It’s true that Drift Hunters is a “free online drifting game,” but its designer, Ilya Kaminetsky, has nothing to do with, or the many other websites that have copied and pasted their game and spread it around the web. (Flash used to be the predominant tool for building web games, before it was essentially wiped from the modern internet.) He claims Crazy Games “hasn’t been contacted by schools or teachers at all,” and described the website’s primary demographics as “very wide-ranging” and from “teenagers to retired.” Mertens told Waypoint he grew up playing Flash games in high school, which eventually led to him playing around and making Flash games himself. I'm on a VPN myself actually, since the co-working space I'm in belongs to a corporation, and the corporate network blocks games sites.” We don't have a way of checking how many of our users are on a VPN. “We don't have any specific knowledge of kids getting around IT departments, but I assume that some of them try to use a VPN. “We know that we're often blocked in schools from emails that we get and from a report by GoGuardian,” said Raf Mertens, co-founder of Crazy Games. He also claims he’s “never gotten in trouble” for producing the channel and publishing the workarounds, but noted “a few teachers that found out about it thought it was cool.” His parents also, apparently “know about my channel and are very proud of it and like it.”Īs a parent of two children, I can vouch for this sentiment: I would be very proud of it, too.Īccording to the GoGuardian report, the five most blocked websites were Cool Math Games (games), (typing lessons), Facebook (social network), Crazy Games (again, to play games), and SparkNotes (aka everyone’s favorite way to read without reading). I'm like, ‘Oh, are you on Geometry Spot?’ My geometry teacher looked up, and I was like, ‘Oh, I made that one.’ And then my geometry teacher asked me, she was like, "You write stuff about geometry?" I'm like, "No, it's a gaming website,’ and she started laughing.” “I was in class, and some kid was on my website. “I was at school, and someone said, ‘That's a cool website, but why don't you add games to it that we can play in school?’” Jerry said his teachers have a good sense of humor about his work, and at one point the vice principal talked to him about was, it seemed, pleasantly surprised about the LLC. I just want to make sure everything's legit.” We're going through it together, I guess. “I'm happy for him,” said Chris, who helped Jerry set up an LLC and start having conversations with advertisers who wanted spots. Now in high school, Geometry Spot is the latest in that chain, a website that’s done well enough that it now includes ads, and generates what Jerry’s father, Chris Klamm, calls “real money.” A typical cycle would then play out, with Jerry making a website with embedded games for fellow students to play during and between class, before the school caught on and banned it. He did, and suddenly, a lot of people at Jerry’s school were visiting his site-to play games. “I was at school,” said Jerry during a recent interview with Waypoint, “and someone said, ‘That's a cool website, but why don't you add games to it that we can play in school?’” At that point, I watched as they opened a new tab and searched ‘how to get a teacher fired.’ It gave me a good laugh.” This happened over and over over the course of about half an hour. Then they would open a new tab, find a new game site, and the cycle would repeat. “I would wait for them to open one, add it to my list of blocked websites, refresh my settings, and then they would get locked out of it. “One kid kept opening up game sites” said one high school teacher who asked to stay anonymous, to protect the identities of their students.
What exists now is an escalating game of whack-a-mole between students, teachers, and IT departments, as kids hopeful to do anything but school work try to find a way to play games. But these days, computers are deeply intertwined into education, and many school age children have regular access to a computer, usually a Chromebook or iPad, as early as 1st grade, when kids are only six or seven years old.
Kids have been trying to play video games on school computers for as long as computers have cropped up in schools, but decades ago, they jumped through those hoops in a dedicated computer lab, or secretly downloaded homemade games to their TI-83 calculators while pretending to crunch equations.
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