I didn't mean to hit the cheerleader, really I didn't.
This jock tackled me -- all I wanted to do was find a shortcut to English class across the football field, sir -- and things got confusing and next thing I knew there were prefects throwing me to the ground and dragging me here, to the principal's office. Because I know, sir, that you can do a lot of bad things in Bully, the new PlayStation 2 sandbox game from Rockstar Vancouver, but hitting a girl is not one of them. In conclusion, sir, I think we can both agree that missing class is punishment enough and I'll be on my way.
I didn't get off that easy -- there was a scolding and I had to perform a boring task, mowing a lawn, instead of doing something fun -- but I mean it about missing class. Bully is a Teen-rated (age 13 and up) video game set at a reform school and it was made by the renegade company behind Grand Theft Auto. It was therefore in the news long before its release last week, and school boards and parents have expressed concerns about it from Miami to Manchester, England. After finally playing it, however, I have a recommendation: School officials should see it, but not to shake their heads at how horrible it is -- it is actually quite tame, once you get over the fact that it is a brawling game featuring teens. They should see it because this often silly comedy has educational potential far beyond most of the games that have thus far been put in classrooms.
Before we get to the whys and hows, a quick word from the Federation of American Scientists, a serious group that usually does research into nuclear weapons and the like. It conducted a year-long study and, around the same time Bully was released, announced recommendations "calling on government, educators, and business to develop strategies to use video games in education and work-force training." We have several generations now who have grown up thinking about games the way their parents and grandparents consider TV shows and movies -- as sources of entertainment and often questionable information. Games have a proven ability to draw and hold the attention of a wide swath of the population and that ability could easily be harnessed for education.
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Now just to be clear, Bully has so much questionable content that it should never be allowed near an English class. Its first chapter is weakly written and contains enough imbecilic gross-out material to fill an American Pie trilogy (it gets better and much funnier in Chapter Two, around the five-hour mark in a 40-hour game). And there is the violence, which is pervasive and provides no helpful model for how kids and teens should deal with real-life bullies and schoolyard dramas. If your kid is playing this game, definitely sit down with them and talk about that stuff.
But Bully is, after all, a game, not a training manual for life, and it is one that hides the codes and rules of Rockstar's open-ended gang titles -- the Grand Theft Auto series and The Warriors -- under a new paint job. Instead of sprawling cityscapes and guns and blood, you get the Bullworth Academy, a prison-like school, and a 15-year-old anti-hero, Jimmy Hopkins, who runs into and between social cliques. He tries to make friends among stereotypical groups that have been used in fictional high-school depictions since the fifties -- nerds, jocks, preppies and greasers -- by running errands, and exchanging flowers for kisses. Basically, it is a game version of The Outsiders, or Grease without the singing, and no self-respecting educator would allow anything like Grease near impressionable young people.
Bully's potential is not found in its content but in its structure: To help Jimmy move through the game and through the story, going to class is a necessity. Each class -- English, gym, shop, chemistry, art -- is broken up into five mini-games. Once you complete a level, Jimmy gets a new ability. Chemistry class will allow him to make stink bombs, gym gives him new fighting moves (or a fun game of dodgeball) and English enhances his talking skills to help him avoid fights and apologize more convincingly. Most of the mini-games here are arcade-like, simple reflexes rather than actual learning, but check out English: Take six jumbled letters and make as many words as you can in three minutes. I am not ashamed to say I am stuck on level three -- unlike just about everything else in this game, it's tough.
Once all five levels in a class are cleared, Jimmy will no longer be considered truant, and with no prefects chasing him it becomes easier to explore the nearby town and complete the story missions. And that, as it is in many interactive experiences, is the driving force in this game -- to see and do all the things the developers have put in it, from homages to classics like Punch Out to funny lines like this one, from a preppy girl thanking Jimmy: "I wish you had been born into my social circle."
Harness that driving force, take out the baseball-bat beatings, and you have an educational winner.
And if the idea of taking part in teen brawling is not going away, if this latest Rockstar experiment seems dangerous to you, consider this: Jimmy can kiss boys as well as girls. What Rockstar does, aside from courting controversy to move units, is give the player a choice as to how to act, good and bad and everything in between. One mad genius of the Internet, David Wong of PointlessWasteofTime.com, put his finger on why such games are better tests of morality than save-the-princess-by-pressing-A titles such as Nintendo's Mario series: "So how can you say the gamer in Mario did a 'good' deed when he didn't have a choice in the matter? For a game to teach kids about consequences, wouldn't there have to be a button on the controller that lets you do something terrible? So you can choose not to push it?"
That makes a lot of sense, and it is another reason to believe the hype: Parents and school officials should keep an eye on Bully.
