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Student Arrested For Posting Zombie-Killing AR Game Clip Filmed at His High School (yahoo.com)
18-year-old high school student Sean Small was arrested in Indiana on Tuesday and charged with a misdemeanor for posting a videogame clip to social media. An anonymous reader quotes Yahoo Lifestyle:
The clip in question is Sean playing The Walking Dead: Our World, which is an augmented reality game that animates characters into a real-world setting. In this case, players kill zombies. Along with Sean's video he wrote, "Finally something better than Pokemon Go," which is also an augmented reality game....
Sean, who is a member of the Indiana National Guard, pleaded not guilty to an intimidation charge. He was released on $1,000, and his school expulsion hearing is set for next week. The video featured other students walking through the halls as Sean allegedly attempted to kill the zombies the game placed among them.
Realistic footage of shootings in the high school's hallways apparently alarmed the off-duty sheriff's deputy hired to work at the high school -- who then filed the misdemeanor intimidation charge with the county prosecutor.
Sean, who is a member of the Indiana National Guard, pleaded not guilty to an intimidation charge. He was released on $1,000, and his school expulsion hearing is set for next week. The video featured other students walking through the halls as Sean allegedly attempted to kill the zombies the game placed among them.
Realistic footage of shootings in the high school's hallways apparently alarmed the off-duty sheriff's deputy hired to work at the high school -- who then filed the misdemeanor intimidation charge with the county prosecutor.
There seems to be a grey area between fiction, and really harmful content. However the line between free speech, and being uncomfortable about something is very hard to draw.
I'm not sure how to objectively draw a boundary. However if the game is setup to allow real life footage to be amended with zombie shooting, this would have happened sooner or later.
How this finally plays out is actually important for the future boundaries of free speech.
I expect this to get worse as AR becomes more commonplace. Imagine if it were a laser-tag AR game where he was shooting other students!
People love their battle royale games, I expect there to shortly be location-based AR battle royale games; last survivor in your school wins!
I'm honestly surprised that ~20 years after Postal, Pico's World, GTA and Super Columbine Massacre RPG, people still get their panties in a twist about games about killing sprees. Perhaps satire was the only thing that spared those games, anything that's halfway serious gets shouted down even by gamers.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Gun control is completely realistic in the most general sort of sense. I've lived in 6 or 7 countries, and all of them have strict gun regulation. In all of them owning guns is allowed, but it comes with reasonable preconditions. One has to pass a base sanity check, and one cannot easily own an arsenal.
Guess what, there are no recorded mass shootings in any of these countries. The police aren't armed to the teeth. They are not trigger-happy, and you don't have to live in fear that you'll be shot by them no matter what ethnicity is.
And, guess what, schoolchildren in those countries don't get arrested for playing a game. Even it is a FPS AR one.
This Aussie is rather silly to think it knows what "cultural context" is going to be shared or not. The US still resists the nanny state mentality. That's the shared cultural context that you don't, or can't, understand.
We don't need more laws to stop incidents like the Parkland shootings, we need officials who will enforce the existing laws instead of letting known-violent offenders do whatever the flip they feel like in some misguided attempt to "shut down the school-to-prison pipeline". They merely replaced it with a school-to-graveyard pipeline.
A few guys in my high school did a similar thing with Doom in the 90s. Made a model of the school and some of the students, teachers etc as monsters and you could play a level killing them all. Nobody thought it was threatening. Don't see why this one would be?
I think the problem is, they arrested the guy and a lot of people are saying it's an overreaction, but if they hadn't done anything and he later shot up the school, some of those same people would have said, "Why didn't you do something when you found out he was playing that game?!"
Specifically, there's a tension created by the Republican rhetoric, and there's not a clear way to resolve it. On the one hand, they want to argue that the availability of guns isn't a contributing factor in school shootings, and that the responsibility falls entirely on law enforcement to identify and arrest the shooters. In other words, the problem isn't bad policy or bad guns, but bad people, and those people need to be locked up. On the other hand, they want to claim that they're libertarians who value freedom and personal choice, and that the government should not be involved in your life in any way unless you've committed a clear crime. The shooters often don't commit a clear crime until the actual shooting, even though they may have said or done some disturbing things. And so this sets up a conflict between the freedom to buy guns, and the freedom to think and speak as you choose.
The Republican resolution to these kinds of tensions often take the form of moral panic. They won't budge on gun control, and they don't want social reform or to provide mental health services, so they need to find some source of "evil". They imagine devil worshipers and perverts behind every corner, and look for reasons to blame social media or video games or sex or drugs or minorities. They deny the possibility that there could be problems with our own rules, culture, or way of life, and instead look for an assault from an outside evil, arguing that if that evil were simply removed or prohibited, everything would be fine.
They've already created the expectation that school shootings are caused by violent video games, so a violent AR game played in a school is guaranteed to cause concern. I wouldn't argue that arresting him was the right choice, but it makes sense that the social media post would cause some kind of response and intervention. I think if this had happened while I was in school, before school shootings were so common, it might have resulted in a visit to the principal's office, and maybe a couple of follow-ups with a school counselor to make sure everything was fine. If they want to be careful, maybe some kind of a mental evaluation is in order, or having police check to see whether he's known to have access to weapons.
Schools have [zero tolerance] policies because it relieves them from having to think. Aren't all the grown-ups at a school supposed to be capable of critical thinking?
School administrators are capable of critical thinking. The voters who elect the school board that hires school administrators, not so much.
That certain inalienable Rights are not as widely accepted by other Countries actually speaks volumes about their lack of Civil Rights compared to the U.S., rather than that those Rights are somehow not "acceptable".
Except that many other countries recognize inalienable rights that the US doesn't, including right to privacy in public, rights to vote, right to a new start after serving a sentence, rights to healthcare and right to a roof above your head.
The US of A is way down the list of human rights, and needs to shut up. The US bill of rights was forward-thinking centuries ago, but has stuck on archaic while the world has moved forward.
Just for that, I'm going to buy a bump stock. I don't own a rifle that has a pistol grip, but fuck it, I'll buy a bump stock anyways. I don't use Instagram, but I'll create an account and post a nice selfie of me holding a bump stock.