When Rockstar Vancouver released Bully in 2006, they did so with an acute understanding of the inherent appeal of their Grand Theft Auto games: it’s fun to break the rules. By creating a vast open world the player has a chance to study their environment and the rules that govern it. Who inhibits my character’s freedom? Why?
What if I drive a car off a bridge? What if I do a jump into a skyscraper? By setting that world in a New England Boarding School, Bully introduces a more finite and restrictive environment than their previous games. Focusing on the experiences of a teenager learning to cope with adults and peers, the game creates a distilled and purified version of the American teenage experience. It does this by creating a world where that acknowledges the necessity of authority in one’s life and establishing your own relationship with it.
It’s important to note before starting that a lot of my experience with this game comes from the fact that I went to a New England boarding school. I managed to have a good time while I was there but I don’t recommend the experience for everyone. There’s a lot of great camaraderie and intense academic discipline to be gained, but a lot of friends suffer under the pressure and structure as well. There are the classes until afternoon, mandatory sports, evening chapel services, study hall, and the inevitable ‘lights out’ that comes at 10 p.m. At an age where people are beginning to explore their freedom, boarding school takes it away. Depending on where you attend, you may even be forced to work alongside day students who don’t have to endure the same schedule as you. Nor is money much of a factor at a boarding school beyond the expensive tuition. Everyone wears a uniform, most of your time is spent studying, and anything you “own” generally gets loaned out to the entire community. Still, there are no parents to hassle you and no home life to disrupt your day. So there is still a great deal of personal freedom found in breaking away from the nest, but it comes at an ironic cost. In a life of mandatory conduct and zero home life, there is precious little to form an identity around for a teenager.
Which is why placing Bully in a boarding school as opposed to a regular high school is such a good idea. Unlike a game about being a criminal, where the average player has little personal experience, we all went to school and were teenagers at some point. There are just too many variable issues in the regular home setting.
We all come from vastly different parents, houses, and income backgrounds. At a boarding school all of those issues are removed. You can be just as much a blank slate in boarding school as you can a criminal whose just moved to a new city.
It also allows the theme of authority and one’s relationship with it to be more fully explored. In a game like Earthbound, your character Ness’s relationship with his parents is generically positive and passive. As you go about saving the planet, they never make you do anything and never enforce discipline on your character, outside the occasional reminder to go outside and play. How would one even react to a video game parent doing anything disciplinary? Do I argue with my virtual Dad?
Throw things at my digital Mom? Bully’s setting is clever because all of these issues are circumvented. There is only the headmaster, the teachers, and your peers to contend with. These aren’t people whom your character is related to or even obliged to care about, they’re adults paid to babysit him. Few players are going to worry about shoving some jerk prefect whose hassling them about the rules. The player is much less constrained to worry about resistance than they would be having us fight with a father or mother. None of the familial stigmas are present for the typical teenage challenging of authority, so the player won’t be inhibited by any issues they themselves may bring to the table.
The game is set in a small New England city and boarding school which are different from each other in several ways. The gender based dorms, gymnasium, cafeteria and main building all draw on elements of gothic architecture so as to look like the stereotypical boarding school. As with any of the GTA titles, a long list of activities you’ve always wanted to do are immediately provided. The fire extinguisher, long the temptation of many a student, is completely usable. The fire alarm can also be yanked to send students running around screaming. The town is designed in contrast to this, composed of a white collar neighborhood, an industrial area, and various shops. You can ride your bike around town, buy things from shops, and knock civilians over if you want. The aesthetic difference, modern buildings as opposed to stone structures, mirrors the difference in game design between the two areas. In Bullworth Academy you must worry about prefects and class along with several rules of conduct, but as soon as you go back into town the old rules of Grand Theft Auto take over. In town you are free to run around wherever you like, cause any kind of trouble you want, and need only worry about the cops if you step out of line. Get caught at Bullworth and you’ll be sent to class or have to do chores, get caught in town and you’re just deposited at the front of the school.
The prefects and class structure are another element of the game design that enhances the setting and feel of the game’s experience. It’s logical to expect there to be classes if a game is about being in school, but it’s the options presented about whether one wishes to even attend that make it interesting. If you go to class, you’ll play a mini-game that involves the subject matter in some way. Rewards are linked to the theme of the class, with English improving your communication skills while Geography gives you the location of collectable items on the map. Yet should you choose to skip, the prefects will be harassing you until class is over. Punishment for being caught by them is either being sent to class or the headmaster. This broad system is how the entire rule structure of Bully works for the player: these are the things you’re not allowed to do, these are the things you’re supposed to do, and if you’re caught not obeying you get in trouble. It’s different from GTA because typically all of the activities in those games are illegal or unrelated to any larger authority. In Bully, there’s an actual way to submit and obey the rules. There’s a way to behave in this game and even be rewarded for it. This game design shift changes the experience because the player now has a relationship with rules besides just breaking them. True, the plot still drags Jimmy into all kinds of misbehavior, but the theme of authority and learning to submit are reflected in the free roaming portions of the game design as well as the narrative.
The game design also captures some of the more intense elements of being a teenager. At no point are you ever allowed to drive a car. Instead, bikes are the best mode of transportation in the game. Yet there are still cars driving around the city of Bullworth, moving around much more quickly and easily than you can. What better way to capture the longing for autonomy than to incorporate wanting a car within the game design? It’s a symbol of the adult world and the power they have that the students do not. Many times in the game you’ll be forced to walk back to school while cars drive by you on the road, further reminding you of your role as a teenager in the game’s setting. The game design isn’t just creating a rule structure that resembles being in a boarding school, it’s making a system that also induces the longings and desires of being in one. You wish there weren’t so many stupid rules, you wish you had a car, you wish you didn’t have to go to class, and you wish people would stop telling you what to do. In this way the game design creates the perfect setting for a story about being a teenager and coming to grips with authority in your life.
The game’s popularity system is much more linear but this is in and of itself a commentary on being a teenager. It sharply portrays the realm of teenage politics by making the system totally arbitrary. One mission will put you in a group’s favor one minute, only to have your score drop for an unrelated activity further down the road. For a game about becoming popular, having the metric by which this is gauged be utter nonsense is fairly witty. Popularity contests have always been
inane, but in a boarding school where people have no other identity but the one they create it’s making a joke of the entire idea of being ‘King of the School’. Popularity and accumulating it is an illusion in the game, just as it is in highschool, because the student’s adoration is fickle. Any accumulation of popularity can be taken away through no fault of your own in the blink of an eye and the linear plot missions reflects this.
Before we get into the actual plot, it’s important to remember how a sandbox game’s story works. The characters must typically be much broader and stereotypical than a traditional linear story. You have to account for the fact that a variety of players are going to be coming at it from a variety of angles and moods. Put another way, It’s tough to have a sad or tragic moment when the player could potentially have been kicking dogs and blowing up mailboxes for three hours beforehand. The game design has to deliver the story in small chunks as well, since the whole point of an open environment is that you can dash off to do whatever you want. Missions then act like small vignettes, with a short cutscene delivering the characterization and plot, followed by a mission that in some way represents the greater narrative action.
These are activated voluntarily by the player, so that again you have the issue of a player who might not have engaged with the linear story for hours. Since you can’t rely on the player remembering everyone and everything that’s going on, the writer instead has to make a story that can be picked up or forgotten at any moment and still work.
As a consequence, the game relies heavily on stereotypes and dress codes for the various factions in the game. Nerds all dress one way, jocks dress another. The writing also mirrors this by having each person be an incredible exaggeration of their real world counterparts. The nerds are all insecure, wet their pants, speak in awkward squeaky voices, and loudly broadcast their role in the game. The Preps are all elitist pricks who reference their Dads, dress in nice clothes, and typify their image. This is true for all the cliques. This reinforces the boarding school setting because as noted previously, one often has to struggle to find identity there. The solution many kids adopted when I went was to fixate and “become” something.
A lot of teenagers do this in mild ways, such as being a fanboy, but in boarding school you really see some extreme manifestations of it. For example, I knew a kid who for a year of their life would only listen to one musician and talk about them incessantly. The extreme personalities also add another aspect of boarding school: you become acutely aware of everyone around you. Keep in mind that the character you play lives at Bullworth and is around these people every day. In order to deliver that near nauseating degree of closeness with other people, you have to make their personalities and actions broadcast that much more loudly. You have make them that much more outrageous to be around in order to get the full boarding school experience.
So, this is the structure that the game design delivers the plot in and how the constraints support that structure. What kind of protagonist do you then place in this setting? Jimmy Hopkins is a child without a moral compass. The opening sequence of the game reveals he is without a father and is abandoned by his mother while she pursues another man. When the new step-father tries to force him to speak up Hopkins replies, “What? Who are you? Mom, I thought you told me never to talk to strangers.” It establishes the entire relationship Hopkins, and the player, will have with authority for the rest of the game. The dilemma, as Hopkins bluntly explains to the fat, balding man whose “twice as old as his grandfather”, is that Hopkins knows too much. He knows that the adults who order him around are morally flawed people and thus sees no reason to listen to them. This also makes him connect with the player, who is equally uninterested in being told what to do by the video game.
The fact that Hopkins’s Mom opts to abandon him to the authority of a boarding school gives the player the experience, alongside Hopkins, of being thrust into a new social order.
The arrival of the secretary, Ms. Danvers, marks this shift as she announces her worship and devotion to Dr. Crabblesnitch (as opposed to caring about you). Here is another false mother to Hopkins, sarcastically handled by him in his typical subversive manner by trying to walk in the opposite direction from the boarding school. The name Danvers is a reference to the Alfred Hitchcock film Rebecca, which is about a crazily devoted maid whose refusal to accept the new wife of her employer leads to a bizarre psychological duel between the two women. In a twisted bit of satire, it is now two men that Danvers is confronted with and she is quick to make feel Hopkins inferior in every way. The walk to the Headmaster’s office is equally belittling. The game design allows for random bullies to taunt you, shove you, and call you any manner of names. Since your popularity score starts out at zero with all of the factions, no one will speak to you or do anything except hurl insults in these opening moments. The player has his inferior status paraded around him for the opening moments of the game.
Yet Crabblesnitch demonstrates himself to be a capable Headmaster because he immediately greets Hopkins’ dry sarcasm with his own. Unlike the mumbling and threats of violence that his step-father attempts at Jimmy, the Headmaster meets Hopkins on his own turf. After reading the unspeakably bad record of your character he taunts, “I’ve never met a boy like you Hopkins. Whatever am I going to do?”
Pushing the issue even further, he forces Jimmy to make the same observation the player himself is wondering as they play as Jimmy. “Why should I help you?”
asks Crabblesnitch. Hopkins doesn’t have an answer for either of us. Crabblensitch explains that he’s helping Jimmy because it is his calling, a higher purpose that demands he convert Jimmy into an upstanding citizen. Like the player, Crabblesnitch announces that he is here to help Jimmy through control.
This authority figure’s supremacy is further enforced as Danvers comes in, meek and subservient to his orders. As soon as she is put in charge of Jimmy, however, she is crude and bossy again. It’s all handled humorously, but the opening exchange of the game establishes the motifs for the rest of the experience. Hopkins must prove himself in a new order and he is now at the bottom. Hopkins, renewed with a social order and the moral compass of climbing to the top, bluntly narrates, “That old creep thinks he can tame me? We shall see my friend. I only give people what they have coming to them.” Naturally, within minutes of this declaration, Hopkins is attacked by bullies and must be saved by a teacher. The fact that the player must endure losing in a fight in this moment means that they too are dragged into the humiliation of depending on this new authority.
What kind of options does the game design give me when I want to play as Hopkins?
He’s not the biggest person in the game by any means. He’s neither tall nor bulky, making many of the other bullies and opponents in the game physically intimidating.
Rather than the typical masculine fantasy of playing a hulking space marine, Hopkins visually represents the insecurity and inferiority that the game makes you feel in the beginning. But from the very first fight, it’s clear the animators wanted to create a character that looks like he can handle himself. His arms pop into a boxer’s pose as soon as you press the button and the game starts you off with several mean combos. The little guy you play as can kick some ass if he gets shoved around. A mean jab, the ability to tackle an opponent, and a nasty knee kick are all options for the player. Indeed, your ability to fight becomes the principle foundation of your authority in the plot and the game design reflects this. With the exception of boss fights or when your opponents are using weapons, Hopkins is always the superior fighter in the game world. The game cleverly allows the player to assert this superiority by creating finishing moves that taunt the person you’ve just beaten.
The first student you associate with is Gary and he quickly presents himself as a mirror to Hopkins. He is as morally ambiguous as your character, operating on a code of conduct as amorphous as Jimmy’s desire to give people what they have coming. When asked what pisses him off so much he rattles off a list of sources that sound remarkably similar to Jimmy’s: ADD, parents, school, and any other number of ultimately irrelevant causes. What he wants, as he bluntly explains several times, is to be King of the School. With loose threats and ominous warnings of the difficulties of not being friends with him, Gary quickly becomes the embodiment of someone who abuses the authority they accumulate. Echoing the statements of Crabblesnitch, Gary mimics Hopkins, “Yeah, I’ve been expelled from anywhere
The first student you associate with is Gary and he quickly presents himself as a mirror to Hopkins. He is as morally ambiguous as your character, operating on a code of conduct as amorphous as Jimmy’s desire to give people what they have coming. When asked what pisses him off so much he rattles off a list of sources that sound remarkably similar to Jimmy’s: ADD, parents, school, and any other number of ultimately irrelevant causes. What he wants, as he bluntly explains several times, is to be King of the School. With loose threats and ominous warnings of the difficulties of not being friends with him, Gary quickly becomes the embodiment of someone who abuses the authority they accumulate. Echoing the statements of Crabblesnitch, Gary mimics Hopkins, “Yeah, I’ve been expelled from anywhere