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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."
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.
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-
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.
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!
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
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 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.
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"
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..
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.
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"
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'.
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
I agree that linux is great for the servers, ESPECIALLY if they have the hardware to back it up, but other than a few games, nothing runs under linux.
Now before you people jump on me about the glories of WINE, I've tried this. Games are crashy at best and the DirectX/OpenGL support is crap.
In short, you can run all you servers on a linux machine, but the gaming rig should still be running 98SE because you'll actually be able to play, rather than spend your valuble LAN party time trying to compile the latest DX8 rip off...
Linux is dead.
LU
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.
yeah, that was called nerf arena...
oh never heard of it?
hmmmm....
Chicago2600.net more than a lifestyle, its a survival trait.
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.
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.
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!
I'd stay away from the FPS's, they're going to wind up causing trouble with overbearing parents
/rant
All I have to say it this: Kids are going to play those FPS's whether they are in school or not. It is the hot game style out right now. It is easy to learn and hard to master. It is all the rave! Come on, everyone's doing it!
But seriously, some parents need to get their heads pulled out of their asses and realise that FPS's are not going to make your kids want to go out and kill everyone. If ANYTHING it is a release. But more often than not... it is just a little fun... a break from real life. Maybe I am 100% wrong here... but I am about 99.99% sure that I am not.
The kids that are going to snap are going to snap sooner or later anyway. A silly game isn't going to create that imbalance. And the lack of that game would at best delay him going crazy. I personally hate delays, get it over with so we can see who the kids who might add something to soceity are.
And yes, I know what some of you are thinking: "What if it is my child who gets shot?" Well, my answer to that is you need to not be selfish. SOMEONE'S kid is going to get shot by this guy, why wish that kind of pain on someone else?
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.
Yeah, addictive...all the way to a career. As a kid I only pursued computers to feed my interest in games. Along the way I inadvertantly picked up a few computer skills, and am now a happy computer professional.
Playing Chess, spades, cribbage, etc. online is just as addictive. My 65yo neighbor spends her entire life in her office playing solitare.
On the otherside, when I was on the chess team in H.S., I played 2-3 hours per day. Nobody complained about it, maybe because the graphics weren't as good.
There are many things that can be done to stimulate thnking in the game community, and many things that are better for just blowing off steam. Trying to compare quake to chess and go, or even a more modern game like Warhammer 40k isn't a good comparison. Different games use different skills...but all use skills to play well.
Seeing schools promote games is good. It's a fun way to think. Some games like Warhammer and Warhammer 40k even offer multiple aspects for development. First, the models have to be assembled and painted, then the rule books have to be read and understood, and then that understanding has to be applied to a high level of strategic thinking. I think this sort of thing would reap huge benefits if it were embraced by more families and communities. Don't like the genre? Use civil war minis and reconstruct some historical battles. See if you can beat General Lee. Heck, a kid might even voluntarily pick up a history book to learn more about it...ie. reading the historical excerpts in Civ III.
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
I'm well aware of the differences between First Person Shooters and real life and I agree 100% with your statement, but the fact is this is a SCHOOL-SPONSORED ACTIVITY and many parents will look down on violent shooting games and feel that they shouldn't be encouraged in an activity provided by a school system. It "wouldn't be prudent."
Is your browser retarded?
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.
Yes, but maybe they're not into sports. Maybe the school should actually make an effort to cater to what they like instead of telling them what group activities the school feels they should do.
Your's is the same mentality that led to Columbine. We a have a generation of educated, talented children that are being told if they can't dunk or throw and 80 yard pass they aren't worth shit in high school. The people that will one day run everything are the nerds and geeks of high schools today, and the star high school athletes will be the guy installing my pool or re-shingling my roof in 10 years.
I for one, harbor a deep hatred towards the way schools treat atheletes vs. the way they treat scholars. When I was in high school, I was using a 15 year old math book and then went to assemblies where all the cheerleaders had new uniforms. The chemistry equipment was so old that the reminents of 1000 past experiments were stuck to beakers, leading to some rather bad, unforseen chemical reactions. But what do you know? They just installed new tennis courts and an olympic swimming pool..good for them.
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
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...
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
Most of these games have a "no blood" mode. Maybe just playing Descent III or Shogo or Slave Zero instead of a conventional FPS would be good - its all mechanicle there.
There's the whole question of how legitamate this all is - these are retail products here.
Okay - Abuse is awesome, try that multiplayer, you'll be confused out of your wits why there's nothing else like it. BattleZone 1 is good on old machines, nice graphics, and gives both FPS buffs and RTS buffs good gameplay.
Play Total Annihilation for a week and you'll have army management and base construction skills that will kick the ass of any StarCraft or AoE player.
Independance War II should be added to a physics class curriculum for required playing - space fighting the way space fighting really works.
For a sheer visual orgasm of strategy, there's Homeworld. Too bad the game's not that much fun tho.
Notice that all the games I'm recommending except Abuse are about fighting vehicles, robots, etc - not killing humans. Slightly reduces the whole "violence" issues.
If you want non-violent games, theres 1/0 racing games out there to play online.... heck, there's some good violent racing games too (WipeOut XL comes to mind).
Most of those games will work fine, if not perfectly, on a pentium II with minimal video acceleration (Descent3 and IWar2 are exceptions) - a good baseline for a highschool.
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.
If the school had computers back in 1985
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
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
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.
Give me some good reasons as to why those 'games' are any better than those played on a LAN.
Linux is dead.
LU
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.
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
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?
On the otherside, when I was on the chess team in H.S., I played 2-3 hours per day. Nobody complained about it, maybe because the graphics weren't as good
Whaddaya mean? With features like: Nearly Infinite Resolution(TM), Ultrareal 3D(TM), Force Feedback(Patent pending), Texture Feedback(U.S. Patent 4242424242) and the fact that it is ultra-low power design makes Real Chess(TM) the most realistic simulation of a board game yet. Real Chess, it doesn't get any more real than this!(TM)
Seriously, you DO know that you can play Solitare and Freecell with real cards, right?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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)
That's all well and good, but restricting activities doesn't help to encourage anybody to do anything. PE should be an important part of a childs education, but more than that, kids should be taught to enjoy it. Get kids backpacking, hiking, biking, running, whitewater rafting, kayaking... Just because there is a sports team doesn't mean that a kid is interested in playing. (I hated playing basketball and the only thing being forced to do it did was make me bitter).
Linux is dead.
LU
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.
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
Well, your response made perfect sense in regards to the parent, albiet it made little sense in response to mine ;)
Linux is dead.
LU
Oh yeah, the best game ever! ;-) It was back then, anyway. We then had Marathon and Marathon 2.
BTW, there is a WinBolo (www.winbolo.com) out there complete with Internet servers. Doesn't seem as fun as it did back then though.
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.
"The people that will one day run everything are the nerds and geeks of high schools today, and the star high school athletes will be the guy installing my pool or re-shingling my roof in 10 years."
Arrogance and ignorance go hand in hand.
[o]_O
So go and chess aren't addictive games? Funny, cause some people spend their life playing them.
All games are addictive. "Having fun" is addictive. Should everything that is addictive be considered bad? What would be left? Even work is addictive to some people.
True warriors use the Klingon Google
Ah, the good old days, when it took you longer to compile that Codewarrior C++ app than it did to write it...
Of course, right after I'd taken all the CS classes I could at that school, they went and bought a whole new slew of Wintel machines. Kinda pissed me off. Now you go in the lab and everyone's playing UT or CS. Makes me want to complain about how we didn't have them fancy three-dee graphics in my day . We only had Bolo, and we liked it!
heck yeah ... this is just a fun game overall ...
09
Free, cross platform, (semi)educational http://www.inl.org/netrek/netrekFAQ.html
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
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.
-
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
Sports make you healthy. Video games give you a fat ass.
do you really want your high-school kids to get even less physical exersize then they do now?
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.
I disagree-Note that he said there were 34 computers, presumably, this means about 30 kids come to play. That's a sizeable group-bigger than all but two parties I've been to as a high school student.
My peer group (skaters who like computer programming and games...several of us have A+ certs) would undoubtedly love something like that. Because it's at the school, it gives a central location for everyone to come to, and it means that there will be enough facilities for everyone.
In my spare time, I participate in a handful (about 3) different clubs and organizations, and play some "alternative" sports like Paintball.
One note-my school's computer club is considering using WorldCraft to teach an emergent computer technologies class. WorldCraft = the Half-Life SDK+Level Editor for those who aren't aware. The logistics are being worked on...
There are many posibilities for this thing. The kids who are going to come are going to socialize with each other while there-they're just doing the socializing in a more controlled, directed setting-something many people like.
Oh for Pete's sake.
Sports programs are SO INCREDIBLY OVER-SUPPORTED in our
school systems - to the point where they degrade academics.
Take some time and actually do your homework: it is easier
to build a new sports facility in a public school in the US than
it is to upgrade an existing science lab or library. Arts and
music programs are virtually non-existant nowadays.
Math and Science teachers are the first laid off every year
when there's a budget cut (to the point that it's almost
impossible to get tenure because you're constantly shuffled
to the bottom of the pile with each transfer). On the other
hand, how often do you see a PE instructor or coach on the
unemployment line?
I know you put chess and go on the list --- OK most schools
have Chess clubs. However, there's no good reason to limit
it to just a few board games because they're somehow less
"threatening" to nay-sayers. This is an opportunity to make
some very substianial changes in how schools treat students
and teachers. It should be encouraged.
Baseball and Basketball: /. who complain about never getting laid probably never exercised in high school.
1) Exercise. Believe it or not, people are healthier when they exercise. People who exercise regularly have lower incidences of more diseases than I care to enumerate here.
2) The self confidence gained by being in shape. All the geeks on
Chess and Go:
1) These are well researched games that have stood the test of time. Computer games only last until the next 'it game' comes out. By learning to play chess or go, you learn a skill that you'll have the rest of your life. Also, once you reach a certain skill level, you need to start researching documented theory on the game. For example, there are entire books that are devoted to a single chess opening.
2) Ever known anyone to get carpal tunnel from playing chess?
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
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)
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
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 :)
Yes, but maybe they're not into sports. Maybe the school should actually make an effort to cater to what they like instead of telling them what group activities the school feels they should do.
Or maybe they're not into math, or science. Why should schools cater to students who enjoy those activities?
We a have a generation of educated, talented children that are being told if they can't dunk or throw and 80 yard pass they aren't worth shit in high school.
I know a lot of people who were never able to do either of these things, yet they always managed to get A's in Phys Ed.
The people that will one day run everything are the nerds and geeks of high schools today, and the star high school athletes will be the guy installing my pool or re-shingling my roof in 10 years.
And the people that play computer games all day are the ones we'll be taking care of in the hospitals when they have their fourth heart attacks.
When I was in high school, I was using a 15 year old math book and then went to assemblies where all the cheerleaders had new uniforms.
High School math hasn't changed in 15 years. Cheerleader outfit styles have.
The chemistry equipment was so old that the reminents of 1000 past experiments were stuck to beakers, leading to some rather bad, unforseen chemical reactions. But what do you know? They just installed new tennis courts and an olympic swimming pool..good for them.
Ultimately maybe your school had a poor balance. That's no reason to claim that all schools do, or that we should throw out sports completely.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
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
The funny thing is, the admins don't enforce it - its the bitchy librarian (oh man is she mean) and the paraniod teachers that give us hell. The sysadmins just do what they're told by the faculty.
"Upon attaching the waterblock to my penis, I began to notice that I know nothing about computers." -- JRockway
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
I completely agree with you that Warhammer 40k would be an excellent activity for schools to promote...as would pretty much any physical game (as opposed to virtual). However, there is a distiction to be made between physical games like Warhammer and Virtual games like StarCraft or MechWarrior. Warhammer requires you to move more muscles than just your fingers and eyes. Eye strain and carpal tunnel are real problems for many people (not to mention obesity due to inactivity) and we shouldn't be encouraging any activity that will result in an earlier onset of these problems.
As many others have pointed out, many other things can be addictive. It's when addictions have negative side effects besides the loss of time that they become problematic. It is precisely because of games like Warhammer which teach much the same skills as computer games without the dangers of carpal tunnel or eye strain that schools should not be promoting computer games.
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
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..
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.
Addiction in and of itself is not a bad thing, so long as it is recognized as such. It's when the addictive behavior also has negative side effects that there is a need for more concern. If cigarettes didn't cause cancer or heart disease, their addictive qualities would be much less of a concern.
Chess and Go do not carry the same risks of carpal tunnel syndrome and increased eye strain that computer games do. These ailments can be very debilitating for people and cost businesses millions of dollars every year in increased health costs and lost productivity. Basketball and Baseball (as well as all sports) have even greater benefits as exercise has continually been proven to have very positive effects both physically and mentally.
So, the fact that computer games themselves are addictive is only relevant since playing them is also physically unhealthy.
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
"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.
Most sports teams in high schools pay for their "improvements" such as new uniforms and bleachers with ticket and concession sales from their games. Our wrestling team had a yearly banquet, the cost of which was wholly offset from bottles of soda we sold during our home matches. And we weren't even a good team.
Textbooks and computers, on the other hand, are not usually the auspice of any "club" and therefore must be paid for with surplus funds, stipends or bond acts. When have you ever seen a bond act for new basketballs? A new fieldhouse, maybe...but fieldhouses bring money from alumns which feeds stipends, etc.
Sure, a lot of teen athletes are failures after high school...so are a lot of computer dorks. Three of the guys from my high school's Tech Model Railroad Club work Joe jobs -- coffee shops, supermarkets and the like. Our star quarterback works for IBM.
Your selective bias may make it seem like high school athletes are failures, but it ain't necessarily so.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
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?
Although you do have a good point, I think you're asking for too much. Most high schools don't just give the sports teams a bunch of money, the team members have to do fundraising to get the money to buy new things. Why should the nerds and geeks get the money handed to them while the jocks and cheerleaders have to work for it?
Oh, and the star athletes are usually the ones with charisma and they'll probably end up being that boss everyone has that has no idea about anything related to the job but still has control over you, the educated, talented "nerd."
So when's the first MathBlaster Quake Mod coming? ;)
I wish my lawn was emo, so it would cut itself.
One more reason why I've never been to a "class reunion" - how they treated us geeks.
I for one, harbor a deep hatred towards the way schools treat atheletes vs. the way they treat scholars.
It's funny you should say this - when I was on my high school's Academic Decathlon team, our principal and our main coach decided to applaud us with letter jackets at a mandatory pep rally, before our big state competition. We did appreciate the sincerity and thoughtfulness of those adults, but when we walked into the gym, people booed and hissed, some team of jocks (who were losers competitively as well as academically) were openly making fun of us as they left the floor, and the cheerleaders just couldn't stop giggling enough to really cheer us. For the rest of the year I got teased a bit about where my "letter" was for my letter jacket, and what sport I played, etc. At least they were good for showing off to the other geeks that "our school cares." (Yeah, right!) But if I hadn't made other memories outside of school with that jacket later, i'd have put it in a homeless shelter donation bin long ago.
Oh, yeah, the next year (after I graduated), the team won the national competition - but I didn't hear of them getting much more respect, then, either... but how about that golf team!
Get off my launchpad!
A word about Fund raising. And a disclaimer, disclaimer first: I was on my highschools Academic Bowl team, in the Technology Student Association, a member of the Strategic Gaming Club, a Tutor for elementary school students, and a Wrestler, so I had experience with all of the various types of organizations at the school.
The Football team was allowed an unlimited number of fundraising events as well as their ticket sales, etc... As wrestlers we were allowed 2 fund raisers per year, as was Band, cheerleading, etc... Academic Bowl was allowed 1 fund raiser per year, TSA was allowed 0, the gaming club was allowed 0.
In Academic Bowl we were using a buzzer system that was 15+ years old and frequently didn't work properly, in TSA we had incredibly outdated equipment and very very limited tools. Wrestling hadn't had new equipment in 4 years because the money from Wrestling, Cheerleading, etc... went into a global 'Sports Activity' fund that was doled out mostly to the Softball team, which was part of that group and allowed only 1 fund raiser.
The Strategic Gaming club used chess boards, go boards, cards, etc... donated by the members or brought in to use for the sessions. We had 0$ from the school in the way of funding. When my younger brother founded the Chess club my parents paid for every chess board they had. Even when they took 12th out of 50 or so schools at the State competition, the school didn't even consider giving them any money for anything. They were allowed 0 fund raisers.
So the system whereby clubs in MY old high school were allowed to raise money for themselves was SERIOUSLY weighted against the intellectual groups and even the lesser sports. And highly skewed towards the football team. So even if we wanted to go out and try to raise money for our Gaming club, we weren't allowed to. Sucks eh?
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
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
Point 1. You obviously don't play Go. The hand movements necessary to place stones on a board that's mostly full without messing the board up are very delicate and very stressful. Inexperienced players frequently drop stones when they first switch to the correct grip.
Point 2. Basketball, Baseball, and Football on a high school level are not accessible to all students. I couldn't have played Football in my highschool even if I had wanted to. I was just too bloody small. (I did wrestle though)
Point 3. Injuries during sports are more severe than anything you can sustain typing. Knee, elbow and shoulder injuries are very common in all high school sports. I broke 2 ribs and my thumb during my 1.5 year wrestling career. In my 8 year Martial Arts career I've never broken a bone. Though I have had my forehead opened up pretty messily.
Point 4. Playing Computer Games is not physically unhealthy. I play a LOT of computer games. And I bet I can outrun you, out fight you, and probably pound for pound out benchpress you. I know I squat more weight than you do. And I'm only 5'7", 125.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
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?
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?
Re: Point 1:
So...as long as go doesn't involve the same hand movements as using a mouse, it won't contribute to carpal tunnel. Plus, by actually lifting your arm over the board you increase the blood flow to your hand.
Re: Point 2:
So schools should concentrate on making sports more accessible to students. That means that any student that wants to participate should be given every oportunity to do so. Schools should expand the diversity of their physical activity programs to include things like martial arts, yoga or, my personal favorite, rockclimbing. All of those activities are accessible to almost anyone and promote a healthy lifestyle.
Re: Point 3:
Exercise makes you healthier and less injury prone. The benefits of physical exercise are pretty much universally accepted to outweigh the risks. There are *no* physical benefits to using computers.
Re: Point 4:
If you can run a marathon in less than 2:45, then you can outrun me. I'll give you the fighting and weight lifting since I never do that sort of activity (although, from my rockclimbing, I guarantee I can do more one-arm pullups than you can). Ok...now that the "who's is bigger" crap is out of the way, did all those computer games make you able to do all those physical exploits? Didn't think so. Playing computer games *is* physically unhealthy, you just participate in enough physically healthy activities to compensate for your gaming habit. Not all gamers are as responsible, in that respect, as you are.
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
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.
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?
This is assuming that you were a "geek" in the sense that you weren't an athlete or otherwise in whatever was considered the popular crowd, not a "geek" in the sense that you were/are exceptionally maladroit. (Well, okay, if you were exceptionally maladroit but no longer are, you might be very surprised, as well.)
Now, I don't think this will be as true at, say, the five year reunion as the tenth or beyond. But in the Real World(tm), intelligence counts for a hell of a lot more than it does in high school. If you are successful in the Real World(tm) (batteries not included, void where prohibited), that's likely to be admired among your peers. Also, if you're successful, you'll likely be more self-confident, and that will make a huge difference.
It is not unusual for the people that were the most obsessed with being popular in high school to never "unlearn" the behaviors and strategies that worked for them there. But in the Real World(tm), often such strategies seem incredibly petty and foolish. They can't quite make "it" work the way they did in school, and they increasingly cling to a version of themselves that's long gone. They become incredibly pathetic creatures. It's very amusing.
I was never quite able to evaluate my own social position in high school. I was some strange kind of school genius who skipped classes a lot, got A's and F's, mostly, played drums in band, wasn't a jock but being that this was a small town I was casual friends with all the popular folks because I was one of them until my puberty (when I didn't grow as much as the other boys did--popularity kiss of death), sometimes teacher's pet, sometimes wiseass, always an iconclast, and voted "most radical" by my senior class, whatever the hell that meant. Anyway, I thought I wasn't very popular, but I was aware that many, many people were less popular than I was. I wasn't sure what to expect of my 10 Year HS Reunion.
Even though I grew up completely in that small town, I didn't have any familial ties there, and not too long after I graduated both myself and my family moved away. So I hadn't been there in a while. As my wife (now ex) and I pulled into the parking lot before the first informal meeting, I had this amazing, wonderful realization that I did not care in the tiniest amount what these people thought of me. I did when I was in HS, although I affected a disinterest in such things like everyone else did. But it was an odd feeling realizing that these people whose approval I desperately wanted ten years before had absolutely no power over me now. It was a really, really neat feeling.
I stopped and told my wife (now ex) that I hugely regretted the fact that I wasn't gay and could therefore be scandalously "out" and not care what they thought.
So, anyway, the gist of the rest of this silly story is that everyone seemed to remember and know me, everyone came up to talk to me, everyone seemed happy to see me, and I could hardly remember anyone's name at all.
It was strange.
This month, I believe, I will be attending my 10th Year High School Reunion. That cheerleader I had a crush on for three years is supposed to be there this time. I can't wait.
Go. Don't give a shit. You'll have fun.
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!
But of course, these are all traditional entertainments, so people blithely ignore the risks and injuries, and presume that these activities are beneficial overall, even though if some people get hurt, or indulge in athletics to the detriment of their studies. Violence is rare with chess, of course, but it also just as sedentary as computer games.
On the other hand, if something like a computer game is merely popular, it gets characterized as "addictive." And while no school would ever consider eliminating football if a player throws a punch during a game or if spectators get in a brawl afterwards, the slightest hint of any kind of a problem would doubtless lead to widespread demands for the elimination of computer gaming.
The diference between geeks and jocks is a unique American invention.
You're right. We used to say "dumb jocks" as a pejorative for someone whose only success was on the field or in the gym, but "dumb" became seemingly redundant as sports became more about beating other people than about winning. That's not to say that smart athletes don't exist, here, of course, but it seems that only in smaller schools, these days, can you find that the math whiz is also the star basketball player, etc., simply because many people will pick just a single thing to be good at now.
Get off my launchpad!
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!
Heh. Well. I was actually geeky in all definitions. I moved across the country, became a network engineer (just got laid off, but I'm the last one of my industry friends that did, so that's an accomplishment, right?) making about twice what I would have made as an elementary school teacher (which I may go do now, actually). So I have to say that my social skills have improved at least to the point where I can get by. But I don't recall being friends with anyone in junior high or high school (we moved into a much more expensive neighborhood, in junior high, and I was made fun of from day 1 for my "poor" clothes, by people I found out later were living on welfare).
It was just a bad scene, all around, and it seems that if I go back it will be to try to prove something to people I shouldn't care a bit about. I might go in a couple of years to "network" if I'm out of a job again, but... going to a party full of people I either can't or don't want to remember sounds like a waste of time. Maybe if I was bored and lived nearby, I could just treat it as crashing a party full of strangers. Or go and observe what types of lives all the people who stayed behind ended up with, and reassure myself that while I'm no CEO, star actor, or Nobel Prize winner, I did relatively well. But I should be comparing myself to my goals, not to what others have done.
Only thing is, I have the same feelings about college, too, but I will probably go to my 10th reunion, there. I'm not sure why, maybe to see if anyone actually uses their degrees in their fields? =)
Get off my launchpad!
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??"
Diplomancy? Is that the International Relations course taught at Hogwarts? World Peace through Black Magic?
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!
When I was in high school, I was using a 15 year old math book and then went to assemblies where all the cheerleaders had new uniforms
There are differences from district to district, but in my high school the cheerleaders had to buy their own uniforms. This meant either rich parents (in most cases) or bikini car washes (w00t!). I only know this because I dated a cheerleader in high school [I still have no idea how I pulled that off, and last week we got engaged!]
But what do you know? They just installed new tennis courts...
Also, I was on the tennis team, and guess what: they condemned our courts. You read that right: the city came and put a big lock on the gate to the courts that said Keep Out: Condemned. We had to walk about a 1/2 mile from the school to a park in a somewhat shifty part of town to practice and play matches on 3 courts (typically schools have at least 8). So wherever the money was going to in our school, it certainly wasn't the tennis team or the cheerleaders.
My guess is the football team. The following is anecdotal, but I seem to remember our tennis coach telling us that the football team's budget was around $100,000 (including transportation, facilities, equipment, coaches, etc.) and ours was $50; enough for one box of tennis balls.
Please note that I'm not shooting down your theory about school budgeting, just clarifying some of your points.
"What we elect to call imagination is mere combination of things not heretofore combined." - Frank Norris
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 :)
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.
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 :)
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
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)
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...
Ah, but the point is that TA gets so much _bigger_ then StarCraft. TA has all the unit itinerary, work itinerary, waypoints, patrol systems... I find StarCraft's combat focuses an awful lot on the judicious use of special powers, while TA actually focusses on combat more. Plus, TA has way cooler jets.
I also feel that TA brings much more to the field of base construction and defense - the greater need to expand to all the metal sources in TA mean that players have to defend a very wide area, so the art of defense layout is much more complex.
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.
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..
The people that will one day run everything are the nerds and geeks of high schools today, and the star high school athletes will be the guy installing my pool or re-shingling my roof in 10 years. Nah. The nerds and geeks of high schools today will spend their futures bitching about stuff on the internet and getting increasingly lardy.
They will not be the people who run everything, as those will be the people who know stuff and do stuff and have good social and hygiene skills.
"Information wants to be paid"
Point 4 - Playing Computer Games is physically unhealthy if you don't take time out to exercise!
I mean, you do martial arts, so you're going to be in good condition. Too many people out there spend all their time glued to a computer, so they're not going to be in good condition.
"Information wants to be paid"
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.
Since you're basically calling me a liar, I shouldn't even bother responding to your really rude response, but since I do know what I'm talking about, I'll make the effort if you promise to be more civil from now on.
One example: in Mass. there was a program called MISTEP which was designed to get math, science, and english majors into K-12 teaching jobs. They put you through am 18-month intensive course to get an MS in Education, gave you classroom experience, and set you up with your first position. In return, you promised to teach in the system for 5 years.
My brother went through this program. He taught in a different school every year because every spring they had across the board layoffs in math and science, then everyone had to scramble fighting for the same spots. One place he was at wanted to keep him, but the math position went away --- but they really liked that he had coached girls basketball.
Ah - you say - that's just one case. Well, no - the program closed down after a few years because the same thing was happening to EVERYONE. They all promised to teach for 5 or more years, but couldn't find permanent work. The best you could get was an entry-level position every year and get laid off at the end of the year, every year. The next year you could find yourself in an inner-city school across the state, that is if the school reopened the position. So you might find a position, but it'd be 100 miles from where you lived.
That's not at odds with the situation you describe. Yes, at the same time they're begging for qualified math and science teachers, but at the last minute when they need then will hire people off of the street. If there are cuts in the budget, those positions will be let go until the budget is rejuggled, since another "emergency" can always be altered later on.
Thus, if you're a math/science teacher you can't progress in the system since every year or every couple of years you have to start over. The two situations go hand in hand - why stay in teaching if your career dead ends at the outset? So, you get a cycle of "no one's applying" and "there are no stable jobs".
My original (and still completely valid) point was - you NEVER see this happening with PE positions or coaching positions. Those positions are deemed "necessary", as if the lack of a varsity football team will destroy academic performance.
Well, if they were smart the game publishers would jump on it. There's a reason MS & Apple love the education market. Get the kids hooked on a game at school, and they'll probably buy it for home...
jred
I'm not a mechanic but I play one in my garage...
LOL...HS was 13 years ago...so those things didn't exist yet. I meant played 2-3 hours with a person sitting across from me.
Once I got bored of Starcraft, and later Civ III, I don't play many video games.
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.
My point was that playing computer games doesn't automatically mean someone is going to be unhealthy. Nor does it mean they are doing nothing but. People shouldn't be discouraged from playing video games just because you think it might be less healthy for them than running track. If I get my physical excersise outside of school via rock-climbing, Martial arts, or whatever, and I want to play computer games at school then why shouldn't I be able to? Just because some couch potato who wouldn't participate in a physical activity even if forced might be slightly less healthy for it? If people aren't going to excersise then they aren't. You can't force them to.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
> Oh, and the star athletes are usually the ones
> with charisma
This has come up many times on this branch and it just seems irrelevant to me. The focus of the original post was scholars as opposed to sportspeople.
Not everybody who is smart and has knowledge of computers in high school is an asocial geek. CERTAINLY plenty of non-geeks seem to get on alright with a bit of Quake 3. Not all star athletes have charisma, and a fair bit of that is the 'mystique' of being a star athlete (especially in the case of cheerleader).
All that the school incidents have shown up is the pathetic teaching of social skills in schools. Yes, it's possible.
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