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Washington School Bans Halo 2 Tournament
Pluvius writes "A couple of high-school students in the Washington city of Puyallup wanted to raise money for the tsunami disaster in South Asia, and figured that the best way to do so was to hold a tournament using Bungie's hit XBox title Halo 2. Their school district disagreed, citing an anti-violence policy. Even though all of the parents of the children who would've taken part in the tournament signed waivers acknowledging the game's violence, Puyallup School District felt that due to school shootings across the country, 'anything we do that even looks like we're endorsing violence is not appropriate.'"
Is there a mod for this that changes the weapons systems to Nerf guns?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Yes, because each and every person out there would make the obvious cognitive leap that raising charity money via tournaments of a futuristic game based on fragging aliens equates to condoning kids bringing guns to school and shooting their classmates, right? /sarcasm
This is asinine. Does the school have a football team? A wrestling team? Or do those not count as violent?
Are they really expecting the kids to go home, make a needle gun, and bring it in to school? All the Halo games teach is that you should kill aliens. It says nothing about school teachers or other students.
Here's a spoon, America. Let's dig our heads out of our asses.
What a non-story (not slashdot but the article). The students want it, the parents signed off on it. So what if the school doesn't want it? Then don't involve the school. I'm sure there's plenty of other locations where one could hold the tournament. Maybe a local community center?
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
The school *did* have a football team, but they deemed it to violent and closed it down. They now play a form of "peaceball" where opponents hand each other presents, then gently insist the other team is better than their own, and has won.
School's policy, school's decision.
Just have the fundraiser outside of school property.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
If they refuse to endorse violence in any way, shape, or form; then bye bye Shakespeare, Dickens, Tolstoy (?), Nursery Rhymes; etc, as well as almost all forms of organised sport; modern art, some forms of modern music, etc; etc.
It's a video game. Just as Romeo and Juliet is a book. Where one has you not-so-elegantly killing your opponents; the other has a very elegant description of someone killing his opponents. Where you conspire with your friends to best your enemies in Halo; the two houses "teams" conspire to best each other in Romeo and Juliet.
Humanity is violent; its' roots are violence, and if you cannot control your own desire for violence then *you* probably *will* do something stupid at some point in your life- which has nothing to do whatsoever with Halo 2; Half-life 2; Doom 3.....
My UID is prime. Is yours?
...have stuck with MonkeyBall
I can't really blame them. All it would take is some bleeding-heart political activist and suddenly it would look like the school is endorsing violent activities. The school is protecting themselves from possible litigation and some possible embarassment. As much as it sucks, it's the safer decision they've taken.
I know this isn't going to be the most popular opinion, but I sort of feel sorry for the school district here. I mean, imagine if they did allow this and a parent complained, and you know one would. In a society that values censorship over responsibility, these people just did what they needed to to keep their jobs. As asinine as it seems, the district people were taking the safest route for all involved, politically. One more thing- imagine that a week later some nutball came to school and started shooting. You just know Halo 2 would have been blamed, whether the stupid kid went to the touroment or not. I guess if something were to happen, it's better that it not easily be tied to a form of media that a lot of people are trying very hard to censor.
When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.
IIRC, it's their legal position that student organizations all have an equal right to school facilities (yup even the Boy Scouts - just no 'special rights').
You may want to contact them via their students' rights web site at ACLU student rights
The world will not get better through technology. We must seek to be better people.
I agree completely. just trying to add some humor. Want something really funny? check out my other post on this topic. I get modded troll for basically saying what you just said & another guy gets +4 insightful for bashing me.
/. as a whole.
lol, this is a sad reflection on
Halo 2 has an ESRB rating of M (17+). Most of the kids in highschool do not fit into that category. If they wanted to have a Mario Party tournament then I would understand people being upset over it being canceled but we have to face facts. Halo 2 is not for kids.
Look, think about it from the school's perspective. Lawyers will try to find even the most obscure link between a shooting and the video games the shooter may have played. If the school *did* allow this tournament to happen, you just know that if there was a shooting five years down the line that the school district would be the first in line to be sued.
Don't blame the school, blame the sue-happy culture and the negative stigma of videogames for forcing their hand.
Even if they don't raise any money, this is sure to reduce the teen pregnancy rate at the school.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
It had little effect on productivity, grades didn't change, and we were using otherwise unnocupied resources. And I don't need to tell you the effect it had on morale...
Few months later, in the next semester, we had some county people in the school. One of them was checking email in the lab. Someone else walked in and booted up UT.
Not only did we recieve a ridiculous lecture (understand, we are 15 mins from Columbine, maybe 18mos later) but there were suspensions, the lab tech was reprimanded (later left the system - now makes twice the $$ dev'ing software!) And we made the district newsletter.
Schools over-react to everything, because by default, the only people in district management are the ones who think there is something intrensically wrong with the way the system is run - they do not understand logic - They comprehend only liability.
Physics is nothing like religion. If it was, we'd have an easier time trying to raise money!
I completely understand and agree with teh schools stance. Should anything have happened after the event, months or even years, you could bet that some parents group somewhere would have held the school liable for it.
I also think that the students should be commended for wanting to do something to aid the victims of this disaster. It proves that their generation isn't as disenfranchised as we are lead to believe.
Good job gamers!
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
This is only one small part of a much bigger problem.
American students are not taught how to distinguish fantasy from reality.
This has been going on for at least one generation, maybe more, depending on what criteria you use.
This is why Americans are not allowed to see real phone numbers in fictional movies. If they do, people call the numbers trying to reach the fictional characters. (A film that had a story about God helping people had a real number in it and the people who happened to have that number were swamped by people trying to contact God.)
Some people say our last election was an example of people who cannot tell fantasy from reality.
Some of the people who want to protect us from real violence seem to believe that fantasy violence either causes it or encourages real violence when the statistics show no such correleation. Just because they cannot tell the difference does not mean that others do not.
I can give other examples...
I doubt that this problem will be solved soon. Too many parts of American culture derive their power from the confusion of fantasy and reality for their to be any real incentive to change.
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
The newest entry into the endangered lists, common sense. While everyone has been out ranting and raving about saving this animal, that plant, protecting minorities, and not hurting people's feelings we forgot to save one thing.
I'm guessing that a high percentage of the folks here condemning the school don't own homes.
Why? Because homeowners go through this sort of painful deliberation regularly.
I live in a cul-de-sac and my yard happens to be the recipient of all the snow for the entire street. For a kid, it presents awesome potential for king-of-the-hill, snowball fights, digging tunnels, etc. It's truly a massive amount of snow.
But can I really let the neighborhood kids play in it? No way. The second one of them got hurt, it's MY homeowner's policy on the line. It's MY insurance that's going to not get renewed, forcing me to double my cost for homeowner's insurance when I have to resort to the state 'pool'. In other words, if I want to be a nice guy I have to accept an unreasonable risk.
The school is in the same position. You can bet that administrator and the school officials really thought what the kids were doing was cool. You can also bet that they sat back and said: "When we get sued, it's going to require resources in time and money that we *really* can't afford, given ever-tightening school budges."
So they came to the only reasonable conclusion.
To all these folks screaming about the state of our country, I pose this question: Are you really, honestly ready to stand up and say "I won't sue my neighbor, even if he's technically culpable"? Because until you are, people are going to be more concerned about protecting themselves than in freeing up their resources to share.