Teachers around the world, including B.C., are banding together to ban the game Bully: Scholarship Edition from stores.
According to Irene Lanzinger of the B.C. Teachers’ Federation, “Instead of ridding the schoolyard of bullies as the promotional materials claim, this video trivializes vicious bullying. It stereotypes female students as either sex-pot cheerleaders or overweight losers.”
Emily Noble was equally outraged: “With bullying and school violence high on the agenda of public concerns, teachers and parents increasingly question the impact of violent interactive media on children’s growing minds and bodies. The proliferation of cyberbullying via cell phones, the Internet, and blogs, means that victims can now be bullied anywhere with devastating consequences for the victims.”
To listen to the teachers’ federation, Rockstar Vancouver invented bullying, then made it fashionable to use the latest technology to belittle your peers.
Like the first round of outrage about the original Bully game, all these recent statements are just more ado about nothing. It shows how little the authorities understand about video games and gamers, which serve as a convenient scapegoat for all the social ills affecting kids and teens in the world today, from obesity to drug use to violence.
But for all the posturing, I don’t think anyone in the federation has actually played the game, as I have, or has enough experience with games to put Bully in the proper context.
Bullying is cowardly. Bullying is sick. Bullying makes life a living hell for children around the world. Little bullies grow up to be big bullies, and the worst members of our society. Kids who were bullied often develop serious mental problems, and in rare cases will fight back with tragic results.
I get it. But for as long as we’ve packed classrooms full of underdeveloped brains, and students of different sizes, maturity levels and social statures, there has been bullying. Bully is not responsible, it’s merely representative.
It’s interesting that the teachers would key in on this one game, set at a New England private school called Bullworth Academy, when there are so many truly violent games on the market. Bully has a few fist fights, some minor rule breaking, a little romance and that’s about it.
In Halo 3, the goal in several online modes is to kill as many members of the opposite team as possible within a time limit. In Grand Theft Auto, you deal drugs, steal cars, rip around city streets like a maniac in your stolen vehicles, produce porn, pimp prostitutes, tangle with crooked cops, join gangs, and rack up a body count in the thousands. Manhunt has you breaking out of prison, suffocating people with plastic bags, and using a variety of household items to cause pain and death.
Overall, Bully is a pretty mild game. There are bullies in Bullworth Academy, but the main characters’ missions typically involve protecting the weaker students and putting the real school bullies in their place. In the meantime you have to go to class on time to solve puzzles or you wind up in detention. You have to eat good food and get enough sleep or your energy bar drops to nothing and forces you to start your mission over again. You can’t beat up on other students at random or the school prefects will hunt you down and put you in detention. You need to do odd jobs like mowing lawns to earn money.
There are actually some pretty good messages in the game, which never get covered by the media when discussing Bully.
As for the stereotypes, Bully is an entertainment like any movie out there about high school and there are always stereotypes — it’s really no different than The Breakfast Club in that respect: some female characters are Molly Ringwald, others are Ally Sheedy. Stereotypes apply to the male characters as well, so there’s no real sexism in the way characters are portrayed.
The irony of the controversy is that Bully is an average game at best, but the endless amount of negative press from groups like the teachers’ federation have made it a best seller. It’s free publicity that makes kids want to try the game for themselves.
It’s also time to address this idea that games are somehow dangerous, all because the Columbine killers were reportedly game fanatics. Whenever there is a mass killing among students these days, critics are quick to suggest that the killer was probably an avid video game player even if turns out not to be the case — the killer at Virginia Tech never played games, and the killer at the University of Northern Illinois was a casual player at best.
It’s not exactly fair. Violence is a staple of television and movies, and other forms of entertainment, as well as in real life as governments go to war and news broadcasts lead with stories of murder and mayhem. No word from the teachers’ union on those subjects.
The fact of the matter is that the gaming industry is now bigger than Hollywood, but for the tens of millions of gamers out there, there are still only a handful of violent incidents by gamers — I know, because every incident where games are somehow involved instantly grabs headlines, whether it’s true or not or the criminal is just blaming games to excuse his actions.
Compared to crime rates in the general population, some new data suggests that gamers are actually less likely to commit violent crimes. Maybe we’re too busy hanging out at home playing Bully to be bullies ourselves.
