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Warren Spector - Predictor of the Future

Written by Pacdan

A hit list of four people on a piece of paper does not a plot to commit murder make. Seriously, try finding a high school student who doesn’t hate four people in their school - I guarantee you can’t. Just because someone was (a) stupid enough to write down the people they hate on a piece of paper and (b) stupid enough to throw that piece of paper out on school property (which would be damn hard to prove anyways, unless you’ve got the whole business on camera) doesn’t mean they have a plot to commit murder. It means the person in question is an idiot, but for better or worse that’s not a crime…yet. Taking threats seriously is all well and good…when there’s an actual threat, but without any further evidence of intent this all seems like a massive overreaction. Not saying they shouldn’t have done something, just that actually bringing charges against the person for the content of a carelessly discarded not is a little ridiculous. More than a little. Of course, I suppose we should expect no better of those darned slum kids over at Silver Lake . Just kidding guys.

I guess Warren Spector really did have a good idea of the future. Just how long until we see this in our daily paper?

Bootcamp for Betty
APR - Portland

Madison High School junior Betty Souza will spend the semester at the Canyon
City Bootcamp, say school officials. The crime? “We have verified that she
told another student that she knows how to make a bomb,” said Principal Martin
Gordly.

What makes this case notable is that the parents have filed a lawsuit against
the school district. “Our daughter wears black,” said father Brandon Souza
in a prepared statement. “She has an occipital jack and we let her use it to
play games. We allowed her to get a tattoo when she turned 16, but none of
this makes her a criminal.”

The parents claim that Betty was discussing a novel by Tom Robbins taught at
Madison High when the mention of explosives occurred.

Betty Souza will not be alone in Canyon City. Last year 15,234 young people
served sentences in the state’s FBI-run “good behavior” camps, a legacy of
the Northwest War.

Don’t laugh, he inadvertently predicted September 11th more than a year before it happened*.

*OK, now you can laugh - but the parallels are surprising.

Points if you got my references on your own, for those of you who didn’t - Deus Ex! Game of the year 2000 and IMO the single best game ever made. Warren Spector is lead designer of the game and that whole quoted article appeared in a newspaper in it. As far as the whole September 11th thing, the twin towers didn’t appear in the game’s (this being set around 2052) New York skyline because they wouldn’t fit into texture memory - not out of any real sense of impending disaster. Still, a little bit of an odd coincidence isn’t it?

That is all, you can now yell at me and tell me to “think of the children” and all that stuff.