Who is the Bully now?

I think we can all agree, that videogames have a huge influence on kids. I mean look at all the Rock Bands, and Guitar Heroes that have popped up seemingly over night, playing their shows on street corners or at bus stops, harassing the gray tops with their ‘rock music’.

It’s a plague I tell you.

If you can recall a few weeks ago, on March 4 2008, Rockstar released a game. This game was so horrendous, so horrible, so evil, and so vile that to see the cover of it made most priests weak in the knees, and would cause lesser men to believe in true evil. This game was Bully: The scholarship edition.

The Canadian Teachers Federation (CTF) heard about this game, and that very day had a focus group sit down with the game to evaluate whether or not it was suitable for the children of Canada. This focus group included, I’m told, an extremely savvy 16 year-old who tried to play the game. I know what you are thinking, “the game must have been so evil that it tried to corrupt him and the CTF, being the responsible people that they are, grabbed him, and turned off the console to prevent any permanent damage to the poor lad, and that’s why he couldn’t play the full game”. No, here is what the CTF said;

‘According to the gamer, the game is plagued with freezing issues and audio glitches in addition to a less than solid frame rate. With respect to the story development, it’s a game that he would not recommend for his 14-year old brother to play. As you know, the game offers players the “option” to do a good action instead of being a bully. Well, our experience with the game has shown, whenever our gamer chose to do the “positive” action, the game would freeze up and we had to reboot and start the game over again.’

I don’t think I have every heard of children lying to grown ups. Especially when they would be getting special treatment. Have you? Almost like they were bullied into it.

‘Had the game producers ever considered that kids would voluntarily choose to do the “right” thing, these problems would have been ironed out. From the results of our study group, I think not.’

The game for XBOX is full of issues, and Rockstar never got back to me about whether or not they tested the game differently then others they have released in the past, however there is a patch coming out that will fix the issues... eventually. I also never heard back from Rockstar confirming that this is how the glitches are expressed for other copies of the game. However, everyone I talked to about it seems to disagree with the statement that the game freezes only when a positive action is done.

Well after what I’m sure was one frustrating day of playing a game full of glitches, the CTF came out with a press release on March 5 2008 calling to boycott Bully. It must have been hard coming to this conclusion when you haven’t fully played the game, kind of like judging a book by the cover, and all pretty fast too, its like they knew what they were going to say even before then ‘reviewed’ the game. A few people got their names in the papers, the CTF looks good and that’s that right.

Wrong. That’s when I heard about this nonsense. I phoned the Manitoba Teachers Society and after getting nowhere for about a week, I was finally engaged on the phone, but not before I was told by their communications person that he only had a limited time to devote to this issue.

Sorry, what, are you trying to bully me away from this story?

Then when I asked why the teachers decided not to take the opportunity to teach parents about the rating, instead opting to just out-right boycott the game, I was told that “it’s not our job to teach parents”. Imagine that, it’s not a teacher’s jobs to teach. Now I understand that it may not be teacher’s jobs to teach parents, but then they should be staying out of the parenting game all together. Let parents do their job, and the parents will let you teach.

So the CTF is not only going to tell you what you should let your kids watch and play with, but also they are now quality control testers for Rockstar. That’s what I pay taxes for, for the CTF to tell me how to raise my children, and to provide off site quality control for Rockstar. Sounds to me like they are trying to bully Rockstar about they're quality of work.

All this for a game that is bought and sold under the counter like cigarettes.

Kids are influenced by what games they play, but they are also influenced by what TV shows and movies they watch, what internet sites they go to, and what music and radio shows they listen to. But that’s all on a microcosmic scale, and it doesn’t even compare to how parents and guardians influence children. Parents are the ultimate filter for children and should be trying their best to let their children only be engaged by appropriate media. Letting a four-year-old play this game is pretty much the equivalent of letting a four-year-old watch Die-Hard.

Media imitates life, and life imitates media. The mafia was around before the ‘God Father’, dysfunctional families were around before ‘The Simpsons’, and bullying at school was around before the game.

But then, with out ‘The Simpsons’ we wouldn’t have D’oh. Its all very cyclical, like a Santa’s little helper chasing his tail.