Random Acts of Nerdness: Living Vicariously Through Jimmy

That’s not to say that school can’t be fun. Okay, if I had to be honest with myself, I prefer my current job, which consists mostly of sitting in front a computer with enough free time to pump out tactless articles that talk about parents having secret sex encounters while there kids are in school. But I also realize my school years were some of the best, because, if you know how to do them, you really don’t have any real responsibility, which is a plus in my book.

There are a lot of good qualities about the actual school experience. Where else can you have such a concentrated collection of idiots available to constantly torment you? That’s not to mention the apathetical teachers who hand out pointless assignments which teach you nothing you’re likely to actually use in real life. How about the unbending social structure that seals your fate unless you’re willing to whore your pride out to squeeze your square peg self into the round hole? You know, school really sucks.

No, it’s not all bad, and there are many things I miss about it, especially high school, like having my friends around on a near daily basis. There’s also the aforementioned lack of responsibility. Plus, I sort of liked the structure and having the idiots around. It challenged me constantly, and gave me a greater sense of me-verses-them in a controlled environment. This is not to mention that there were a lot of single, pretty girls around, not that any of them would go out with me. Well, except for one, which I’m marrying, so I guess it all turned out.

If God appeared before me right now and offered to let me relive high school, I’d slap him in the face and ask him where he’s been for the last few centuries. If he didn’t decide to release a plague of locusts upon me for my insolence, I would take him up on his offer, because I wasn’t done with high school before they stopped letting me go there because, get this for a lame excuse, I graduated.

Unfortunately, God hasn’t shown up with the offer yet, but fortunately I found an easy way to experience some of high school again, and do it in a way that doesn’t trap me in role of idiot fodder or cause police involvement when a twenty-four-year-old shows up at the local high school asking girls to the Homecoming dance This portal to my younger days was opened by playing Bully.

If you read C’s article about the Playstation 2 hit Bully, you’ll know that he generously let me wretch it from his hands so he could give it to me for Christmas. We had both been following this game for a few months before it’s release. Since elementary school, C always wanted to play a video game based on the school experience. I was looking forward to the new setting and the potential for new game play ideas. Having been playing video games since I was three, I’ve sampled quite a few redundant ventures, and the possibilities of a realistic school yard setting seemed like it would offer something fresh.

So when I got home from hanging around C while he was on leave over Christmas, I immediately popped in Bully, eschewing my current adventure of Star Ocean: til the End of Time. I was thrilled with the opening cinema (despite an evident glitch in the chemistry room; check out the off-centered water dripping on the sink), which featured the problems of a real high school boy, something most of us in American can relate to. After a short intro featuring some poor acting, I was thrust into the action.

Almost immediately, I found out that Bully was based on the infamous Grand Theft Auto engine, which makes sense, seeing how GTA’s developer, Rockstar, created this game as well. I’ve always had issue with how poorly the GTA games played, but I’ve always managed to extract fun out of them, so I figured Bully would still be a blast to play. After getting chased down by, appropriately, bullies, I ran to the principal’s office and was treated to more bad acting (which, thankfully, clears up after this point), and was then guided through my new playground of Bullworth Academy.

The more I played, the more I noticed that this was basically GTA with some healthy modifications. The mission structures, the radar, even the controls were pretty much identical, save for the fact that Rockstar managed to make everything work much better for smaller-scale interaction (about time, too). Whenever anyone asks what Bully is like, my first reaction is to say “Grand Theft Auto in a school setting… but not really.”

I hate to put it like this, because Bully is actually much different than GTA in premise and gravity. Whereas you can slaughter endless hordes of innocents in GTA, the most you can do in Bully is beat up kids. No one dies in Bully, not even the final boss, as much as you’d want him to. In this regard, Bully emulates the low-stakes world of high school, where only the most deranged would truly be capable of slipping outside the fantasy world and actually kill someone. In the world of high school, dying is slang for getting beaten up.

I want to establish the near-whimsical world of Bully to counteract the ridiculous, though vaguely warranted controversy surrounding this game, mostly due to the setting and that it came from the same source as Grand Theft Auto. When Bully first came to public attention, anti-game violence types like conservative psycho lawyer Jack Thomas immediately labeled it a “Columbine simulator,” dead certain that the goal of the game was to shoot school children for fun. This, of course, is wildly untrue, but I can’t absolve Bully from creating a potentially bad influence. After all, after playing, I wanted to go back to high school so I could beat kids up.

I should point out that I, personally, don’t see anything wrong with desiring the ability to relive high school for the sole purpose of punching students in the face, because many of them deserved it. One of the things I love so much about Bully’s premise and Jimmy’s character is the feeling that the only way to right the wrongs that are being ignored by those in charge is through vigilante justice. While Bullworth and its denizens are exaggerations, much of the basic system is all too real.

For example, throughout real-life school, I was often times picked on (though I was never beaten up, I was threatened a few times, but never got into an actual fight). The only way my tormentors ever got in trouble was if they were caught doing it by teachers. If I told a teacher that I was being picked on, I would eventually be regarded as a tattle tale and subsequently ignored. In a society where we’re encouraged to report crime and do the right thing, we set a bad precedent early in our children’s lives. Not that it mattered too much, since the punishments for such behavior, if there were any, were negligible at best.

As I went from elementary school, to middle school, to high school, I gradually stopped involving the authorities in any instances of my personal problems with other students. The flaw in this method is I was basically a good kid. I never started a fight, was never involved in a brawl, very rarely even made physical contact in the name of confrontation, and never went so far as to steal or destroy an adversary’s possessions or humiliate them. The most I usually ever did was get into the occasional round of name calling, which rarely helped anything. I never wanted to get in trouble, les my mother found out and became Very Disappointed in Me.

The problem was, the other students didn’t play by these rules. In elementary, the worst punishment that was ever inflicted on a student was an after school detention for throwing a snowball with a chunk of ice packed in at another student, and this might have just been an urban legend. The usual punishment was staying in for recess, standing still outside during recess, or, as brutal as this seems, being forced to stand in the girls’ line.

These punishments didn’t faze the dumb kids, however, who let their inferiority complex get the better of them. Even when the stakes were upped in later years with detentions, suspensions, expulsions, and the occasional police record, an alarming number of students didn’t give a damn and proceeded to make my life a little less pleasant. And then there was innocent little me, getting picked on through no (verifiable) fault of my own, desperately fighting back with pathetic insults, but ultimately dooming myself to a school life of contempt.

Jimmy doesn’t have this problem. When faced with adversity, he insults it, beats it up, humiliates it, or any combination of these. Rarely does Jimmy start the fights, but he’s quick to finish them, regardless of the consequences. I also like the vigilante aspect of Jimmy, wherein he fights people to end the fighting. While Rockstar has never been very good at establishing an anti-hero character with consistent personal morals (like GTA: San Andreas’s CJ, who burns down a gang’s apartment seemingly because they’re a rival Hispanic gang, but in the same mission, after killing a dozen gang members, rushes into the apartment, risking death, to save a lone black woman), Jimmy states defiantly that he’s only doing what he’s doing to stop the bullying in the school. And if the situation doesn’t call for fighting, he just dismisses whoever is bothering him and walks off.

This is the kind of person that I always wanted to be. I’ve always been a big supporter of the three-strikes rule, wherein if an offending idiot starts trouble, he is verbally warned twice, and if he isn’t smart enough to understand the concept of consequences, would be out on the third strike. As much as I hate to admit it, violence is the only language the clinically dumb seem to understand, and it’s almost impossible to speak it properly enough to not instill hatred, thus causing a vicious cycle where no one wins.

I can just imagine all of you self-diluted, optimistic types shaking your heads and muttering “Chris, how can you possibly think aggression is the answer? Wouldn’t it be better to simply ignore the bullies?”

I know this method doesn’t work because I actually went to school. Anyone who honestly believes that ignoring bullies makes them go away either was exclusively the bully or was on drugs, because I tried the passive route, and it doesn’t work.

The lone flaw the strategy of being like Jimmy is punishments don’t work in the real world like they do in Bully. In the game, if you do something bad, your trouble meter goes up, and authorities start chasing you down. If you can manage to avoid them for long enough, though, they eventually forget about you and your crimes are forgiven. Obviously, this is not how it worked in school. If it did, I would be a much happier person today. Or dead.

One thing about the consequences of fighting Rockstar did nail was picking on girls. In the game, if you hit a girl or one of the smaller students on campus (they don't come out and say they're Freshmen, but you can imply it. Further evidence that they're way under aged is based on the fact you can't make out with any of the smaller girls), your trouble meter maxes out and you have to run like hell for a good long while to avoid getting caught. Slugging an older boy, however, is basically without consequence.

While punching anyone would have resulted in a police record, especially unprovoked (I know from personal experience, having being threatened with this sort of punishment over a rather anti-climatic and non-injuring strike against a crazy kid who always insisted on hanging around me), there was definitely an unbalance in gender equality when it came to boy-and-girl violence. I remember a story of a pothead I never liked getting into an argument with a girl, who apparently lunged at him. In response, he raised his arm to block, something we're told to do if someone attacks us and we can't run away, and he caught her in the throat. You better believe the punishment for both of them was severe, and, without knowing the whole story, I actually felt sorry for him.

I don't think there were any rules protecting Freshmen boys, though. They were pretty much on their own.

Another big part of the world of Bully are the cliques. There are six major clichés in the game: Jocks, Nerds, Preps, Greasers, Bullies, and Townies. Other groups include the teachers, prefects, police, and townspeople. The interesting thing about these cliques and groups are how there is an underlining feeling they they’re from different worlds. Once you get the opportunity to leave Bullworth’s grounds, you feel like you’ve stepped into a larger, foreign world.

In many ways, this phenomenon emulates reality, where there was a separation between the Real World and high school. It might sound odd to many who haven’t lived it in a while, but those two worlds seemed to be separated, each with their own set of rules. Whenever the rules of one intersected with the other, it always seemed rather unusual. For example, when I went on a marching band trip my Freshman year and we were set loose in a mall, I felt I had to buy stuff simply because the rule of normality could suddenly come into affect again and we would be expected to behave like we were in school. It’s a very abstract concept, and it’s something no one realizes until they’re out of high school.

Within the high school structure, cliques do have strong influences, but oftentimes the lines would blur, and people would find themselves in multiple cliques. And this doesn’t say that everyone got along because they were in the same group or hated everyone from another group. Obviously, life is a lot more complicated than that, but that a video game managed to give the audience a bit of a taste of the high school social structure shows the talent of the developers.

The Jocks are probably the most stereotyped group, and the most prominent in real high schools. These are the guys who gain popularity because of their athletic abilities, and wouldn’t you know, it works. School spirit is synonymous with the sports teams, and athletics, not grades, were the true currency of social popularity. You could take an ugly, overweight dimwit who is destined to be a social outcast, throw some football gear on him, and send him out to battle. In no time, he’ll be transformed into school royalty and be considered a major stud muffin by girls who would have sneered at him normally. So we still honor our soldiers, just the wrong ones.

To no surprise, my rally cry back in the day was “school spirit is dead.” As I was forced to sit through pep rallies and expected to show support for my school (or rather, the school sports team), I would cross my arms when I didn’t feel like playing along. I was concerned with the fact that people who excelled academically or creatively (guess which of the two I was) were mostly disregarded. I was chided for this mentality, though I believe if you really take an objective look at it, I think you’ll agree with me.

Bully’s stereotype of Jocks cast them as aggressive, moronic muscle whose fame rests on their ability to chase a ball. While some of this stereotype is true, there were Jocks at my school who were intelligent, civil people. The influences of the testosterone, however, could not be denied.

When thing that’s sort of odd is the game never casts female athletes, but I suppose this wouldn’t serve the purposes of the game. Most of the girls who were in sports never really acted less intelligent or overly cocky because they were on teams, so you can chalk this one up to male egos. In the game, cheerleaders, the female Jock counterpart, were the target of ridicule, depicted as stuck-up and shallow girls that you just wanted to smack. In my school, at least, many of the cheerleaders were actually pretty nice, but I’m not privy to any internal conflicts, so I wouldn’t know for sure.

The Nerds are a pretty clear-cut group in Bully, cast as grade-grubbing, socially and physically inept rejects that serve as the punching bags of the school. They are also depicted as conniving and backstabbing. Interestingly, though I consider myself a nerd, I never really got involved in any of the groups. The nerds never really gathered into a single force, either. It was really hard to actually pick out packs of them during normal school hours, but I suppose you could peg the limelighters or the band as the biggest congregation. That’s not to say there weren’t a large number of nerds walking around, but they didn’t make there presence known, and few of them were that distinguishable.

Oddly, it was when I was out of high school that I started seeing nerds as being conniving. I had a nasty experience with a pack of them who ripped me off on building a computer back in the dark days before I knew anything about building them, and I observed a very backstabbing sub-culture of greed and mistrust, likely stemmed from having to fend for themselves socially. Later, when I started advised two nerd clubs at the college I work at, I came to find more selfish nerds who vyed to be Alpha Nerd and rule them all, likely a backlash from the social oppression of high school.

The Preps were even more foreign to our school yards. In the game, preps were cast as pompous, rich, shallow socialites who you couldn’t help but want to pound. In my high school, we didn’t have that many rich families, at least not so rich that they were completely disconnected from the rest of reality. There were a few kids I considered preps, or at least preppy, but not the type who openly flaunted their family’s cash to anyone. These were the clean-cut, somewhat snobbish kids with air of one-up-men-ship that made a normally rational person want to tackle and scream in their face “JUST STOP BEING YOU!”

Things never came to this.

The prep poster child for my class was a blonde grade-geek named Jay Harrington (a name that screams Prep) who was obsessed with animals (no comment on that one), was attached at the hip to another preppy guy since they were in elementary school (really no comment on that one) and seemed to ever so subtly look down on people. Interestingly, the one thing I’ll always remember about this kid, even though he was in the top three of our class, is how he copied word-for-word from Garfield comics for a class project, keeping the same art style, but changing Jon into another dude and Garfield into a woman. Seriously, I wish I asked for copies of these. C and I, being the only nerds that read Garfield, looked at each other with than “Hey, wait a minute…” look and thought to say something, but for some reason didn’t. It was a shame, because then this kid could have been kicked out of school, maybe sued, and have to live on the street, surviving only on the rats that he once loved as pets. Stupid prep…

Right, where was I?

We really didn’t have Greasers, either. In Bully, these were the group of kids that looked like fifties throwbacks, with greased hair and leather jackets that acted tough and represented the school’s low-class, ignorant, but skilled student body. I know there were students who were involved in specialty classes like auto shop and electronics, so I suppose you could say these are the real-life Greasers, but they never distinguish themselves from anyone else.

There were Bullies in high school, but by that point in their school careers, most of them had assimilated into other groups, mostly the Jocks. In elementary and middle school, where identity wasn’t as important, there were kids who did little but make childhood a little less whimsical. By the time we got to high school, it wasn’t like there was a pack of Bullies running around the school, hunting the weaker kids, but there were a few assholes looking for cheap ego boosts.

One Jock who was the perfect example of a Bully from my high school days decided he didn’t like me, despite the fact (get this for a lame defense) I never really met him before, and he wanted to fight after school, which would have been entertaining for about three seconds, after which point the fight would have probably ended with a collapsed skull on my part, because this kid had arms the size of fire hydrants. Interesting, C ran into him at a bar about a year or so ago, and he was still flexing his muscles and trying to appear better, but C, being a sergeant and out of high school, only bought the act for a second, and disregarded him. He went on to say I couldn’t show up at the bar then because I was gettin’ it on with my girlfriend (this wasn't true, at least not then), which impressed the him for the moment, given that he probably thought a nerd like me could never have sex with anyone not made of synthetic material. I have to thank C for that small victory.

The Townies were made up the lowest-class students, and actually weren’t students at all, but drop-outs. We really didn’t have a big population of drop-outs that plotted against the school, so I can’t really say this group is applicable in real-life comparisons. The best possible comparison I could make with this group is with the people who didn’t fit into any real group in the school and tried to make their own way. I labeled these folks the Outcasts, and while I dislike most of them, today, I often consider myself one of them, simply because I never fit myself into a group.

Most of the other groups mentioned above really didn’t come into play, save for the teachers and other school authorities. Most of the teachers were fairly decent, dedicated people, a contrast to the scornful, pompous, or apathetical teachers in Bully. But I can also attest to the fact that Rockstar wasn’t completely off, as I’ve had a few teachers that fall into these stereotypes, so they do happen. Highlights include my middle school band director whose ineptitude resulted in two injuries to my skull by other students, my Tech Prep teacher that stopped caring that her student ran amok and a digital media teacher who had an underlining spite for me because I wasn’t an athlete.

I was really confused about the concept of Prefects. These are the Seniors that act as security guards in the school. We had students volunteering as crossing guards in elementary, but no one was stupid enough to hand the discipline responsibilities to students. That’s just idiotic.

The closest thing we had to this was the self-righteous feelings of upper-classmen entitlement that swirled around the bowl of the school social structure, taking the lower-classmen with it. I’m surprised Rockstar didn’t mock the upper-classmen power structure, because it’s something that affects high schools around the world.

If you’re not familiar with this phenomenon, you’ve either never been to school or you’re Amish. At some point during the thousands of years high schools have been in operation, the older kids got it into their heads that they were better than the younger kids. I’m sure this isn’t helped by the fact that a lot of big changes happen in high school, wherein previously juvenile children are now starting to do grown-up things, like drive, get jobs, prepare for college, and have sex. Although I think that last one is starting up in elementary schools these days, but I can’t be too sure because I haven’t been in the elementary school environment since before I was a teenager. Seriously, look at my police report; I’m clean.

The problem was always the worst with the Seniors, who would walk around with their heads held high, flaunting the fact they were older and wiser than the rest of the dumb kids. The way I looked at it was they were just one year closer to getting their varsity letters stomped in the Real World, not to mention one year closer to death, but what can I say? I’ve never been one for idiotic social structures.

But seriously, upper-classmen believed themselves to have some sort of higher authority than the students, which was only superficially true, but never officially. It wasn’t uncommon to hear stories of evil Seniors trying to sell elevator or pool passes to unsuspecting Freshman, who were looked upon with contempt and viewed as squeaky-voiced little brats, which, to be honest, they were.

In case you didn’t get the joke, there was no elevator or pool at my school, you little dork.

Sometimes the Juniors even got into the game, because they were basically on the top of the pecking order anyway, as long as the Seniors allowed it. This brings up a story from when I was a Sophomore, and found myself being harassed by a preppy moron name Chandler (really) and his fellow idiots on a daily basis in the cafeteria. For whatever reason, the school decided to remove a single table from the cafeteria, and if you remember anything about school, you probably remember the lunchroom was ground zero for the most serious territorial battles, with students laying down stakes in a certain place from the first week, where they would stay for the entire year. So you can imagine how a single missing table could throw the entire system on its head.

My roots were planted next to Chandler’s table, but thanks to the missing table, his group believed firmly that I was violating their territory. To this day, I would stake the life of my fiancé (but not my own, just to demonstrate my level of commitment to this) on the fact that I was in the right place, because I was smart enough to recognize who was sitting next to me and where the tables lined up in relation to the room. So it was Chandler who was violating my territory, but this notion never sank in, because he wasn’t that smart, and, failing that possibility, he was a JUNIOR.

On the first day of the confusion, I was seated in my usual spot, when the second group of students (each lunch period had two groups of students) came rushing in, and Chandler and his posse stalked up to me and told me that I was in their seat. I tried to point out this wasn’t the case, but they insisted I was in the wrong, and regardless, I had to move, because they were upper-classmen and I was just a lower-classman.

Then I did something they didn’t expect. I told them I didn’t really care and dismissed them. At that point, Chandler didn’t know what to do. I imagine no other under-classmen had ever defied his authority before, so he started muttering threats of telling on me. I told him to go ahead, because I knew nothing would happen, and he knew it too, so his group of morons filtered around me and spent to rest of the time harassing me. I would have let it roll off my back, except there were girls in the group, and I felt a little weird about incurring their wrath. I was still at that naïve age where I believed girls were beyond that sort of thing. Plus, I wanted them to go out with me.

Since reason didn’t work, I sicced one of my cronies on them, but he ended up getting along with them (it was hard to find good help in those days; stupid flourishing economy). I eventually got my revenge when I mixed ketchup and mustard from my lunch tray together, forming a brownish substance that matched the brown chairs, and smeared it on the place Chandler always sat his light blue jeaned-butt in. And sat he did, though I didn’t see the results of my handwork, I’m sure he’s still in therapy to this day.

So I’m not sure why Rockstar didn’t put in wonderful high school moments like this.

The police were never really a presence in the school. We did have one as a security guard, but it’s not like they were swarming the place, except maybe in the parking lot, guiding clueless and arrogant student drivers out of the lot. We obviously had townspeople, but they stayed in the Real World, and we rarely interacted with them, except during sporting events, where they served as ego food for the Jocks.

How you interacted with these groups was important, both in the game and in high school, but in Bully, the structure seemed too unreal. You start out on the bottom of the social ladder and move your way up by completing missions. Sometimes these missions would brush against other groups, and your standing with those groups might fall, but I never experienced any repercussions for beating up Nerds outside of a mission. Your standing pretty much rises and falls on a predetermined path. It makes the entire thing feel artificial.

I also wished there was a greater emphasis on maintaining peace. On a few occasions, I would be walking around Bullworth, and find a Bully picking on a Nerd. I would decide to step in and push the Bully off him, but this would do nothing for me but start a fight or get the prefects on me. And if I winged the Nerd in the process, he would get mad and start flaying at me. Maybe it’s just hard being the defender of justice, or maybe Rockstar needs to inject a little more soul into the proceedings.

Speaking of which, I’m glad Bully had a take on the phenomenon of high school dating, but at the same time, I felt it made things a bit more artificial. All you really had to do was raise your reputation with a particular group, and the corresponding girl of that group would like you and let you make out with her. If you made out in front of another girl, the two would get into a fight, but both would still lock lips with you as if nothing happened. It would have been a bit more realistic to have to work on each girl and risk losing her if you started making out with other girls, but that might have complicated things. As it stands, they made really handy health power-ups.

And no, I never once made out with any boys. In the game or in real life. Except maybe with C.

You can’t have school without classes (that would make it the world’s dullest hangout), and while this feature probably could have been expanded, it adds a dash of realism when you have to show up for class or face punishment. You’re usually pretty good if you make it to class at all, even if you’re late, something you won’t find in real life. I should know.

It might sound like I have a whole list of complaints about Bully, but I assure you it’s mostly nitpicking. In truth, I have nothing but respect for what Rockstar did with this game. It took no small level of courage to make a game set in a high school, because of both the controversy and the fact that the unconventional setting might not sit well with gamers.

I also admire Jimmy’s character. As C pointed out, he has a mind of an adult trapped in a high school boy’s body. Jimmy is really above the social structures and idiotic authority of the school, with a perspective and an agenda all his own. He might not be the smartest or most likeable character, but he’s the type that countless people would have wanted to be like back in high school. The game and Jimmy would probably be better appreciated by those who have been out of high school for a while, but those who are still in might be able to learn and accept one of the most important lessons I learned before it’s too late to apply it to your life: the social structure of high school doesn’t matter, especially in the Real World. This is probably the one lesson I wish I could teach my kids, and I have a feeling Rockstar would do a better job on this one than I could. Kind of psychotic, isn’t it?

This is not to mention that Bully is a damn great game. I’m not sure if sales were as high as they should have been, so if you haven’t purchased a copy of Bully yet, what’re you waiting for?

My respect for this game will drive me to pick up the forthcoming Xbox 360 version at some point, even if it is basically the same game as before with a little added content, I’ll be more than willing to go back to Bullworth Academy and relive high school yet again with Jimmy. I just hope other developers took a good look at what Rockstar accomplished, because Bully is, at the very least, a minor masterpiece, and I’m looking forward to the chance to lay the smack down on the Jocks again sometime in the future.