Shut up and give me your lunch money.

Your last line is key. I believe that the line for finding a solution to bullying is very thin. Sway too much to either a passive/dismissive approach or overaggressive disciplinary action can be detrimental and ultimately more damaging. We both agree there--no question. My argument was that "Susan from the video" was way too dismissive and her approach seemed to be, and I'll quote myself again, "If you think happy thoughts, you won't get bullied." I disagree more with her attitude toward the victims of bullying than with her outlook on how to deal with bullies.

And of course, anytime there is someone who spews ALL CAPS BULLSHIT in one line without making a coherent point, that helps no one. Both sides of the coin have a little dirt on them that we just have to brush off or ignore.

Are you saying that bullying is best in life?

@hailinel: You might be surprised, actually.

@jdevlin24tgb: I wasn't trying to say that bullying isn't prevalent, but that it isn't as personal of a story. Hm, look at it this way, Papa y Yo feels like a narrative specific to one person. A story that has thematic hooks in the life of one of the writers. Bullying is far more general. Sure, everybody deals with it, or a lot of people anyway, but it isn't as personal. Maybe I'm wrong, and they'll find a way to make the story feel more personal, but bullying is such an overdone topic, that'll be hard to accomplish.

@groverat said:

A great point lost in the rest of the comments. This idea seems like a gross oversimplification that will make the "I just want video games to make me feel something" crowd happy, but won't ultimately make any sort of coherent or fair point and make absolutely no difference in the bullying debate.

I look at it even more cynically. It plays specifically to the type of people who see themselves solely as victims in the world, exploiting a terrible character trait in the target audience in order to make a product more attractive.

It's the "nice guy" version of a headless tits-torso pack-in.

@voshinova: lol

I think people tend to really under play Bullying or misinterpret bullying as just being made fun of or being called names occasionally and that is something that everyone experiences. Over the years some of the kids that were reported to in the news that killed themselves because of the result of bullying were shoved around on a daily basis, been told they would be killed, derogatory terms, thrown down flights of steps, etc, etc. None of that exists in the "reality of adulthood." Being in an adult environment is absolutely nothing like any sort of actual bullying that happens in schools.

Watch the documentary "Bully" on netflix and then try to honestly tell me that what happens to those kids is what adults deal with the on a day to day basis, because it surely isn't what I experienced in what you consider to be "adulthood."

yay \o/ another boring moralistic art project, so in the lyrics of 'The Who' - I Won't Get Fooled Again

As someone with a lot of personal experience on the subject, it would be interesting to see what they might accomplish. I always found it interesting listening to people with little to no actual experience sit around and talk about the subject because it's so.. amusingly misinformed. It's one of those things you just don't really grasp until you've been on the receiving end.

While somewhat mild, that's assault, and we have a system in place to punish those who assault.

been told they would be killed

Depending on how credible the threat is, uttering death threats is also illegal.

derogatory terms,

Sorry, derogatory terms is something you have to learn to deal with. I got called a "dumb fuck" the other day for daring to do my job. I cannot arrest that person for being mean.

thrown down flights of steps

Thrown down a flight of steps? There are people being thrown down flights of steps, a potentially lethal form of assault, who do not go to police? Someone who has had a severe form of assault inflicted upon them gets my sympathy, but not if they refuse to do absolutely anything to rectify the situation.

None of that exists in the "reality of adulthood." Being in an adult environment is absolutely nothing like any sort of actual bullying that happens in schools.

Being in an adult environment actually is like the bullying that happens in schools, the only difference is is that you expect an adult to exercise their rights. Because of course they would. It's not a matter of "it's kids so it's inherently different", it's that no one ever seeks actual legal justice for assault committed in school, so we develop this idea that it's this lawless zone where there's nothing to stop people from punching someone else in the face. In the adult world, there's also nothing to stop people from punching someone else in the face, but there are available punitive and renumerative measures, and adults are likely to use them.

Rather than instruct kids on what it's like to live in the adult world (as in, someone injures you, you go to the police), we want to develop all these insane intermediate measures, often at the expense of the curriculum. I'd rather you spent 27,000 dollars on new science textbooks than to hire more counsellors to provide emotional comfort that simply will not be there once they're in college.

I was bullied in school. Do you know what did more for me than any counselor or lecturer? It was my first law class I took in university. There were no law or civics classes in my high school. And there never will be if we're spending money on "anti-bullying" measures rather than education. Unless that anti-bullying measure is a full civics class.

I would say it exploits the fetishization of guns in modern culture, but either way. I'm certainly not in favor of bullying, but I think people use that term to mean a lot of things these days, to the point where it just comes off as whining. Maybe all the people working on this game did have the shit beat out of them when they were younger just because they were a little different, but I find that hard to believe. More likely that not they weren't part of the 'popular clique' and maybe were made fun of by those people. That's not bullying IMO. That's just people being dicks, and a person should have enough self-esteem to be able to deal with people being dicks, because that ain't ever going to go away completely.

I saw this pop up a few days ago, and I've been giving it a lot of thought. I did most of my adolescent growing up in the 90's, during that time my dads store was closed, my mother wasn't working for a few years while she went back to school and being the kids we didn't get "stuff" with the same regularity as class mates. You'd be amazed how fast things like "poor kid" or "dirty" begin getting bandied about, especially when your clothing is clearly from goodwill or from the cheaper department stores.

The worst experience I had was when I got a GameBoy pocket and Metroid 2, this was a huge expense for my parents and it was something I coveted it was my pride and joy. So the bullies in my life upset that the "poor kid" had a nice new piece of kit, within 2 weeks took it from me and smashed it. It's something I still remember rather vividly, it sucks but as time went on my parents fortunes and my own improved and events like this began to kinda disappear.

I am very well aware that my "experiences" with bullying in my early years is not how everyone's went, I know some involved far more violence than my own and perhaps they weren't exactly as well equipped to shrug of being picked on for things outside of their control as I was. This is what makes the issue so hard to tackle in an effective manner (What we're doing is NOT effective.) no two instances are the same, and some like Golguin had pointed out can be extremely dangerous.

I made a friend in my last year of public school (K-8), he had ADHD and acted out in ways some people didn't quite understand and so I witnessed him get bullied pretty mercilessly. He had been moved from a few different schools, and each one he had been bullied in different ways. I ended that isolation, and because of that I changed his perception of the world outside and his life throughout high school (We remained very close friends, but we went to different high schools) was MUCH better.

Do I think this video game is going to capture any of that? No probably not, but I won't condemn them or accuse them of ulterior motives for trying either.

Guess I should count myself as lucky then I'm an artist and wasn't bullied, but you make good point kids who are different from the norm tend to get picked on.