Persuasive Games: Taking Bully Seriously - Ian Bogost
Despite the counter-media rhetoric, authority structures in the game are fairly weak by design, since even the adults in Jimmy’s world can’t be trusted. The player does have to attend classes or risk punishment for truancy, but the school subject mini-games are rudimentary and contingent (an anagram game for English, a rhythm matching game for chemistry, a Qix clone for art, etc.). Time is so heavily compressed in the game that attending class becomes a fairly minor part of the experience anyway. The same goes for truancy and getting caught by prefects. Yes, the player does endure reprimand, but the consequences are akin to arrest in Grand Theft Auto—lose some items, and some time. Waiting for the console to load the headmaster office cutscenes feels like more punishment than losing a pocketful of stink bombs. As with most of the Rockstar's titles, the best social commentary in Bully is ambient. In Grand Theft Auto, it was the hilariously satirical radio shows. In Bully, it’s the conversations among Bullworth students, which satirize the shallow nature of high school social roles. Sweeping away all the dust that Bully left in the wake of its release, it’s hard to defend the game, not because it might be a public nuisance or a danger to kids, but because it could have been so much more of a scathing critique of high school social politics than it turned out to be. Jimmy defends the weak and undermines the school’s tormentors, but the player never feels much empathy for any of them. Bullying is overly stylized, with verbal and physical attacks slung almost at random, a result of Rockstar’s continued resistance to moving beyond the stock features of RenderWare to model inner lives for characters beyond the ones hard-coded into the cutscenes. Even Jimmy’s relationships with girls are limited to wearing down their disinterest with flowers or candy until they agree to kiss him.
Many serious games overly privilege pedantic learning theories and government-endorsed messages, and I do worry that a serious game about bullying would so fear confrontation that it would devolve into dialogue menus of weak verbal spars. Rockstar’s approach is the right one: model the broken dynamics of high school and give the player an embodied experience of negotiating those dynamics. But in this case, their spotty follow-through not only affects this specific representation of life among bullies, but also risks poisoning the topic for those who might come to it later, differently. Bullying in video games is marked terrain, at least for the time being. When we combine the game’s failings with Rockstar’s characteristically silent apathy about their artistic intent, it’s tempting to conclude that the game is little more than a provocation, a good idea with enough neutralizing rhetoric in its design to deflect the most obviously anticipated media criticisms. For those of us interested in making games whose primary purpose is to educate, critique, or editorialize about serious issues, we should demand more from video games’ bad boy developers. Of all the people who should take Bully more seriously than they have, perhaps the worst offender is Rockstar themselves. Other Serious Games Source features by this author:
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game’s missions and emergent dynamics, however, don’t really cash out this
promise. The player learns how to break into lockers, how to sweet talk girls
to win favors, and how to fight (fisticuffs, slingshots, stinkbombs, etc.).
In typical Rockstar fashion, the game privileges the underdogs—nerds and girls—and
the player spends most of his time undermining the bullies and the jocks in
order to even the social pecking order.
