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Comment by dictum | Hacker News Reader

> it reinforces the idea that you ought to be so awesome that bullies leave you alone — which will never happen.

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.

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> 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.

>Only if you make it hard for bullies to bully it stops.

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.

I wish it was easy like that. I don't know anyone who has successfully "not-bothered-away" bullies. They will stop as soon as it's socially no longer a gainful action for them. Not bothering may be part of it but it's certainly not sufficient.

It's hard to simplify something like bullying, but there can be a pecking order involved, where people who are bullied in turn bully other people whom they feel they can influence in some way.

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.

It's like stepping in the same puddle every day on the walk to school. It's not out-and-out fun, but it's a habit, a pattern, and if it might provide 3 seconds of entertainment, that's worth it. "Not being fun" won't make it stop.

That's a bit like telling people who live in dangerous areas that the best response to a mugger is not to let them impoverish you. Bullies select people who seem physically or emotionally fragile to start with.

It's more like telling people who live in dangerous areas not to walk around looking scared and confused. Which we do...

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.

I'm rather disappointed that whenever the topic of bullying comes up, everyone seems to just extrapolate from their own experiences and assume that all bullying everywhere is identical. Or worse, claim that anything that doesn't match their experiences "isn't real bullying". I think the broad lack of agreement among people's accounts should make it pretty obvious that not all bullies are the same.

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.

How big an N do you have to get to go from anecdotes to data? Basically my entire family, for two generations, where bullied. I am pretty sure my grandparents would have been bullied too, except it was long enough ago that nobody cared when boys smacked each other around.

Our bullying stopped when we fought back, or moved out of school. And yes the bullying continues to hunt us to this day.

It's not the size of the N, it's the method of sampling that turns anecdotes into data.

Which is what makes this game weird. Just some quick initial thoughts:

> 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.

Nope, you need to keep the game's context in mind. The task is to get the pizza from point A to point B as fast as possible. Thus Gemma isn't simply fleeing, she's ignoring the bullies and focusing on doing what she wants to do. Depression comes from letting the bullies control her and happiness comes from refusing to do so. This very concept is in fact expressly embodied in the game with a little sequence where letting them get to her makes her fall to the ground, and she has to force herself to get back up and keep going.

"You don’t kill the enemies in Ninja Pizza Girl. You can’t even knock them out. Sure, you can bowl them over for a second or two but if you hang around they’ll get right back up again. Running away is just as viable as attacking and sometimes more so. Running fast makes Gemma feel good about herself and feeling good is the most fragile resource in the game."

I'd say running fast isn't just about delivering pizza fast, it seems to be about avoiding bullies too.

This is the attitude of a bullying victim. Bullies leave you alone if you fit in, they don't leave you alone if you don't. It's not about being awesome or resilient, it's about conformity.

It's not about conformity; it's about visibility. If you're conforming, you're a lot more invisible (and, it must be said, protected). There are other ways to become invisible, but I'm not sure the cost is worth the independence.

It is not about conformity, it is about power. At my high school people didn't bother the goth kids because they stood up for each other.

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.

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