or female. (Well other than Jim Raynor saying "Hey man", and maybe some comments Kerrigan makes when you select her.) My sister who is in her teens actually likes playing Starcraft. She thinks its cool. Cro-Mag rally is another good one. But that's Mac only. You also want to choose games that are challenging and require strategy. Also games that require competition are good, so long as you watch out for kids taking the game too seriously. And games that are about blowing people to frags, well I don't think those are proper in a school. (yes i know i played Duke Nukem in computer prog lab, but i was younger then.)
I dont buy games like Quake mostly because if i have it lying around I know sooner or later my brother or sister will pick it up when i'm not around and start blasting characters to frags. That can't be good.
-codeonezero
.... ... }
int main (void) {
And take it a step further. Get other schools involved. Take moddable or skinnable games and make 'uniforms' for your side. Have inter-district LAN parties, and inter-school gaming. Turn it into a real social sporting event.
How sweet would it be to have your own School District Online Gaming Trophy? Give the non-athletic kids something to take home and put on the mantle.
We played Scorched Earth when I was in high school. That and the Monkey Attack and Nibbles that came with QBasic 5 on Dos 6.22
PS/2 machines with 40 Meg hard drives... those where the days.
they have plenty of power.
at my college they run 700mhz pentium IIIs, Dell OptiPlex GX110...with win2k pro.
________________
"A man prepared who hesitates, is lost." -Dante The Divine Comedy: Inferno Canto XXVIII, 99
All they need is Nethack. Besides, they can continue to play it in college (almost every computer lab has it).
My, how things change. In the early 80s we also played games on the high school computer. But there was one major difference.
These games you mention... I've heard of them. And that's what's different. The kids should be writing the games, and none of us should recognize any of the names.
We played
- Kojak (and Kojak 2: Telly's Revenge) (these were mine)
- Jungle George (one guy's rip off of another guy's Vic20 game called Pygmy Patrol)
- Cockroach Races (multiuser) (the only game that ended up being banned, because it encouraged behavior that would damage keyboards)
- Sperm Patrol (group project, each guy wrote a different "stage" of the game)
- Flaming Enchiladas (damn hot salsa)
- and a bunch I can't remember the names of
- assorted ripoffs of arcade games, the old snake/tronlightcycle thing, etc, etc.
all on the VT100s and Gigis hooked up to our PDP-11/34a running RSTS/E. We wrote 'em (usually in BASIC, sometimes Pascal), we shared 'em, we played 'em. We learned, we had fun.Maybe install Python and PyGame on your school boxes, no commercial games, and then let nature take its course. They might as well have fun and learn something at the same time.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
15 years ago, the C64 was still king. Every classroom in my elementary school had one. Many kids had a stack of games that their siblings/cousins/parents had "copied" using Renegade or whatever, but no computer. We would trade disks and hop over to a friend's house to play.
The school held an "activity" period three days a week in which children were allowed to stay after class. Those activity periods became our game time. Soon as classes were over, we'd hunt for a free machine while another group of kids would find the school's joystick. Soon as we found them, we'd LOAD "*",8,1 and start playing. Summer games. GI JOE. Airwolf. We got so many kids staying after that teachers set up reserve sheets for the activity period and we would assign different games to the machines.
Sure, we were playing stolen games. Sure, we probably shouldn't have been doing it in school. But the enthusiasm we had for the computers continued into adulthood. One of our charter members runs a Windows CE contractor in Georgia.
I'm a big supporter of games and their ability to teach. You want to play UT? Well, it'll help you a lot if you first learn how to network some computers, and to know a little about hardware. Playing games encouraged me to learn how to program -- in fact, my first program ever was to make a couple animal sprites dance in a piece of software called "Logo."
Hey freaks: now you're ju
My college has had a Game Night every Saturday night (during the regular school year, not summer sessions) for the past 5 years. A couple kids started it as "a way to keep students from going around getting drunk every weekend" and things like that. Really, we're just geeks and like to play big LAN games every once in a while.
Noone signs up, people just show up. Sometimes there are themed nights (Counter-Strike, Starcraft, FPS, genres, etc.), and sometimes people just decide what to play and do something. We go from 7pm-whenever (usually 1am), and break and order Pizza half-way through. We stuck a deal with Dominoes for a good discount, its only $5 per person, and you can eat however much you want (theres soda too). It works out really well and people seem to like it, and have a good time.
We even got our IT department to sponsor (my boss is cool) a tournament and give away brand new graphics cards to the winning team. He even made the Starcraft maps for the tourney (there was Rogue Spear, CS, and some other games involved too).
Its the largest-attended on-campus event my school has, last I checked. Granted, we have a small school, but sometimes we get over 50 people (usually its around 20).
i think that this pratice is a great idea. there are so many high shcool aged guys that i know that would jump on this in a heart beat, my self being one of them. Among the people i know this has always been an interesting idea but never acted on becasue of district restrictions. maybe if other schools are more willing to do it ours will be too.
"My heart is in the work." - Andrew Carnegie
BZFlag!!! It's a free, low-violence fps-style tank game with strategy!
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
A high school friend of mine lived near school and found a way to enter the school after it had closed. So every once in a while, we'd just break into school, and have an all night DOOM lan party. Fun stuff.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
At my school, a group of us had started up a "starcraft club" where we played SC for a few hours after school on fridays. We had to convince someone to sit there with us. Then they apparently decided they didn't like the idea and claimed we had trashed the place and put potato chips in the cd-rom drives?!?! Now we can't start it up again at high school (that was in middle school) due to bad recommendations from the middle school tech people.
In my AP Computer Science class (which we lovingly call AP Starcraft) we play Broodwar nearly everyday with the occational Red Alert 2 thrown in. If you have the computers sitting there why not use them.
I run a Debian/Kernel/Knoppix Mirror: (http|ftp|rsync)://debian.ams.sunysb.edu/
apt-get @ > 5MBps == teh win!
For a while a friend and I ran a consulting company. On Friday evenings we'd let a few high schoolers we know bring some of their friends use the LAN for Counter-Strike matches on Friday evenings. I think everyone involved had a blast, even the adults, although sometimes the kids would get schooled and we'd have to play some less strategic game where reflexes mattered more. And lemme tell you, nothing spells satisfaction like typing "I 0wn3d j00 w/my @w350m3 5|<!11z" at a 15 year old.
I like to be as self-sufficient a Libertarian as the next geek, but I've found real joy in setting up ways like that to give a little to the communities in which I live and work. Sure, for political reasons the schools in most districts can't do this, but that's just even more reason that if you can scare up the resources to put such a thing on yourself, you should try it.
A few years ago, our school got new computers, so they had about 20 leftover 80386's. A few students made a network with them and I remember them playing MicroMachines on them.
Two years later, we (me + another few students) had made our own Linux-network, and surprisingly multiplayer XTris became a real hit amongst other students. Man, those good old days...
In my Networking Technology Class, (AKA, 12 geeks in an expensive room) our midterm test for that class was a 3 vs. 3 game of StarCraft.
I was on the losing team, but I raked up enough points to still get an 'A'
"Sometimes you have fun, and sometimes the fun has you"
The library lab computers were funded not out of general funds, but rather through the Digital High School grant. That is a state funded grant program under which we were awarded $225,000.
This has nothing to do with teacher salaries, which come from the general fund.
So, relax. Your property tax dollars weren't wasted. And remember, these computers are only used for gaming on special events, outside of class hours. The rest of the time, they are used for purely academic pursuits.
Regards,
Joe Griego
BUHS (http://www.buhs.k12.ca.us)
Don't Die Wondering
Just a note to mention one of my fondest memories from junior high. One of our assistant principals sponsored a Dungeons & Dragons club after school. Just a handful of us RPG geeks would gather weekly to adventure and goof off for an hour or two. Great fun. (This was, of course, quite some time before the popularity of computer gaming really took off.)
:)
Others here have mentioned Warhammer, chess, go, etc. I'd love to see a local gaming club where the kids are encouraged to play any game.
Anyway, great thread. Now I've got the gaming itch and need to find some folks to roll the dice with.
~~Galen~~
Schools have competitive sports and games. What's the problem with computer gaming?
Other suggestions for games that are not first person shooters, might be more accepted by girls (and parents), and won't give people motion sickness (which I know some people get with all the 3D action in games like Quake) are Heroes of Might and Magic, Warcraft and Dark Reign.
These are also games that come with the ability to make your own maps. It could be fun and educational to have the students make maps for the other users to play.
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
I'm in college but for a long while we were playing Need for Speed 3 networked and Need for Speed 5. They're fun games, and 3 is especially cool because you can play as the cop. Other than that all the games we play have gratuitous violence.
Public school does NOT suck! As a public school employee here in Bishop, I see nothing but motivated teachers, helpful staff, and a majority of kids who are excited about coming to school each day.
If you experience was poor, please don't toss out the baby with the bathwater. We have an excellent district, well run, well administered, and well taught.
Move to Bishop, and we'll welcome you with open arms!
Joe Griego
Dir., I.T.
BUHS
http://www.buhs.k12.ca.us
Don't Die Wondering
If Quake3 turns kids into cold heartless street murderers, wouldn't strategy games turn them into fascist dictators? Or is that something that a parent can be proud of?
As a parent I'm more likely to get stressed if the schools are trying to teach my kids on computers that couln't run those games. As long as the game nights are outside school hours (they are) and have some modicum of supervision (not a lurking teacher, but some adult in the room at least), I'm all for it. As for your comment "Good computers are just greater incentive to misuse the resource", you have to be joking. That's like saying having good teachers is just an incentive to waste their talents.
... we would loved to have let the students play games after school was out. There are two basic problems with that approach:
... who, come on, is almost certainly unaware that it's a hazard to do that), doing whatever they can. Oh, and it's not limited to the Mac or PC, either. Even if the student is unsuccessful, they've wasted an entire period when the could have learned how to conjugate Spanish Verbs instead learning how to ... what, do nothing?
... in a word: Bullshit. I've done my share of exploring and hacking and cracking in my day, but the fact is that if you're breaking into a system for the data on the hard drive (whether it's a game or source code or encrypted passwords), you're leaving behind trojaned binaries of whatever you need to get back in, later. That may very well cause tremendous problems for other, as legitimate, users later, and prevent the use of a limited, state-funded resource for those same, again at least as legitimate, users. Just Don't Do It!(tm).
First, students who have gaming permission often spend most of their time during classes trying as hard as they can to hack around whatever security procedures are in place in order to play those games during class. Booting from floppies (right in front of the teacher
Second, the computers were purchased with state or county monies. Try explaining to a County Board member or State Legislator why students should be allowed to play games on a school-owned computer.
All the way around, it's a bad idea IMO. The students who are going to spend the hour trying to break around the security software may try anyway, but why give them a reward for doing it?
There are those who will argue that most of those students, especially any successful ones, are "exploring"
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)
This would never have passed at my high school. I meet a lot of objection from the principal when I tried to start a chess club, he said it was a game, and there was only room for "academics" at school. I did eventually get it started with help from the comp sci teacher, though.
When I was in High school, we used to play Quake a lot on the school's LAN. It wasn't officially sanctioned by the school board, but at the time there was no internet and games policy. Our teacher let us put it on the server and actually use the game to do a project for the class called Computer Graphics 2. This was during the pre-school-shootings era, as such I doubt games night will be possible in most areas. Personally, I'd be totally in favor of something like this. However the majority of public would most likely condemn it. If one were to be able to get approval to start a games night, then I'd guess that once the rest of the town (or city or whatever) got word of it, there would be massive complaints about the corruption of teens. Heh, I don't know what would happen if one of the kids who went to those game nights actually went and did a shooting...I assume lawsuits would be flying everywhere.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Why is it any different than a "family movie" night? Or school often had those, and though the flicks were at most PG-13, they still featured profanity, nudity and adult situations.
I guess my major gripe is that parents who whine about the video game industry are the same parents who have raised their children on "R" rated films and uncensored TV. What's the difference?
I know that parents who would have a problem with this video game night, but the hypocrisy(sp?) bothers me...
"Teachers leave us kids alone
If you have someone that is creative, have them use one of the level modelers (like the one provided w/ Unreal Tournament) to design a level that models your school, or a subsection.
We did this with our office, and just had a blast. The only problem was that we would walk around during work and try to come up with better places to hide the Redeemer!
At the highschool i just graduated from, we used to play BZFlag after school, or during class when there wasn't much to do or if we had a sub. We had a couple of linux boxes that we set servers up on. We had a few people including myself who got into mapping and we would get the entire CS dept. PC Lab going, though it must have been a shock to people playing on the server from ouside the school about how the bell would ring and 99% of the people on the server would quit. BZFlag was a great incentive too, get your assignment done and you can spend the rest of the class playing BZFlag.
My school had computer club from 1995 to 1999 where every computer in two labs was taken so people could play Warcraft II. We had several games going at the same time and with school funding for the club we bought about 5 legit copies of the game for the lab. Since our school computer club had so many member the school gave us $500 a year spending. Our school of about 900 had 73 members in the computer club my junior year which was more than any other club/sport in our school including football or band.
Ah, CBM 4016, how we miss your monochrome screen :-)
</oldgit>
Ain't that right.
When I was in High School (some 20 years ago) I did all the administrative programming. Not for pay, but because I felt as if I were contributing. Sometimes it's hard for those of us with below-average social skills to find a way to contribute in HS (why, I wasn't even nominated for prom king!)
The flip side is that all of the stuff I wrote had trojans in it. Not that I was malicious, it was just the typical teen-hacker mentality: the thrill of the break-in. Of course, they didn't do attendance or grades on the computer then.
And I wasn't happy about it... This was back in the days when you just couldn't play FPS games at home, because the old 28.8 was just a little too laggy... My school had a strict no games policy, so we learned how to beat the protection software, installed games on half the machines, and were going to just go in and play sometime... However, we learned that this would probably get us suspended. So, Rather than reveal the fact that we knew how to bypass the weak security measures set up by the school, we decided to have some fun with it. Every joke program that we could get on those macs was put on... There was stuff walking / flying around the monitors in the room, we locked out the printers, and in general just made life difficult for everyone that worked there, and really didn't know what was going on. Now, had we been allowed to play games, I doubt any of that would have been done... I would have been more than happy to settle for warcraft, or something like that. Just the fact that you allow students to use the computers for recrational purposes probably saves you a lot of work. If not, some of them will most likely experiment with alternate forms of recreation...
We had a Teletype, FTBL*** and STTR1.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Less violent than real surfing - no localism for a start. And quite fun two-player.
My school did this, under the slight misnomer of Computer Club. In theory, we maintained the school website, and did productive things, but it was pretty much an excuse to play Starcraft on school computers for a few hours.
Of course, we did the same thing in most of my programming classes..
Overall, the AUP wasn't really a problem. The only staff close enough to enforce it was the sponsor of the club, and was usually playing with us as well.
Overall: Fantastic idea!
And book out a lecture hall with some biiig speakers and a big projection screen. You may have to fill out some forms first.
Well, it's not officially sponsored but we all used to get together to play tribes at lunch (until school let out)
Pi
I'm the Network Administrator for a large high school.(2500+ students) Until recently I had a shared directory on the server I set up for them to install their games and compete on our network. I did this in an effort to keep the same game from being re-installed 2000 times in individual user directories. However, I recently had to shut it down due to piracy concerns. Lots of movies and MP3s were being uploaded (some ina propiate) and that would be hard to explain if someone came asking.
I think the original argument does have some merit. I also work at a public school and have seen other districts. I would lean toward the idea that most are unsatisfactory and 'some' are good.
As much as the fact that theyre old POSes, we use "new" (as in theyve been in the supply chain for 6 months) 1 ghz optiplex desktop units, mini-ATX form factor, nothing impressive. And as much as they don't have a graphics card, a few kids (myself included), have been known to schlep anything they can scrounge from home. Others just use software acceleration, but its all good :-). Only problem is that every Miami-Dade tech person is a bonafide idiot. When they caused us to lose our priveleges gaming, they blamed it on network latency due to the gaming traffic. In reality, Quake 2 doesn't create that much traffic, and if for some reason it does, it means that there's another really obvious problem with the network, even if there are 20 odd people playing.
I was a computer teacher in Australia and had a class of mainly Aboriginal students. For end of year fun I connected some of the PCs together via serial cable (old 486s) and let them play head to head Doom.
:). Of course I didn't tell a sole about it. Just between me and the kids.
It was the best class (and most rewarding) I've ever taught
In some situations the enjoyment of time at school is far more important than the subject matter. With some students there's a lot of layers you have to break through before learning can happen.
Back in me high school days I had the opportunity to go to a special computer training class for 2 hours a day for two years. It was a great experience that let me learn me a lot. The best part of it though was that the teacher was a young guy too and loved to play games. He actually talked the school into buying the parts for 20 some odd computers that were of good enough quality to play some fun games on. He was able to slip this buy as having the students put the computers together for a 'learning project'. The best part of this story though is that some of us would go out to the school at night to play much games over the school net connection, hell we even had a clan for Delta Force (this was a few years ago you can tell :)). O to be young again :)
man
No manual entry for
There was a recent book that was released that discussed the decline in social capital. It discussed the decline in community bowling league, the lack of and continuing decline in church attendance. Over all, this generation, i.e. the generation X is becoming less tied to one another than any other previous generation. Clubs and leagues that was once known from the past generations is now almost gone to the way side.
:-) "Games, it's not just for boys anymore!!!"
However, having a computer club where kids can gather to share ides, play games, similar to those that spawn team work and fair play, in a control environment, it really is no different than the same values and ideas once shared by the chess club, weekly league bowling, or even the boy scouts. I believe it is a great way to build a sense of community, and provide a great way for individuals whom once may have felt a sense of outcast, now they may join others and come together for a sense of togetherness.
Bottom line, whatever game it may be, mech warrior, starcraft, sims, quake, or unreal, it is still the individual themselves that will make the right decision as to how to play the game. After all it is only a game until someone take it too far.
No one ever said you have to bet money in order to play a game of pool. The same could be said about the games such as Doom and Quake. It is only a game. And in a supervised environment, such as a computer club or a games club in a school and academic setting, perhaps the incident at columbine could have been avoided. For it was their sense of being outcasted from the rest of their peers that in the end drove them to that unfortunate fate. I believe had they been in an evironment where they could have felt a sense of belonging, things would have been different.
I say we should have all have a gaming club at each school!
Our local high school computer club holds quarterly LAN parties, supervised by the IT coordinator. Since they are held at night and don't affect the teachers, the school doesn't mind. Students must bring their own computers; our club provides a 100 megabit switch, tables, monitors (previously, we placed the student's computers next to the school computers). Games are typically Counter-strike and Starcraft. We do require a signed permission form and our advertisement flyers are friendly (no pictures of Counter-Strike, esp. since the first LAN party was a couple months after Sept 11. and the screenshots looked like Afganistan) consisting mainly of Nintendo characters.
Last time there were 30 people. Only students at our high school can attend. With the exception of the first time we posted flyers, the school has been fairly pleased with our LAN parties.
do other high schools do this??
HAHA.... NO.
if we have more of this around the schools we would see a much better graduating class. :-)
keep up the good work!
Here in Finland, a smaller town of Nokia(yes, it's also a town name) has done this for a while. It's not arranged by a single school, but the town youth welfare workers. And I think they got the right point - let the kids spend a weekend now and then gaming instead of getting drunk on the streets.
This is imo the main point - okay, only violent computer games is bad. But isn't the main thing that they're competing in a safe, moderated environment and dealing with other people.
As for games, I've found that letting some of the students themselves take part in arranging this is a good idea. Part of arranging it is to arrange short demonstrations of games. Get their interests to rise. Strategy based games, especially those letting you do teamwork and cooperation can get them interested quickly, if you show them what it's about. They think it's boring when they hear the name, but when someone talks a bit, shows a bit of it in a short demo, it just might get more interesting.
And no, I'm not kidding when I suggest some net version of Civilization or Master of Orion II(for shorter games). Especially when you see teamwork there, it gets fun for everyone.
im sorry but that is disturbing :)
i hope you're being sarcastic with the phrase "isn't she hot?"
Typing of the dead! Quite possibly the most educational videogame ever. If I had this thing, I wouldnt have slipped by the edge of typing class despite being able to type at least 40wpm
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
One of the continuation schools in my old high school district would host lans every quarter as part of keeping kids off the streets/off drugs/outa jail budget. It was a great front. We could use their school computers or bring our own.
The principle limited us to games rated T or less, so we played Mech Warrior IV, Star Trek Elite Force, Revolt, and Tribes II.
its a great way to meet friends of similar interests.. lousy way to meet chicks. I wish more schools did this. Maybe those soon-to-be seniors could take up planning a lan as a senior project... donate the money raised to a local charity; perhaps one that aims to close the digital divide.
Urgo: "I want to live. I want to experience the universe and I want to eat pie!"
Jack: "Who doesn't??"
We pretended to be working on journalism assignments and instead played on the Apple IIe's. My partner in "crime" was Wes Cherry, who went on to write Solitaire for Windows. I went on to become... errr... a Slashdotter.
- Consult the dictionary frequently to avoid mispelling
Diplomancy? Is that the International Relations course taught at Hogwarts? World Peace through Black Magic?
In high school (junior high to americans) we played Quake 1 (when we had crap computers) and AEO II (when we had Duron 700s)
In college (senior high to americans) we play CS, Half Life etc.
High school got a bit rowdy because it was supervised by supposedly mature students. But it was fun.
Barto
Last semester, I decided that we needed a gaming night at the University of Saskatchewan. Of course, going through regular channels is too time-consuming, so I just set up a mailing list and started e-mailing. We just showed up every other week or so and more or less took over a couple labs in the Engineering building (all P3 900Mhz, 32Mb Video) and went nuts.
.nah. Even the odd grad student in there at 10:00 seems to enjoy listening to the trash-talking and general game banter. We'd even let them play if they wanted. . . .
Those were the small days when 8-10 people would show up. Then, a couple upper-year guys who had been coming started bringing people out, a real mailing list got organized, and by the end of the semester we were at the point where one e-mail would end up bringing about 30-40 people out for some intense LAN gaming from about 10:00PM to 3:00AM (mostly Physics students and other assorted geeks showing up).
We, unlike what a typical high school class should do, play mostly CS and some UT, but lately Medal of Honor: Allied Assault is the game of choice. Teams get split up into different rooms and mayhem ensues. Hopefully, we'll find something that scales well (as far as player load) and we can really get going. By next year, this could be a 60+ person event every odd week.
Hmmm. Maybe we should actually talk to the IT guys and stop just taking over labs at random. . . .
- Relativistic? That's barely Newtonian!
would be excellent as far as the low violence factor, but they wouldn't allow for fair use of the machines in the lab. There's nothing like a little fps fragging to get the game over with.
People are inherently stupid - I prefer computers.
I live and schooled in Sydney, Australia, and my school had 3 labs of about 20-30, and the biggest one alone (single room) was available 2 nights a week.
Censorship is much less significant in Australia. There are two ratings (R and MA) that _restrict_ purchase to 18 and 15 year olds, respectively, and they are used sparingly.
By remoing the FPS genre, you are taking most of the fun away. Most played Action HalfLife (or whatever it's called *s*), and some played AOE2, but there were other choices. Multiplayer mode is what we were there for though.
Parents didn't mind kids shooting eachother. At least not in my neighbourhood.
We used to play Quake everytime the comp sci teacher (who didn't know shit) was out for the day and we had a sub. Eventually the network admin caught on and installed some sort of console-access restriction program (I forget the name). Basically all we could do was just load the programs on the start menu and that was *it*.
:) Needless to say his pathetic attempts ended in utter failure and I laughed my ass all the way to Claustrophobopolis ::gib noise::
Ahh... the wonders of DOS shell from QBASIC, or the file:// from IE or even ShellExec from Win32 API.
So if you don't count that, then no; we weren't able to play games at school, much less be encouraged to do so.
# fuser -v
#
Our old high school had a games night every thursday, and we had great fun playing all sorts of games, from some cheesy network space game you got with novell 3.1 running on a lab of 386s, all the way up to the latst quakes. We even played duke nuken for a while, and had a map of the entire school to blast each other in :)
No local rights, dumb Internet access terminals, and Draconian monitoring. That's what hundreds of thousands of students here have to face each school day.
In Toronto, a WAN is implemented, thus reducing the number of people (let alone teachers) with local admin access to around nil. This WAN only came into existance after several sub networks, divided geographically by the city, were coalesced into one big unwieldy one, which gives technicians (and probably the admins) a permanent headache. Phone lines inside the school are cut - no modem access, in fact the only way to gain Internet access is to sell the soul of your machine to the WAN (i.e. format it with NT and hope its still operable). Or tunnel an illict connection (NetBIOS is not implemented that well).
Running anything but IE on these systems is hard enough; hosting LAN parties are out of the question - unless you want to loose a few days of school or your job.
This article puts forth an odd proposition, as I'm probing that the locked-down WAN schema is the case in many other large cities.
We worked hard to make a convincing presentation to show the principal...
RTS games teach economics:
We came up with more (and different ideas, which unfortantely I don't remember), but you get the idea.
...and besides all that, we were helping to test the network... very important job, that.
From SlangSite.com:
What's the situation on licensing? If each student brings his/her copy of a game to school and loads it on that PC is that legal? What if it's already installed on their home PC? It would be something imprtant to know. On that point, do Internet Cafes that run gaming sessions, purchase individual software packages for each of their PCs? I remember in the old days when my high school set up their first network with MS NT. Lots of after school sessions of Hearts :)
It sounds like a darn good idea to me. Unfortunately, my particular high school has no such accomodations, let alone any support for the program. *insert random complaining, then a question* We're running hand-me down Celerons, according to the head of the computers department. No one bothers to upgrade them, or even fix them when they start making funny sounds. Yet, we're in the most expensive place to live in all of the Western US. Funding should be easy to get, yet we've got some of the worst computers... Furthermore, parents in our community believe games online are "evil", and the PTSA forced a web block of all games, period. >. None of our teachers really seem to care enough to stay after their required time (Only 3 of my six teachers participate in tutorial after school), and few people with the power to gain funding will, as all of our money goes towards sports, since they make the school look a lot better than an after-school gaming session. So, the question is...How can I, a student, fix this problem? It sounds like a wonderful idea, and I know plenty of people interested. The problem is finding support, whether through funding or just teachers and parents who care. And, as for your question about what games, try letting them play an online game like Ragnarok Online. There's no 'gore', unless yo uthink hitting a pink blob with a face is traumatizing. The worst thing about it the lag, and a few people who use poor judgement. Plus, it's free. ^^
"Those who fear the darkness have never seen what the light can do."
Diplomacy is an excellent Risk-like game, but it's far more dependant on people than random chance. It's set in World War I. Each player runs a country, and they have to form allies and such to dominate Europe. There are no dice or cards; you move armies as you like, and the player with the most armies moving into a given territory wins. The fun part is the conversations and pacts you make between rounds. These conversations are for your own benefit only. You decide your plans, but there are no rules against stabbing each other in the backs. It's great fun!
- W. Blaine Dowler
http://www.bureau42.com
There is one problem - Civilization III doesn't support any multiplayer. They promise to release a multiplayer update in January, though. It's very annoying to see how they split the game in two just to make it cost twice as much...
In the mean time, you can try Alpha Centaury. It's basically the same thing (well, the graphics is worse, IMVHO) but the gameplay is mostly the same. And yes, when played multiplayer it's infinetly addictive.
We've held Half-Life: Counter-Strike tournaments and Quake III: Arena tournaments at my high school, but last year the administration shut them down because they were "too violent". We used both school computers (mostly dual Celerons) in the Computer Systems Lab running Linux for Quake III, and those brought from home for the Half-Life tourneys. The current LAN gaming at my school now occurs in the network administration class, where we are encouraged to play network games, e.g. Diablo, Starcraft, Descent, and Quake.
I belong to the ______ generation.
Until a few months ago a bunch of kids at my school would play Counter Strike everyday after school... It was ended because the district doesn't allow it, the school didn't care.
I've only had a "LAN party" at my high school once. There was a lockdown drill (in response to the Columbine school-saftey fears) and so every classroom would have to turn off its lights, cover up the windows, and be silent. I happened to be in an I/T class at the time, and it seemed like a Counter-strike tournament (oh, the irony) would be a lot more fun than sitting around. Two hours later, we left the class a little bit more entertained than the rest of the school, and perhaps a little bit more violent.
Also, I worked for a while as a lab assistant in a large community college. Having a fairly liberal student body, the fair use policy was that you could do anything, as long as you say that it's school related. And so, of course, the policy was abused, but the lab assistants just vented frustration by remotley killing their game or inverting their mouse. Bad for karma, but watching their frustration made up for it.
"There is a fine line between sayings that make sense"
Thats how I got started on computers... its also how got started on games. I found Ultima II on a floppy somewhere - and within a month had a daily lunchtime "lab" going so thatt we could all play it. That started me on the RPG format (had preivouly been playing paper D&D...
then we moved into all of the bards tales - and I later setup the first CAD network (using lantastic (sucks ass), an everex step server, and genericad) We also ran our first BBS from highschool. Heaven - and if you knew the right people you could access the backside - Hell... which was a pirate BBS which got much of its content from boards around here (greater silicon valley)
We use to have Doom/Quake all night parties that lasted from Friday afternoon to Sunday afternoon. The cleaning people thought it was weird that there were so many empty coke and pizza boxes waiting for them on monday morning!
f es t.html
Here are some pics, definately some of the best times I ever had... although I thought my hand would fall off after all the GAME playing
http://www.fperkins.com/awc/images/bestof/quake
Live web cams
My high school used to do something like this, unofficially at least. Fridays tended to be a free for all.. What ever games you brough, the admin would turn a blind eye to. Particuarly if you left all the files (this was pre Directx and CD's , you installed the files from disk and you could zip up the directory and had yourself a (pirated) game... with rawcopy, you didn't worry about copy protection either)
This was years ago, before the school division got rather... anal retentive and started doing massive security updates (pfft.. well in thier eyes) to lock down acess...
Interesting, opening a exe file in C++ and hitting run worked rather well to run anything you wanted... thier security was patched onto windows 95... Editing INI, bat and sys files to avoid the security program from loading was simple enough too... just had to make sure to put it back the same to make the admin happy.
Brian brought a UNIX system in to the school, back when UNIX was a pretty rare beast, geeks only, and he did some pretty amazing things. One thing he did was give the students root access. What he discovered is that if you give students responsibility, they will act responsibly. There's a wonderful writeup on his web page at Berkeley.
Many important things came out of that project, though the one that will probably have the most click with this crowd is that JOVE, Jonathan's Own Version of Emacs, was written by one of Harvey's students.
So, in addition to games, there are several other interesting models for getting kids engaged. I like to think that Harvey's model encompasses the ones that encourage kids to play games on the computers.
This is such an amazing idea. I just wish that it was a possibility in my teens. I definitely think you're heading in the right direction - sure, encouraging the kids to build teams and deal with a little conflict are great motivators and teachers for later life.
On the plus side you're using equipment at no extra cost that would otherwise go unused (but watch those gaming licenses...hell, you might be able to get some sort of concessions from the companies involved).
But the most important thing about your scheme is as you said yourself, keeping the kids off the streets and giving them something to do. Boredom must be one of the principal causes of youth 'misbehaviour', and knowing where the kids are after dark will certainly put a lot of parents' minds at rest.
I congratulate you on your very original take on an old problem, and hope that others follow after you.
-Nano.
The computer tech guys can't just sling together a script to delete all erroneous information off each harddrive on the network? (If it is networked)... Sound just as bad as that tech people at my high school...
When I was in high school (about 2-6 years ago), we did this. For all four years we had LAN nights now and then. I really enjoyed it, despite not playing many games. Good fund and, as the sysadmin, I got play doom on the SGI O2. The best part, was perhaps killing other peoples games from the admin office.
The big rule we had was, once you were in (at 4:00) you couldn't leave and come back again (this prevents drunken kids, etc.)
No problems were ever to be had.
Mwuhaha.... I played a really old version of the game a while back. Unfortunately, I haven't quite gotten the knack for these games, I keep putting myself in a position to come in second place. Of course, my explanation is that I don't like to be in the forefront and would rather manipulate the leader...
Tired of sitting at that karma cap? Start a flame war today! See just how low you can go!
(preface, I know I'm a geek) When I dropped out of band my junior year to take zero period AutoCad, our teacher let us have Friday as game day as a reward for behaving the rest of the week. We'd play doom and that stunt driving game on our drafting machines. It also gave those that were behind on their projects, a chance to get some one on one with the teacher and catch up. It wasn't networked and it wasn't really school sanctioned but the CAD lab was off in its own dark corner of the school where us well behaved geeks slunk in the shadows. It didn't affect me too much. These days, I only get the urge to pull out my shotgun and start blowing things away if they have sharp teeth, look two dimesnsional and chase me in to the underworld.
--Let's hack root on 127.0.0.1 --panZ
Tribes and Tribes 2. No blood, no gibs (unless you sit on a mortar at 1% health, and even then, it's just your chars polygons flying everywhere) and tribes runs perfectly on my p2 233 with Voodoo 2. Even my anally retentive networking teacher didn't mind when I was playing T2 on the new comp I built in his class.
V-D-D forever baby.
I organized exactly that at my high school. We started with a few games, but eventually settled in to Tribes. We had to accept time restrictions (twice a week, after school), but they allowed it. Eventually they wanted us to get a faculty member to keep an eye on the lab after it got trashed (not by us), and no faculty member was willing, so it died, but not from lack of sanction.
If you're trying to do the same, some advice: write a formal charter and present it to your administration. I wrote ours myself, in two parts: Description and Justification.
Make sure the parents are not only allowed to come in anytime they want to see what the kids are doing, but that they can sit down and play with their kids if they want to.
It may not be very "cool" for some of the kids, but it will get the parents on the good side ("quality time") and they will almost never really do it anyway.
And get games that parents would be hard-pressed to disapprove.
Civilization and Alpha Centauri have already been recommended, but that cannot be emphasized enough. Show any sane parent the Civilopedia and he will fall in love with the game.
Chess is an obvious necessity. Partly because of legitimacy, and partly because if you get some kids interested into chess you will have them competing over the network and improving in no time. Hard to disapprove of that.
Playing chess (or Go) with the adults may prove to be an event that involves the parents and actually doesn't suck for those involved (there would be some Freudian satisfaction in defeating your parent at chess, and those adults willing to play chess with their kids will probably be respectable opponents).
SimCity is also a great game to encourage. Almost any good Sim-style game is a good idea, even Tropico (as a Latin American, I find it hilarious). RailRoad Tycoon is a very good Sim-business game with a historical background...
Sports games are usually accepted by parents even if they don't understand or encourage strategic games, simply because they are an extension of real-life games they approve. It's also a good way to get kids unfamiliar with computers to look at them without the geeky label.
The idea is to get parent support for the stuff the parents don't understand, through stuff they do understand.
An exmaple of things they don't understand but would be a good idea:
Install level-editors/scripters/whatever for all the games you can find them for.
If you let the kids play with Mods or whatever, you can get some of them familiarized with programming, 3D modelling, graphic design, or all of them combined. This is a good thing.
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
If they had made good Ghost images, there would be no problem really. To reghost a machine takes a whole 3 minutes...
Or DeepFreeze. Now that is a MIRACLE product. Abso-fucking-lutely amazing.
At my HS we had this guy who graduated it '95, i think it was, well, now he started up his own game company, well, him and the teacher are trying to work it out still, but I think all the computers in the lab will be beta testing it when it reaches that point, the name of the company is savage2 games, the name of the game is savage, from what he told us about it, it is going to kinda be like a cross between an MMORPG and a realtime war game, visualy stunning, you can see a trailer at http://www.3dluvr.com , i think it is on the first page, you might have to look around a bit for the link.
At my high school (until next monday, when I graduate), half the fun is to install & play the games without the teachers knowing. The other half is telling your friends what you were able to get away with.
My qustion only arises from the "kids off the street" statement. I know for a fact that the guys I played LAN games with were never really entertaining the prospect of cruising the mean streets & mugging old ladies. We'ld probably just get piss drunk and then run up to school so we wouldn't have to throw our comps in the car.
well..i know at my highschool we do..well..were not supposed to..but we do. In our Cisco class, when the teacher is gone and a sub is there, we just play a lan game of MOHAA. Fun times.
signature not applicable
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You'd better not be trying this in Washington at a public school. The state has a policy of what state-purchased computers can be used for. Game playing is explicity listed as forbidden. I don't remember exactly, but I believe it could even be a felony.
We wanted to do LAN games at our university lab to raise funds, but our boss was quick to remind us that if a single administrator found out about it, we could've all been expelled.
So, you can have LAN gaming parties in Washington at a public school, but it has to be kept absolutely secret and unofficial. Just don't hurt anybody while you're breaking in to the building.
Democracy. Whiskey. Sexy. Pick any two.
Then we had this brilliant (?) idea of asking the school to provide us with room and bandwidth for a weekend, so that we could carry in our own computers and have a weekend of fun and Internet. They agreed. We could use the basement and sysadmin provided us with a fast uplink and a range of IP-adresses. We found Intel prepared to sponsor us: they would provide us with the network equipment we needed and we would make sure the name Intel was visible everywhere. I can tell you, it was fun. See opbouwen, Zaterdag 1, Zaterdag 2 and Zondag for some picture.
In this way, we didn't have to use the inferior (?) school computers and school didn't have to worry about us vandalizing their equipment.
Woefdram, l'apprenti sorcier
I teach computer technology in a HS. The students work hard to learn all about computer hardware, software, OSes, and networking equipment. Before each vacation an dthe last week of the year we "TEST THE NETWORK" with Quake, Quake II and Unreal Tournament.
I would really like to get an afterschool program going, the kids love it and it keeps them out of trouble.
Not to mention the incentive it creates to fix network or hardware problems, when they occur the day before "testing".
It helps some of the kids who never socialize to feel more in their element. As long as parents and community members realize it is just a game and it is all in fun, there should be no issues..
If you can find copies and decent joysticks, X-Wing V Tie Fighter could well be the way to go. Enormous fun multi-player, and I can't imagine the kids not going for the Star Wars theme 8^)
Also, just about any of the Descent series (not Freespace) would be intriguing - they are FPS, but different. My hand-eye and spatial coordination went up by a couple of orders of magnitude in the first fortnight after Descent 1 came out...
The plus side of these games is that there are no real hardware requirements other than the joysticks - they'll run on pretty ancient stuff.
Reality is the ultimate Rorschach.
Both of my parents have always worked to 5 pm, or more often, later. I got involved, by most standards fanatically so, in computers right when Doom II came out, when I was 14...mainly because of Doom II. I've yet to mistake anyone, classmates or otherwise, for clay pigeons. I agree that parents have a lot to do with it, but both of them working to keep me eating doesn't have a Damn thing to do with it.
what is that girl, like 14? lol get a life and a girlfriend ;) /barf! truly disgusting
oh and that last post..
that's the funniest post I've seen in weeks.
Working for necessity's mother.
I attend an University College in Norway, and we are allowed (by 'quiet consent', not explicitly) to play on the LAN in the computer labs.
As long as we do it when few people are using the labs for school work, which is usually in the evenings, we're fine.
With P4's, heaps of ram, and Geforce2 gfx cards it's a blast to gather your friends for a round of CS or Ghost Recon after hours...
Please excuse bad English
Are you a grammar Nazi? I'm trying to improve my English; please correct my errors!
Liquidwar has released a new version. I havent tried it so cannot say whether or not it is good. However, Im curious to try it myself. From the write up on the U-Foot site, it is definitely multiplayer, involves realtime strategy and, like Civ, isnt FPS.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
I think that policy is a shame. It's true a lot of students spent hours using public workstations to play games, denying other users access for their coursework. However, IMHO anything you use a computer for teaches you something about using that computer. Now, the games software market is pretty big these days, so that's an area we might place interested graduates.
Environmentalism is the new Victorianism. Everyone ties on a green corset and pretends we're virtuous.
If the kids are willing to stay or come back onto school property and be supervised by school faculty, this gaming over the LAN idea should be saluted by parents the world over. Parents will know where their kids are; kids will stay out of the normal trouble. And it may be a way to introduce kids who aren't computer savvy to more computer use. It will surely improve keyboard skills!
Back in our school, there's a general thing that the last day of term is pretty much a 'free' day. It wasn't uncommon for a few kids to bring in their Playstation, and the IT room was pretty much free to play games.
The games available were limited by what people could bring in and what would run on the computers, then P133s. Despite the high age rating, multiplayer matches of Duke Nukem were common. Quake was available, but ran relatively slowly. Having said this, the whole event was unofficial so nobody ever checked into the legality of installing one copy of a game onto 20 computers or allowing minors to play 15-rated and 18-rated games.
What you allow at an organised event is pretty much up to yourself. Notably, any easy-to-play multiplayer games that appeal to a wide audience are good choices. Stardock's Stellar Frontier is an easily recommended choice, since it's free to download (registration required if you want access to lasers and similar in-game weapons).
Hmmm, I guess they are even trying to teach the English courses over this broken network.
instead of homocidal individuals?
At first I thought you were responding to this post:
" Plus it is a great teacher of military tactics. Probably better and more efficient than any history teacher could. Plus kids actually learn themselves from experience."
That's about the funniest thing I've heard in a while.
This one is quick, but at my school St. Johnsbury Academy in St. Johnsbury, VT 05819 the students organized an after-school gaming project. It came about as such: The school's technical coordinator has no idea what he's doing, so a small group of students working in the AP Computer Science lab 'hacked' onto a network drive and installed Quake; Because every computer on the network had access to those network drives, students would open Netscape and using the open file command navigate to that network drive and start the game. There were tournaments organized for about two weeks before anyone in the administration found out about them. And with school over, they (the original 'hackers') removed the game from the computers, and no one got in trouble so it had a happy ending.
Well, I guess that could have been quicker, but I tried.
I woul dhave never thought a school would sponsor such an event. This is something that I feel is a good idea. There are many gaming groups in this country, that charge for this kind of thing and require you to bring your own box. If the systems provided are good enough to keep the kids happy, I see nothing wrong with it.
Often, at LAN parties, there is an amount of alcohol, and the possibility of illegal drugs. This keeps the kids away from the alcohol, drugs, and smokes.
Besides if this is a supervised event, it's a lot more safer than some of the other things that happen after hours. Hopefully this will spread to other places. Great Job
THe only First-Person Shooter I can think of that doesn't have blood & gore and still is a good FPS is Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force. It was a requirement of Paramount that if Raven made a multiplayer deathmatch mode, there was no blood, if I recall correctly.
but who is paying, and will be paying, for the commercial software? If I'm hearing you correctly, you're in a public (or private, it doesn't really matter in the long run) school system. I know that I don't want tax dollars spent on entertainment when most school systems lack proper education. People won't like that. If it's a private school, you might be asking for some trouble - what happens when a board member (who possibly paid to be there) finds out? You lose your job.
Sorry if this has been mentioned, I didn't see it anywhere.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I'm a big fan of the Tribes series, and they would work well in your situation. While there is violence, there is minimal gore, and teamwork is more important than running around and killing everything that moves.
That is all. Carry on. </transmission>