More from the series that grows as I critique games way later than everyone else.
My girlfriend, falling asleep as I played the opening stages of Bully: Scholarship Edition for the Wii, somewhat facetiously asked me, “What is the constructive value of this game?”
A natural response, I thought, one that falls lockstep with other criticisms by people who haven’t actually played the game. You read the title, you see some punching and coarse language, you find out it’s by the same people who brought you Grand Theft Auto and you figure it can’t be anything redeeming.
Others have defended the game against these assumptions, so I won’t. But I will say that Bully attempts to be constructive by offering a view of teenage life through the lens of a GTA-style dog-eat-dog world, and while I applaud that concept, there’s so much lacking in execution that it’s hard to defend the game outright.
Bully’s lead character is Jimmy Hopkins, a disgruntled teen who gets dumped at a boarding school by his aloof mother and sniveling stepdad. Despite his troubled past, Jimmy seems to have a better head on his shoulders than the rest of Bullworth Academy, which is full of stereotypical jocks, preps, geeks and greasers. The faculty isn’t any better.
The opportunity is ripe to create a bustling system of alliances and betrayals, where each action causes a ripple effect of consequences throughout the system. Bully takes you partway there, offering a “respect” system similar to GTA: San Andreas (help a nerd and the jocks will be more likely to attack you on sight), but it doesn’t get any deeper than superficial aggression.
This failure is further compounded by the game’s physical world. There’s a school, and beyond its borders is a town, but rather than treat life outside Bullworth like a forbidden hideaway, you’re basically thrown out there to find new adventures the minute you get situated (Chapter 2, to be exact. And to be fair I’ve played no further.).
All of this comes at the expense of fleshing out the academy itself. The pool is empty, the football field is lifeless and the only accessible rooms in the Boys Dorm are your own and a small, underpopulated lounge. There’s no organized recess and no lunchtime to fool around in. You have a schedule — two classes a day and bedtime before 1 a.m. — but there are no long-term consequences for refusing to follow it. You can court females, but unlike real life, the rest of the student body doesn’t seem to take interest. Instead of keeping the game concentrated on the microcosms of the schoolyard, the developers spread it out, or in other words, watered it down.
The result is a game that plays more like Grand Theft Auto, for worse. In GTA, the world is static; your actions have limited weight on the world at large, but that’s OK, because like any big city, most people don’t matter. School is different. Everything happens under a microscope.
Because Bully seems so fixated on mapping itself onto GTA’s existing construct, I can’t help but think the developers phoned this one in. I don’t purport to know much about programming engines and the technicalities of development, but it does appear that Rockstar took whatever they built with the GTA series and tried to apply it as best they could to a high school drama. It should have been the other way around.
I thought of lecturing my girlfriend on the unique way that video games model and look at the world. Bully, I would say, has the potential to be constructive by detailing the social underbelly of student life in Anytown, USA. Instead, I just let her fall asleep.
