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.

> 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/...

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.

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 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 either misunderstood the article you've linked or you're misrepresenting it.

The Lego set was taken by investigators as a potentially related article to what its owner was arrested for and charged with - several counts of breaking into the Capitol and organising the riot. No one finds these Capitol Lego sets suspicious on the whole. That one particular set was connected to a criminal case.

If society believed that Lego Capitol sets incite Capitol riots or, more broadly, that architectural Lego sets overall lead to some increase in terrorism associated with landmarks, then it would be similar to how some people think of video games - that if they are thematically similar to dreadful real world events, they are somehow related. And it would be paranoid. As it is with games.

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.)

Kids got in serious trouble for this back then too. I'm not sure I could find a article, but I do remember hearing about it happening in the news (post columbine). I'm pretty sure the kids who committed columbine also did this with a Doom level editor. So rightly or not, school officials would see this as copy-cat behavior.

There's got to be a name for this phenomenon where people focus in on a pattern that may be consistent between events but is actually an incredibly common set of factors that it's totally nom-predictive.

It is an error in Bayesian reasoning. All high school shooters play violent video games, but not all kids who play violent video games are going to shoot up their high schools.

P(A|B) != P(B|A)

Logically, it's affirming the consequent.

It's usually presented as a group of "red flags" that sound rare in summation. Everyone knows kids play violent video games. What I see among school shooters is things like, has threatened classmate in the past, is on anti-depresents/in therapy and played violent video games.

Some of those things may indeed be a factor in the actual event so it might actually have _some_ merit to bring up but I also probably just described ~5% of kids so it's not at all useful for predictability but it's presented as a "we should have seen it coming" or "why didn't anybody do anything!?".

The violent video games thing is nothing more than a panic but mental health issues and a history of actual violence are the actual ingredients of a mass shooter, it's just not predictive.

I hope that makes sense...

The drugs more than the "mental illnesses" contributed to the shootings, it is theorized.

Charles Whitman conducted a mass shooting in 1966, and the supplies he hauled along with his guns and ammo were Dexedrine and Excedrin.

Once upon a time, antidepressants carried a black box warning that they may cause homicidal ideations. That's right, not merely suicidal, but homicidal. And many psychoactive drugs actually work to cause the symptoms they purport to alleviate.

It is alleged, perhaps by conspiracy theorists, that pharmaceutical and psychiatric evidence in the Columbine trials was actively suppressed. Who knows?

But it's an interesting synergy that every mass shooting is followed by political calls for "more mental health care" which translates to more budget to put more people on drugs, so if the drugs are causing the shootings, then you have the perfect storm, don'tcha?

I could easily see it being predictive. Not the violent game part, but the map editing. Conducting surveillance, and acquiring maps are well known important steps in evil-doing. It helps with playing around with various scenarios, figuring out your pathing, first open fire there, then fire a bit there, then exit through there. Police likely to come from there, taking them x minutes. They could be stalled by doing y. Etc.

But since so many people have done this and not shot up their school, how predictive is it really?