Bullish on Bully....

Yeah, still playing Bully every now and then. I think I'm inching my way closer and closer to completion of the game (I'm close to 70% which is usually where the GTA games start wrapping up), and the closer I get, the slower I move. Thursday night, for example, I spent maybe six hours of game time mowing lawns. Sure, it made me a ton of cash, but I already had a ton of cash. I think I did it because I could, and then, after it was done, I found the button that turns on the sprinklers in the park and I felt really happy.

If I had to guess, I'd say that Bully's short game days (you pass out at two a.m. so you better be safe in bed by then) keeps the player from trying to blow through the whole experience in a week, and currently I'm pretty glad about that. When I first started the game, I admit, I was pretty nonplussed by it--as my wife put it, "It just seems like you're doing boring things, not interesting things. At least in San Andreas, you were doing stuff that was interesting."--and I had plenty of other games I was chomping at the bit to get at.

But now, as the game continues to open up more back roads and areas (just past the wrong side of the tracks there's an industrial park that's, like, the wronger side of the tracks) and adding more little minigames and toys and errands, I find myself thinking that Bully is much closer to a Childhood Simulator than I originally thought. Just like when you're a kid, the thing you're doing may look like nothing at all to the person watching, but to you, the person doing it, it's interesting--maybe because it is nothing at all. There's this weird low-key zone I get into while playing Bully that has nothing to do with speed runs, or enemies, or completed missions; where I decide to, for example, play a video game at one of those standalones scattered around town, or get my hair cut a completely different way and dress up like an old school punker. It does feel, almost, like childhood to me, because one thing you realize about childhood once it's gone is that you will never have that much free time in your life again, even if you try. And what's truly fascinating to me--what might be a great essay that I hope someone gets around to writing someday soon--is how Bully takes so many of its cues from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (clothing options, sports minigames, girlfriends to win) and yet is such a different game. I think it's precisely because of how the game trains you to see the world--the worldview of the game, I guess. In GTA:SA, there's lots of interesting things to do but I was always kind of restless in doing them, squirrely: I kept trying to get to the next area, unlock the next thing, find the next girlfriend. It felt like there was so much to do, I had to do it all. (And then, just like in real life, once I did everything I could, I ended up in the casinos playing cards all the time.) By contrast, Bully does a great job of teaching you to lower your expectations, to not expect so much. By the time, you finally get off the campus and get into town, it's pretty underwhelming. That's it? I thought. This is all there is to do?

And yet, when I started playing Bully again, coming back to it after beating Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, thinking I'd just knock off the rest of the game in a day or two and shelve it, I found the game kept doling out more and more bit by bit, expanding its repertoire very discreetly. The dreaded jobs I'd been avoiding--paper boy, lawn mower--were neither hard nor stressful. I started exploring, just because I could, and one day, in what I guess was the early Spring of the game, I went for a swim around the lake just because I could, walked out onto a beach and got in a fistfight with a pirate. That was pretty cool, but when I later maneuvered out onto a bunch of cliffs, lost my balance and caught myself on a ledge, that was even cooler. All those hours you spend walking around by yourself as a kid (in my case, out in the woods somewhere) because that's it, that's all there is to do, are an invaluable essential component to who you are. When you have a private little adventure, something where you almost tumble and tear up all your clothes but don't because you catch yourself on the ledge, that contributes some fundamental sense of who you are, and who you are in the world, without it being a lesson that someone's trying to teach you or that you're trying to teach someone else, those types of experiences are incredibly valuable and necesary when you're a kid, and having an experience just like that in Bully is odd and satisfying and sweet and a little sad. And great.

So yeah, if someone had told me a month ago Bully was a kind of childhood simulator, I would have thought they were absurdly over-evaluating the game. But it seems right to me at the moment. Explore. Watch the stars come out. Run home before it gets too dark. That's it. That's all there is to do.