Join Date: Apr 2002
Location: From Kuching in Malaysia now stuck in Houston Texas
Bully for You
Bully for YouWarning! There are a few small spoilers in this column.
I laid into the kid with a flurry of punches, including a punishing uppercut I'd been taught by an alcoholic Vietnam vet. Wham, wham, wham: Pretty soon I'd pummeled my opponent into the ground. And for my brutal finishing move?
I leaned over and gave him a hand up. I lectured him about the importance of not bullying defenseless kids, and he apologized, promising that he wouldn't be such a meanie any more.
Then we became friends.
This was, I confess, not quite what I expected when I first heard about Bully, the hotly anticipated new title from Rockstar Games. Indeed, it's not what anyone expected.
But last week I got a rare advance chance to visit Rockstar's offices and play the game, and I discovered something interesting. While Bully is extremely fun -- more on the gameplay later -- it's an even more intriguing glimpse into the today's digital politics. Because Bully has had the weirdest history of any game yet: It endured a vicious backlash more than year before being released.
By now, Rockstar is the most politically radioactive gaming company in existence. Cultural conservatives had long savaged the Grand Theft Auto series for glorifying gang violence, hooker-killing and drive-by shootings. The Hot Coffee scandal of last year merely cemented the Rockstar's reputation as the digital pied piper of our age, luring children into the woods of sexual damnation.
So the Bully storm began the very instant that Rockstar first announced the game. In May 2005, Rockstar released a single sentence describing it -- noting that you'd play as "a troublesome schoolboy" who would "learn to navigate the obstacles of the fictitious reform school, Bullworth Academy".
It wasn't much, but opponents nonetheless leapt into overdrive. School boards proactively banned the game. Peace groups protested outside Rockstar's offices. Lou Dobbs called it "another disturbing example of our culture in decline." The game, critics somberly predicted, would inspire vicious acts of copycat bullying nationwide.
Except -- whoops -- here's the thing: It turns out the game doesn't glorify bullying at all.
Indeed, it's almost precisely the opposite. In Bully, you play as a young tough whose parents dump you in a decrepit reform school out in the countryside. Bullworth is filled with all the usual cliques: Preppies with coiffed hair and poncy accents, geeks in thick-framed glasses, greasers hanging out in the scrap yard -- and, of course, blindingly dumb jocks. This is the social morass in which you must defend yourself.
But you are not, in fact, intended to be a bully. Instead, most of your early missions involve you defending the helpless: Escorting weak-bladdered nerds past phalanxes of threatening athletes, or sneaking into the girls' locker room to retrieve an essay that popular cheerleader stole from a helpless she-geek.
There's one moment when things look pretty ugly -- you accompany a gang of toughs who want to beat up a homeless guy. Except they wind up running scared, and you befriend the hobo.
I almost wondered if Rockstar had been so burned by the years of criticism that it was actively attempting to thwart everyone's grim predictions.
In Bully, there's no blood, and the stakes are pretty low: One of the biggest "crimes" is staying out after curfew, or wandering around when you ought to be in class. Even then, all that happens is the prefects hunt you down and put you in detention, where you play word and puzzle minigames. Oh, and if you punch a girl? You're in big trouble, my friend.
Yet the more I played, the more I began to realize that that Bully does in fact fit quite neatly into the Rockstar tradition. Sure, there aren't any AK-47s lying around the school halls. But the gameplay is otherwise quite similar to Grand Theft Auto. You can explore anywhere, try out tons of minigames and eavesdrop on the surreal conversations of passersby. ("Have you ever tried to start a rumor about yourself?" one girl in the hallway asked another. "The sores aren't contagious when they've scabbed over!" another pleaded. Nice.)
The action's pretty intense, too: While frantically running to evade the prefects, it felt just like having four-star notoriety and half the police force chasing me in San Andreas.
But more importantly, Bully feels culturally similar to the GTA series, because you're constantly confronting corrupt authority figures. In Vice City or San Andreas, all the forces of "good" were inevitably on the take. Cops ran rackets; municipal conspiracies lurked in every corner.
When you listened to the radio as you drove around town, it was an elegant parody of the political cynicism of our times. Right-wing commentators would praise the merits of tax-dodging -- while foaming at the mouth about shiftless immigrants. Parents would pop drugs to endure the children they never actually wanted, while preachers fulminated with creepy salaciousness over "loose teenagers." (As one religious talk-show host in Liberty City Stories signs off his broadcasts: "Remember what my daddy always said: 'Don't tell anybody I was in here!'")
What the Bully controversy proves is that politicians have never really appreciated the satirical edge of Rockstar's games. Peel back the hood on the ludic violence, and Rockstar's games have a surprisingly consistent moral view: Those with power will inevitably abuse it. It is a conclusion that would not displease Thomas Hobbes, or even Thomas Jefferson.
That's why Bully is, in many ways, the ultimate Rockstar game. By turning to high school, the designers have found the perfect locale for exploring the cliquishness, unfairness and brutality of everyday society.
Bully plays like a homage to the 1980s flicks that originally explored high-school as a metaphor for society -- like Heathers or The Breakfast Club. As with any John Hughes movie, the cheerleaders of Bully lord their power over lesser mortals ("I can do anything I want, anything," one brags), and prefects re-enact their own personal beatdowns by victimizing you ("I've been waiting to do this a long time!" one gloats as he thrashes me).
All of which means I'll be interested to see what the critics do when they finally actually clap their eyes on Bully.
Rockstar has performed what amounts to a piece of cultural jujitsu. By downplaying the prurient aspects over which critics obsess -- the gunfire, the pools of blood -- they've made a game that lets their snarkily clever social commentary shine through. Politically, Bully might be their first game that is -- pun intended -- bulletproof.
It's funny when the game you are blasting for something's theme is actuaily against what you are blasting it for in the first place.