Hacker News Reader

Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if that's legal, given that mapmaking is protected expression, and a recent ruling saying that (public) schools can't police protected expression off of school grounds.

Without a clear expression of threat, I don't think simple mapmaking is sufficient grounds for a terror threat charge.

View on HN

> simple mapmaking

It's not simple mapmaking though is it? It's creating a map inside a video game to simulate school grounds.

Drawing a map of the school and putting it in a frame on your wall? Fine.

Drawing a map, recreating it inside a first person shooter, then spending hours playing (training) memorizing the map? I believe anyone could see that as a terroristic threat.

Edit: Example Legos. Having a Lego model of the US Capital? Fine

Have a Lego Capital, attend the Jan 6 protest, have books and other militia type information? Probably going to get questioned by the feds.

https://www.businessinsider.com/fbi-took-lego-set-of-capitol...

I think you might also need to consider the context though - well before the thought of a “school shooting” was an annual occurrence. If schools had metal detectors it was for knives or worst case, a hand gun. And guns themselves are not universally liked or practiced with. I seriously doubt someone would suggest that playing an fy_ map is grounds for practicing anything except video games. Extending a video game to reproducing a school ground or neighbourhood seems natural - when I wanted to make my first text based game, I tried making it about different rooms of my house, for example. People often want to model the world around them just to see if they can.

What about the context of flying a commercial airliner into a skyscraper?

Moussaoui enrolled in a flight simulator training course at a Pan Am facility near Minneapolis, Minnesota. Pan Am’s Minneapolis facility used flight simulators only, and the training there usually consisted of initial training for newly hired airline pilots or refresher training for active pilots.

https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/archive/special/...

Again, context. That’s actually a training course. And a plane is mostly computerized. So it makes sense to not train for emergency situations up in the air in a real plane. If Counter-Strike were used for actual training, and maybe it was somewhere, then I’d agree this breaks the rule. But I would never say that making a map means wanting to plan something in real life. It just doesn’t mean that, even if it looks that way. A game like CS is generally not actually a training simulator, it’s just a way to waste time with friends, etc. You don’t actually get any real world feedback or exercise or anything. I would argue actually playing paintball at school would be riskier, though… it also sounds like fun. Maybe it’s a question of harm or intent?

It's a Cessna rather than a commercial airliner, but slamming a plane into landmark buildings was not tabo or out of the ordinary pre-9/11: https://youtu.be/ssig3LUCwng?t=4m35s.

Indeed - Tom Clancy wrote Debt of Honor long before 9/11, and Rainbow Six long before COVID.

It is in fact, simple mapmaking. And fun. You have to project your own fears on to it to make it any more than that.

You could memorize the map by walking through your high school though.

> Drawing a map, recreating it inside a first person shooter, then spending hours playing (training) memorizing the map?

Right, because if they couldn't practice on a computer, schoolchildren would have no idea how to get around within their own school.

> Drawing a map, recreating it inside a first person shooter, then spending hours playing (training) memorizing the map? I believe anyone could see that as a terroristic threat.

I'd like to point out that "legal" means "not forbidden by law", which in our default-allow mode means "no law exists that prohibits it". This affects both criminal charges for playing CS in a school-like map as well as the behaviour of the school in response to that.

The correct way to assess legality is therefore not "anyone could see" but "is there a law that prohibits it?"

(Note that the hurdle to expulsion may be lower than for criminal charges.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com