The Consequences of Bullying Are Inspiring Silent Enemy

I'm just going to employ a strategy a friend taught me when I see dumb comments.

lol

I seem to be talking quite a bit about gangs recently with that other thread about the people going to SF. I'm going to put this as nicely as I can, but people who didn't grow up in areas with gang violence and think that conventional methods of dealing with "bullies" in the areas they grew up in can be applied to all situations don't know what the fuck they're talking about.

I only had two altercations in high school (that I can remember) with the first one being fairly straight forward. Two guys approached me trying to start shit, but I knew they didn't have any connections so I'd only have to fight them both. I was in all the AP classes so they probably thought I was some nerdy smart guy. I immediately threw down my backpack and said something to the effect of letting them throw the first punch because I was going to put them both in the hospital. They never bothered me again.

The second situation was a bit more complex. A dude who was a wannabe gang banger claimed I did something to his sister (I did not) and wanted to start something. He did it in front of my friends and everyone told me to lay him the fuck out because they had my back. There was no question I'd beat him. The problem was that his back up wasn't so much on the wannabe gang banger side and I didn't want to find out how many of them were legit. I had to take his mad dogging and occasional shoves in hallways for a few days because I knew I couldn't start that. I guess he eventually found out he was mistaken because he stopped a few days later and he never bothered me again.

Bullying isn't always the type of stuff you see on TV. It can have very real and violent consequences if you don't know how to handle yourself properly.

Hey Jason, your gonna need some help harassing all those goof tards that like this game. Mind if I help?

I wouldn't be surprised most artists, designers, etc. were bullied. As in creating your own worlds is a means of escape.

@jdevlin24tgb: Okay, maybe missing the point a little bit here.

We can all agree that the goal is to reduce bullying in general and stop that behavior more effectively when it does start. So the question is how do we achieve that?

Well, bullying is an exceedingly complicated situation, made all the more difficult because those who are bullied are chosen based on some innate characteristic, as opposed to two people who have a disagreement that can be solved, there is no simple solution because the recipient of the bullying has done nothing. That means that the reform must focus on the bully. Discovering the core cause of their behavior and addressing those root problems, along with as much involvement as possible with the bullies' parents to make sure that they can observe and help their child work through their aggressive tendencies.

What we see often (like here on this forum) are instead responses like, "No they are monsters and fucking cowards .... fuck bullies!!!!! They deserve no defense." This demonizing only serves to instill the role of "Bully" in a person, and will never change their terrible behavior. Certainly when the government declares a "War on Bullying", they turn kids into enemy combatants which even more so reinforces a role that they fit into, rather than addressing why they bully in the first place.

This is made even worse when it's that same government who runs the ineffective public school system where bullying thrives, and all they do is demonize rather than change. (Not to say that bullying doesn't exist in private schools of course, but here in the US there are 3 times as many public than private, and violence does occur more in those government run schools).

Basically, when schools turn a blind eye, or worse, make aggressive kids who can be changed into enemies, criminals, and monsters, this real and horrible problem will only get worse.

I was bullied too. It's probably why I started playing video games so much.

Oh no! My white heteronormality is threatend!

Quick, to the comments field!

Yes, let's bring even more needless attention to this highly-sensationalized hot-button news topic. Am I "for" bullying? Of course not. What bothers me is how all this "bully awareness" is ultimately just a disingenuous gesture with no real purpose behind it (unless you call merely having "good intentions" a purpose).

It's always exclusively over grade school children, specifically after a mass shooting. So say we live in a dreamworld and all forms of bullying are abolished in schools. School is a utopia and everyone gets along perfectly there. Then these kids get shoved into the real world. But being an adult is unchanged. Their workplace may be FULL of bullying, whether it be from their boss or their co-workers. And that's the lucky few who got a job that they're actually proud of, while others can't even find a job. Drivers on the road flip them off yelling "LEARN HOW TO DRIVE YA DUMB FUCK" for doing nothing wrong. They may have to ease back on paying some bills because they can't afford them, and soon utilities are turned off and perhaps they end up homeless. So... now that they're grown-up, exactly what good did all the warm, fuzzy feelings of bully-awareness and illusions of safety do for them? Who knows. But damn are they screwed.

Adults murder other adults who hurt their feelings every day. Adults kill themselves due to depression every day. But it's not a hot-button topic on the news today so nobody cares about that right now. So even if you don't want to hear "just deal with it" or "you must learn to fend for yourself" because it's just too darned unfair to children or teens... eventually they're going to have to. The world IS a bully. Because unless you're dirt-stinking rich, eventually, there comes a day where nobody is there to coddle you anymore. And there's no way to prove that preparing yourself for this realization at the age of 28 is any less beneficial to a 12 year old.

So, I urge anyone bullying-er, "preaching" bully-awareness: just... stop. The whole bullying campaign is nothing more than that, a political campaign. Making it the subject of a video game only makes it even more reprehensible.

I just want the cool games like Street Fighter.

Lemme talk to you about chemtrails...

@arjybarjy: I'm sure you could. With your tin-foil hat on!! Amirite?

Couldn't agree more. This misses the target for me.

@uberdubie: Bingo. You and I are alike. Indistinguishable!

Because they will automatically disappear because someone wants to make something that isn't what you want?

I love that people have this idea that any sort of social commentary within a video game makes it the most popular and successful thing in the world. "These indie games are just exploiting issues to turn a profit." "Patrick is only writing these articles because they're inflammatory and getting page hits," like he wouldn't be way more successful if he just incessantly uploaded new Battlefield trailers.

People are acting like "Shoot the Ethnicities Your Dad is Afraid of 4" is somehow not immeasurably successful right now and that every single indie developer isn't struggling.

Every moment I watched of the Papo y Yo quick-look did it no favors. It did not look enjoyable at all.

I guess it's really tough to tackle issues without getting hamfisted, but I'd really like to see someone get there.

I think the closest I've seen was the buddhist message of Journey.

Those of you who want to throw the label "bully" on people who bully someone at some point, remember that you're going to be labeling Autistic kids at a 2.5x higher rate than non-spectrum kids.

Children with autism are also more likely to bully others: About 20% of kids with autism bullied (vs. only 8% of neurotypical children). According to the report, many of these kids may actually be both bully and victim, which is somewhat more common in children with developmental or emotional problems.

The developer in the video says people fit in three categories:
1 - Those who bully.
2 - Those who are bullied.
3 - Those who watch.

That is ridiculous. Virtually everyone is all 3 at different times. Everyone who holds up an "I was bullied" sign should be required to write ", and I also bullied others" after it. A single incident or a single series of specific incidents doesn't define people.

Wow, it's so cool to be a cynical asshole.

I hope they nail this one.

knock that bully the f*ck out

@hailinel: I have to disagree. My whole point is that the issue is complex. You can't solve it just by being 'against bullying'. You need to address cultural problems. I mean seriously, have you ever stopped to wonder (as an adult who is capable of logical processees) what makes these kids into bullies? Wouldn't it be great to pull it out at the root instead of demonizing every new generation of troubled kids that comes along?

I live in Philadelphia and I work with inner city kids in the summers. Bullying goes far beyond the definition of that word in these schools. Kids get picked on by getting beat up in an alley as a common occurance.

The program I work for emphasizes the fact that as educators you NEED to understand the child before taking disciplinary action. They will boot your ass out on the street if you take the lazy way out and yell a bully into submission. I am vocally against bullying every single day at that place, but if we just yelled at bullies all day, we'd make the problem worse.

What we do instead is take childred who are acting out aside, and we ask them what's going on. How was your morning? Did you remember to eat breakfast? Usually, we hear some pretty crazy shit about their parents beating them that morning. That sort of life makes a kid act out, and the better solution is to improve their life instead of making it more miserable.

So with this positive approach, what happens at the end of every year like clockwork? 99% of the kids begin to get along, and in our final theater performance, you'll probably see up on that stage dressed as a duck, quacking in front of his entire school, and having fun with his peers like he should.

Fine, let them make it - as long as they include Guile's theme. Then it'll be a cool game.

Exclusive gameplay footage?

@jerseyscum: I must have lived a sheltered life. I literally thought when she burst into the bathroom, she was trying to open a jar of pickles or something.

I don't like the subject of bullying at all. Whenever it comes up, nearly everyone comes with a 'solution' they so readily believe in, while there really is no standard for that stuff. Half of the people believing their solution will work, the other half not believing it could.

I feel nothing solid and concrete every comes out of this argument except for: you really don't know.

@fiberpay: Yeah. Is it a requirement to have been bullied and/or abused to get a job at Minority Media?

No? Then don't make this "We Are The World" ad, just state your business and get on with it.

I see no problem with them trying to tackle this topic in their new game, or that they're generally interested in the more "depressing" aspects of life and actively incorporate those themes into their work. What could ever be wrong with that? There are so many developers saturating the market with shooters, RPGs, strategy and sports games already, I can't say I'm worried that a few "Papo y Yos" will suddenly transform the gaming industry into a hyper-sensitive niche of media. Also, nobody should even begin to care about side-effects like that; I WANT developers to be able to work on stuff that's important to them.
Just like similar experiences can have a drastically dissimilar impact on different persons, these devs just seem to value these issues higher than others, it's great they get to incorporate them into their creative output, actually.

Now, if this game will turn out to be any good or not is an entirely different discussion. Papo I did not enjoy, so I'm rather sceptic.

Quoted for emphasis.

There are some jaded dudes in here.

You're pretty much tinker bell, dude.

This screams marketing ploy. They better send some of the profits from this game to help bullied kids.

I always find it odd when people defend bullying by claiming that it strengthen's people.

I'm not saying they're wrong. However, what sort of strength do they gain? Let us simply examine our society and see whether or not the strength we have is one we would like to keep. Personally, while I do quite favor Western society, I am not very impressed by our lack of impulse control and our desire to destroy or kill that which we do not understand.

It would seem that the strength we garner when bullied is one of fear, one based entirely off of paranoia, one where we must resolve to belittle, dehumanize, and abandon all those who we believe might be or eventually become stronger than us.

Bullying, to me, seems childish and to allow our society to try and flourish under it is to build peace through weaponry, rather than dialogue or logic.

Bulling now isn't what it was before. Half of you guys saying that people need thicker skin NOW, probably wouldn't be able to stand it now any way. Mainly because before, you needed to only physically be in school to get it. Now, you'll get as your're physically in school and out of school as well.

Things like spamming you're facbook page, spamming you on twitter and unleashing some vicious ass shit on youtube or on a photo hosting site carries shit over from your school day crap. When I was kid, bullying was pretty much confined to school. So, kids dealing with it would make it through the day and not have to deal with it when they got home or on the weekends or while on vacation break. But, not now. Motherfuckers can mind fuck the hell out of you beyond school because of social media and the fact that every 12 year old seems to own a damn cellphone that has more capabilities than my pc did 15 years ago. So, when you get someone on your ass...you'll most likely get them on your ass 24/7.

I'm amazed that most of you people aren't even aware of these things. Have any of you even seen the number of kids (kids, as in UNDER 18 years old) that have committed suicide because of out of hand some of this shit even gets?

Wait, how is this showing up in the forums?

I don't know about that. I mean, is the bullying market even a thing?

I think the video can come across as esoteric, or maybe pretentious, or maybe too metaphorical a concept for some people watching it.

But, I don't think marketing ploy comes across for me. Especially given how people described PAPO Y YO and how the storytelling was done in that.

No one said having a social commentary within a videogame make such videogame automatically good.. that is your fail assumption. As with everything execution counts.

I would say however, people flipping out because of this videogame subject speaks of the lack of diversity in the medium, and the lack of tolarance for something different in a huge chunk of the audience.

I don't know how the game will be but this trailer is pure manipulation. It tries to make you emotionally invested in bullying, for what cause? To buy their game? Fuck. That.

It would have been fine if they just made a video with a bunch of people discuss bullying and explaining what their game was about. But this garbage trailer has the music, black and white visuals and the cards just like those Youtube videos. WTF.

But hey, hope the game is good.

Here I was hoping for a game where you secretly fart on someone and then slip away, how disappointing.

This whole damn trailer was just playing to the emotions of people who have been bullied. Maybe if they would have shown/talked about a little more gameplay instead of just the dev team holding signs saying "we were bullied just like you man".

Usually the comment section on GB is less disappointing than this.

My question to all the people that say bullying isn't a big deal. Why do you feel a need to defend something like bullying? I agree that there's a lot of coverage on bullying in the media right now. Do the PSAs and documentaries, that you can avoid if you see fit, annoy you because of their frequency and visibility or because you actually think the act of bullying is being blown out of proportion?

There are a lot of people out there that can benefit and heal from things like this. Even if this ends up not helping a single person it is always good to try and help people. There's really no reason to be against something like this.

That's fair. I can agree with you on that.

@firecracker22

It appears either you or these kids doesn't understand how Facebook works. If you are receiving insults on Facebook, set your account to private. If you are still receiving insults, _maybe don't friend the people who you are bullying you_. Or how about just don't go on Facebook? My God, I was bullied in school, and if I walked around some parts of town dicks would yell insults at me. So I didn't go to the skate park. This is telling kids to continue going to the skate park, and that if you are insulted to call a police officer. Bullying doesn't "follow kids home", they continue to interact with it on their personal time because they choose to. That's immaturity and it's to be expected, but rather than accept eventually someone will mature and go 'why do I even talk to this person if I can't stand them', what the suggestion is is permanently immaturity. Rather than learn to ignore and not spend time with assholes, we tell them their victimization is of such magnitude and that their oppression will never end and that the only solution is for an authority figure to punish the offender. Fantastic. I wonder why today's generation continues buying game franchises they hate, but now it maybe makes sense.

The kids will look up and scream "stop bullying us!" And the bullies will look down and whisper "... that's two for flinching."

Bullying finds kids even if they take your advice about F-book, though. If a kid is really determined to get at someone else, he or she will find them via text, Twitter, email, or a plain old phone call. Even if you're not on Twitter or whatever, that may not even help. In a suburb of my city a kid started a Twitter account about HS crushes which predictably turned into students getting called out by name for being gay, having a small penis, and in one case, having a "huge bush." It would be easy enough for a student to get wind of that, whether or not they're on social media.

I think it's less about strengthening as about preparing teenagers and children for the realities of adulthood. Assholes exist everywhere in the world and you're much more prepared to understand how to deal with those people when you are younger, the consequences are lower and when you have parents and educators as a support structure to aid you throughout the process. A mass market media campaign to highlight that bullying is bad and that bullies should understand that their actions have consequences far beyond what they imagine will occur is fine and acceptable but most of the criticism, whether presented poorly or not, is that these efforts are only going to shield children from the realities of adulthood until they are thrust into situations where the consequences of dealing with assholes will be dire and the victims have no experience in how to save themselves from physical or emotional harm.

@sadisticwolf: By accepting bullying as a valid form of preparing children for an adult life, we are endorsing a life that flagrantly tolerates, accepts, and even glorifies behavior that is, put frankly, archaic at best and undeserving of a modern peoples. So yes, we are preparing children for life. However, we are also, by accepting bullying as a means of preparation, allowing it to exist later on. This is self-perpetuating behavior.

We are forcing "B" onto children because "A" exists, but "A" continues to exist because we demand that children endure "B." If we took "B" away and punished the thing that caused "A" (i.e., bad parenting, poor dialogue skills between individuals, tolerance for unnecessary violence, etc), then neither would be as common. Yes, they would still exist on some level, but to say we ought not act because we cannot eradicate the issue entirely is to say we ought to tolerate racism because it'll never be eradicated entirely.

I have to admit, I was never bullied as a kid. What has caused me to examine this debate has been my work with children as an adult. Some children simply are not strong enough to overcome these issues. To then demand they suffer is to condemn the man not intelligent enough for an exam to pass it, lest he suffer for 18+ years.

And how is that different from how it ever was? Did we not have telephones when we grew up?

Furthermore, how does 'catching wind' of people talking shit about you constitute a campaign of harassment? Unfortunately we cannot police people's speech so that it conforms to what we want to hear. What's your solution for people being rude to people? If someone zoomed into this topic twelve seconds from now and called us cockshit fuckheads, would the appropriate reaction to be ignore them and continue on with our lives, or to keel back in horror, and fall to pieces and hope someone, anyone, could come in here and validate our feelings?

I understand that teenagers don't understand how to ignore insults or control their feelings, this is something you learn through experience. It makes sense to take care of them as they develop these skills, and attempt to guide their decision making... it does not make sense to attempt to bubblewrap the entire world to protect their feelings. It's not going to work, and even if it did, they'll become adults who don't understand how to deal with insults.

Remember also that assault is assault. 'Bullying' is not assault, assault is assault. And in cases of assault, you call the police. No one will ever strike me or threaten to strike me and not wind up either arrested, fined or with a civil suit on their hands. And this goes double for my child. That's what living in a lawful society is.

amusing that they’re representing bullies with the most intelligent, misunderstood birds on Earth, ostracized for how they look + sound

....Wow did they just rip off an Amanda Todd video idea?

I'm not comfortable with that.

Yeah, no.

I agree wholeheartedly. People who are cynical towards the concept of this game seem to me the kinds of people who would challenge ANY indie game utilizing sensitive topics as just "manipulating" or "trying to make a profit through people's emotions". Bullying is a serious issue; I think that we should see how this game turns out. If it's both a good game and treats this subject with the right amount of weight, then I would consider it a success.

The moral lesson is that all game developers got bullied.