Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

<rant> ZDNet has coverage today about the latest in the craze of "the internet is ruining our children." This one comes back to the FPS (first person shooter) games like Quake, Doom, Half-Life and Unreal, but its not about kids playing them, its about kids WRITING them. That's right, junior is sitting in his room learning matrix transformation, polygon removal theory and physics simulation programming -- and its violent.
Its a lot of the same old case of Bill Bennett wannabes piping off:

David Walsh, president of National Institute on Media and the Family, a nonpartisan organization that looks at the impact of entertainment on children, contends that underage mod makers are the moral equivalent of teenage pornographers. He thinks the game industry should apply the same rating system used on games to the mods themselves and restrict kids' access to Web sites where mods are posted.[ed: emphasis added]

WTF. Why are we alienating our best and brightest young people with this inflamatory rhetoric? We already forbid our kids to take an opaque bag to school, we forbid them to read As I Lay Dying and Huck Finn. If they wear dark clothes to school to many days in a row, they might get interrogated as a potential terrorist. Now, we DON'T want them writing expansions for games because the stuff they write is of a "Mature" nature. Let me break it down for you mom and dad, your 15 year old lives in a MA rated world. High school is generally a living hell for most kids, trying to figure out who they are while they deal with their sexually aware bodies, drugs, and adults.
You know, I remember when I was in high school, a local musician to Nashville (my home town) was playing a show at a club called (witty enough) The Ace of Clubs. I was upset because it was a 21 year old or better door policy and I was seventeen, but the act playing (Eric Gales) was sixteen. At sixteen he was old enough to write driving blues songs that 20nothings wanted to listen to. I can tell you the songs didn't start out "I love you. You love me..." I got over that one, but this is exact same thing. The talent involved here isn't songwriting and an instrument, its 3D modeling and computer programming. We should be encouraging these kids!
Many people like myself idolize the id Software development team. They make lots of money. They work on the most cutting edge software. They are a small and exclusive club. Several years ago before the Quake line started, they hired serveral new game designers that were all very young. They were called "The Doom Babies" because they were kids who had gotten Doom and began writing mods for it. Eventually they became so renoun that id hired them to work on the Quake series as it came out. Needless to say, they haven't been convicted of a homicide and they all have a Ferrari.
This is just how clueless these parents are:

On the positive side, he says, his son is gaining professional Web experience and using his computer skills to make animations for Spanish class and other school projects. The 47-year-old business owner says he would support legislation that prohibits the marketing of adult-rated entertainment to children, although he thinks policing will be difficult.

OOOOh, animations for Spanish class. Get clue.
Lately I am beginning to feel old. I am 26 now, and I no longer wear the same clothes or listen to the same music as the "kids today." They have an alien culture. I look at the music of my teenage years -- Nirvana, Public Enemy, Massive Attack, Nine Inch Nails -- and I am stunned that kids actually listen to Limp Bizkit and Christina Aguillera (sp?). I don't understand their culture, but I am close enough to those years in my life to know that they are people. They want to excel at a few things that define them. In that horribly microcosmic world that is high school, the more they can latch on to who they are, the easier it will be to survive.
My dear friend Rachel recently got in touch with me. We were good friends in high school, and continued to keep in touch for several years after we left. We had fallen out of touch for a number of years, and she dropped me an email to let me know she has take a professorship in Omaha, Nebraska. Sunday we talked on the phone for an extended time, and aside from continuing my feeling of age, I realized at a core level how little we have changed in the intervening 8 years. I am a professional, she is an academic. We are dealing with things like morgages, car notes and jobs. But those people we became back there are still with us. I hope I never loose sight of them.
School violence is at an all time low. Crime in this nation is at near historic lows. These kids are not monsters. They are not criminals, they are the future professors, computer programmers, wives, entreprenuers, and employees. Let them explore. Let them be good at something. Developing a videogame that has guns in it is not evil. It is certainly no more evil than writing a story about a war. Adult-rated entertainment will be sold to 15, 16 and 17-year olds because in many ways they are adults. In the ways that they aren't yet, they need to see what its really like out there, and over sheltering them will not help them. Treating them like criminals will only piss them off.

Davis says he has never earned money from mod-writing, and he doesn't understand the fuss. "I think it's ridiculous in the first place that they have the rating systems at all," says Davis, who got involved in mod-writing couple of years ago, when, with help from older teenagers he met on the Internet, he learned how to use a 3-D drawing and animation software program. His first mod, created when he was 14, allowed players to shoot paint-balls in Half-Life. "I just think it's fun," says Davis, who hopes to become a computer engineer.

These are kids teaching each other skills. Not how to blow up a school, but how to make a paint ball effect (which, by the way, fluids and dynamic dispersal is some fairly weighty programming) appear in a video game. A study in the UK a few months ago showed that kids who play video games 10 to 20 hours a week tend to develop better spacial relationing skills, higher IQs and function better in groups. This is a kid who at 14 went from playing games, to seeking out peers to teach him how to make is own version of the game.
Maybe society needs to grow up a little so we can let our kids do the same.
</rant>   Game Critics Slam Violent 'mods' -- ZDNet