That aside, the game has a problem, in my view: it's too real. It sounds like a game that provides you with more of the crushing disappointments that fill real life, and it reinforces the idea that you ought to be so awesome that bullies leave you alone — which will never happen.
Exactly. I don't play zombie-based video games because zombies scare me. I play them because zombies are fun to kill. This game seems a little too realistic.
Then again, it might be a good thing to confront some real-world fears in a video game. I could see a game like this working really well if it's designed right.
Anecdata: bullies don't leave you alone because you're awesome, they leave you alone because their bullying doesn't work on you (because you're resilient to personal attacks, or you pretend to not care until they exhaust the possibilities and leave you alone etc.) or backfires on them somehow.
I can tell from experience that this is not how it works. Real bullies never leave you alone until you stand up and fight back. It's the amount of energy it takes for them to bully, not the amount of damage they do.
They don't care how resilient you are or whether you care about the bullying or not, when their bullying doesn't have any bad consequences or the potential for bad consequences. Only if you make it hard for bullies to bully it stops.
Personally, I found ignoring the few bullies I encountered in school to be pretty effective, but I'm also aware that what I experienced was pretty tame compared to some stories I've heard.
Our bullying stopped when we fought back, or moved out of school. And yes the bullying continues to hunt us to this day.
One way of doing that, that many people have found successful, is to not let them bother you. If you're no longer interesting to bully, they'll ignore you for someone who is.
So, in some cases you may only need to push back to the point where you're not the easiest target in the room. ie, you don't always have to be the fastest runner to get away from animal who is looking for easy prey. You just have to be faster than the slowest runner.
I have to agree with the sentiment expressed elsewhere in the thread, that bullies bully for different reasons. The only time I have been bullied, avoidance and not showing a response worked, because the bully had low self-esteem and was looking for acceptance from his peers by picking on smaller kids. When he saw that he wasn't getting anywhere with that, he stopped.
> The game tracks Gemma’s emotional state. When she’s running fast and jumping high, she feels good and the world is filled with light and color. When she gets laughed at, her mood darkens and the world darkens with her.
That just reinforces that bullying inevitably and inexorably leads to depression. And then it also reinforces that acting happy ("running fast and jumping high") is the way to counteract it.
In other words, it's the old standby advice of "just ignore them" in video game form.
I'd say running fast isn't just about delivering pizza fast, it seems to be about avoiding bullies too.
In the same way the openly gay (this was back 15 years ago) guy in the drama team was never bullied because he was friends with the cheerleaders who had the power to stop it.
The problem is nerds rarely stick up for each other. Whenever I saw a nerd get bullied in high school all his friends would be acting as small as possible in order to avoid getting involved. The conflict avoidance enables bullying.
That's why I would love to see a game like this, a game that addresses the problem, but ultimately remains a game you can have fun with. The best works I've ever read/seen/played are subtle: they don't shove their ideas down your throat, but make you think about their nuances later.
I don't see why not. Video games are no different from any other form of information delivery method, except that they're more interactive. Actually, I think this would make them even better tools for helping to teach morality. While you can pick up some morality from books or movies, those are other people's stories in which you're simply an observer. In a game, (especially more modern ones) you typically have more control over the character's actions.
Take, for example, a game which gives you a choice to steal from somebody and, if you do, it shows you the repercussions of your choice. Maybe you come back to that town later and the person is a beggar who pleads with you to give him some coin so he can feed his kids. Or maybe you come back and the entire town is like that because you stole everything that wasn't nailed down. Written well, I don't see why dialog and visual cues like these can't be powerful morality lessons- more powerful than any other teaching method we have except perhaps for real-life experiences.
Of course, the idea is to teach our kids those lessons before they learn them in real life, with real life repercussions.
The Putt-Putt games were adventure games designed for kids, say 6-10 years old or so. And obviously since they're adventure games, you have to pick up everything that isn't nailed down because it might be useful in a puzzle later.
But the publishers of the game didn't want to encourage kids to just pick everything up in real life! So the developers had to, every time Putt-Putt picked something up, make him say "This looks like somebody lost it; maybe I can find the owner!".
Agreed, so much of the hell experienced through other people can be averted by focusing on building up one's confidence and self-esteem.
The idea that women are mostly feelers and men are mostly doers writes off both men and women as useless stereotypes.
I got into my fair share of trouble when I was a kid; both starting fights without any real provocation and being the recipient of aggression without any real provocation. Much of the time it was caused by an unnecessary escalation of previously fun 'play' violence (towel fights in the locker room was a biggie).
I can only think of two fights that were prompted by some form of emotional argument or dispute: In middle school I fought a bully at my bus-stop, and a year or two later a kid I had been bullying in boy scouts nearly broke my nose.
I think you're unnecessarily narrowing the definition of "emotional manipulation".
I also do not know what "real provocation" is and how it differs from "not-real provocation".
"Real provocation" in my above comment would be the sort of "emotional manipulation" that you are talking about.
Conveniently, this makes it impossible to map out any potential emotional manipulation. It's like saying that World War I happened with no real provocation; it was just these random nations snapping towels at each other and somebody got hit in the balls, boo hoo.
Tell me who these hypothetical people are, who flip a switch and kick their neighbor's ass for no reason. Tell me how many months older they are. What competitions did they win recently? What's their relationship to the teachers? How long have they known each other? Why are some of them friends, and others merely classmates? What do they look like, to each other? What are their parents' relationships? What clubs did they join? And so on and so on.
"Metrosexual" is just a more PC way of calling men who care a lot (relatively) about their appearance/grooming gay. The term has supposedly nothing to do with sexual orientation, yet the term is ostensibly about it since it has "sexual" as a suffix. (And I don't really see how so-called metrosexuals can't be competitive.)
As far as divorcing biological sex and gender - well a lot of guys insult each other by calling each other women for whatever reason. There is no allusions to being gay, and apparently a man can be a "woman" even though his sex is a man. But somehow this doesn't seem very constructive or inclusive.
My point is that precisely because society tends to use these terms as insults, and because there is no approach common to society, we have a lot of work to go in revising our approach to views of gender identity, sexuality, masculinity, and femininity in society.
Not that I agree or disagree with your statement, it's almost impossible for someone of the opposite gender to fully understand the extreme differences between genders in high school.
Edit: And everyone down voting me is also a guy.