Bully: a saga of stupid and/or dishonest people
'The saga of Rockstar's latest controversial videogame, Canis Canem Edit
(or "Bully" to readers in North America), has been well-reported. The
game has the unusual distinction of being a poster child for two opposed
causes; on one hand, advocates of censorship and the eternally morally
outraged present the game as an example of the depravity to which the
videogames industry has stooped, while on the other hand, the industry
itself and advocates of creative freedom point to it as a perfect
example of the blind and ignorant hyperbole to which the self-styled
"moral majority" has stooped.
This dichotomy has come about for one simple reason - namely that in
their over-zealous pursuit of videogames as the latest scapegoat for
society's ills, advocates of censorship or control managed to make a lot
of noise about Bully before actually finding out the facts about the
game. Extensive campaigns protesting the release of the game were
coordinated before anyone had actually seen anything other than a few
screenshots, and speculation about the nature of its content was
presented widely as being fact. If this speculation had turned out to be
true, Bully would unquestionably have been one of the most shocking and
unpleasant games ever made - featuring, as its critics were fond of
wildly claiming, a level of cruelty and violence directed towards minors
previously unseen in the interactive medium.
Unfortunately for the campaigners against Bully, that actually isn't
what the game turns out to be like at all. Instead, Bully is a
surprisingly intelligent, entertaining and indeed nostalgic game which,
although it certainly incorporates a certain level of violence, is
ultimately no worse than the likes of Grange Hill or any number of other
stylised representations of school days. In direct contradiction of the
claims of campaigners, the game actually punishes you for acting in an
irresponsible or, indeed, bullying manner, and while it's certainly not
the chronicle of academic life that teachers or politicians might want
to see, nor is it the seeds of society's downfall encapsulated on a DVD
and waiting to be implanted into fragile young minds. Those seeking
portents of impending apocalypse will have to look elsewhere.
None of this matters to the most fervent critics of videogames, of
course, because few of them are of a mind to let the facts get in the
way of a good story. Even faced with a resounding courtroom defeat in
Florida, where he had attempted to get the game banned, increasingly
shrill lawyer Jack Thompson continued to pontificate against the game -
going so far as to compare the court's deliberations to the misleading
of weapons inspectors in rogue states.
The gutter press is, of course, not known for worrying too much about
whether they're reporting the truth or not (after all, as Karl
Pilkington once wisely observed, you can prove anything with facts) -
and in a particularly shocking example of their willingness to carry
right ahead in the face of factual adversity, a British tabloid (the
Daily Star) last week published a full-page article condemning Bully,
including a screenshot which had been edited to show an act of violence
which isn't even possible in the game. To add insult to injury, it
wasn't even a good edit - it showed the main character of the game
swinging a baseball bat... At himself. A picture caption claimed that
this showed a boy beating up a smaller boy with a baseball bat -
suggesting that whoever does the PhotoShop work on the Star's lying
pictures needs a quick lesson in perspective, and the differences
between "smaller" and "further away".
However, while the loony fringe of anti-games campaigning - from
Thompson to the tabloids - seems unperturbed at being proved wrong, and
perfectly prepared to continue spewing bile regardless, some of their
fair-weather allies emerge from this ordeal looking rather worse for
wear. Various perfectly respectable anti-bullying agencies, and even
some politicians who should really have known better (and, admittedly,
some who have never shown any sign of "knowing better" on pretty much
any issue, such as the continually astonishingly ignorant British MP
Keith Vaz), joined the crusade against Bully without doing their
homework - and with the game now turning out to be so utterly
inoffensive, now have a significant amount of egg on their faces as a
result.
However, worst of all out of this sorry lot - and perhaps most
inexcusable of all - is British retailer Currys, which this week took
the astonishing decision to publicly refuse to stock the game, a clear
bending to tabloid will in the face of perfectly clear facts about the
product. This kind of spineless pandering to the tabloid mentality is
rife among US retailers, of course - and as such, US readers accustomed
to the behaviour of chains such as Wal-Mart will probably not even raise
an eyebrow at Currys' decision, just as UK observers find the debate in
the US over the enforcement of age ratings to be such a non-issue.
However, in the UK, retailers do not customarily pander to tabloid
outrage, and Currys' decision to do so is a disgustingly simpering
attempt to hop onto a PR bandwagon which, we hope, is rolling inexorably
over a cliff.
There are a few possible scenarios which arise from Currys' decision.
The first is that the firm gets the PR it wants from the decision,
appeals to the narrow cross-section of middle England which is prepared
to get its hackles up over lunch about videogames they've never even
seen, and loses only a tiny amount of revenue from lost sales of the
game. In this instance, we start to slide down a slippery slope towards
the US situation, where retailers routinely refuse to stock anything
that the newspapers, or the moral moronity, might have a whinge about.
This is not a situation we'd like to see mirrored in Britain.
Another scenario, however, is that people who are sick and tired of this
treatment of the videogames medium decide to take matters into their own
hands, rather than simply rolling their eyes at the media's ignorant
reporting or at the antics of ludicrous characters such as Keith Vaz and
Jack Thompson.
Currys is a major home electronics retailer. They sell videogame
consoles, televisions, speaker systems, cables, and a host of other
related devices - and with HDTV being rolled out at increasing pace in
Britain, they will be expecting a bumper Christmas as people, many of
them gamers, walk through the doors of the store to upgrade their home
entertainment systems. Wouldn't it be quite a message to send, if a
significant proportion of gamers were to decide to boycott the Currys
chain - and to let them know that their appalling behaviour over Canis
Canem Edit was the reason for this boycott?
After all, there are many places to buy high definition TV sets and so
on; and only one of them has chosen to take the side of the tabloids
over this issue, when simply doing their job and stocking the product
without such judgments would have been perfectly acceptable. As a member
of the games industry, or simply as a gamer, this is certainly worth
bearing in mind if you find yourself pondering a home entertainment
system upgrade in the next few months. When our opponents have reached
the point of lying about products to push their agenda forward, perhaps
it's time to make our voices as consumers heard.
Mstation Games Review
Mon, 30 Oct 2006
