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posted by n1 on Wednesday August 27 2014, @04:38PM   Printer-friendly
from the just-a-game-developer-defence dept.

A letting agent was sufficiently disturbed by a tenant's diagrams of a video game, that he called the police.

A British games developer’s letting agency called the police after mistaking diagrams of his new game for a planned thermonuclear attack on Washington.

Henry Smith is a software engineer from Bristol working on a game called “Global Thermonuclear War”, which uses Google Maps to simulate an atomic conflict between nations. Smith was planning out the game using whiteboards in his home when his letting agent made a pre-arranged visit.

A few days later, the agent rang, Smith says, and told him that “the person who did the inspection did have some concerns about one thing. There were some … whiteboards? And some … drawings on them?”

Although Smith believed he assuaged the agents’ fears by explaining that the sketches were plans for a game, he received a follow-up email the next week informing him that the matter had been referred to the local police.

 
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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by aclarke on Wednesday August 27 2014, @08:13PM

    by aclarke (2049) on Wednesday August 27 2014, @08:13PM (#86442) Homepage

    I had a similar experience as a 17 year old in Zambia in the early '90s. I lived there at the time, and was going to spend the last few days of my vacation backpacking the 140km or so from Lusaka to a friend's house. The first night I asked permission to camp on a field near a school. I shared my supper with some folks at the school, and went out to pitch my tent. While I was setting up, two very drunk men came up and started harassing me. Please bear in mind that I was a very cocky 17 year old, rather than the very cocky 4x year old I am now. They claimed to be police officers, and they were hassling me because I was camped about 4km from a microwave dish installation and they claimed I was a South African spy there to spy on their satellite dishes. I countered that it's unlikely that the South Africans would be using a Canadian teenager as a spy, and if they were so interested in a bunch of satellite dishes in the middle of nowhere, why wouldn't they just pull up a satellite photograph instead of sending me out there. This incensed them further, until finally I called their bluff and said if they were really policemen, let me see their IDs.

    Turns out they were policemen. They arrested me, gathered up my belongings, went through everything, and hauled me into their boss. Compounding my problem were two details. One was that I had an old broken camera with me. It happened to be my only timepiece at the time, so I had it with me. It had no film in it because it was broken. They claimed I'd seen them coming and had disposed of the film. More damning though was the paperwork for the wargame simulation I was working on for my next term's CS course. I had a stack of paperwork on me detailing how far different types of planes could travel, what their payload was, how far a platoon of soldiers could march in a day or how far tanks could travel, how many soldiers a tank could destroy, etc. etc. These guys at the time had never seen a computer, let alone understood what a computer game was, so this pretty much made me look like the stereotypical apartheid-era white South African spy they just knew was out there.

    The guy in the local police station didn't know what to do with me, so he sent me back to Lusaka, where they didn't know what to do with me, so they threw me in jail. Fortunately the next morning, I got sent high enough in the chain of command that the people were willing to admit that a 17 year old Zambian resident with a Canadian passport on him was very very unlikely to be a spy. They let me go, only telling me that I'd better take the bus and not try walking again. So I took the bus.

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