High School Sucked. Can We Please Have More Games About It?


For most people, high school sucked. This is pretty much a given at this point, right? The endless questioning and self-doubt, the lack of control over your own schedule, dealing with the impossible mysteries of the opposite sex while navigating the often treacherous shoals of what amounted to a four year, walled-in social experiment. Yeah, high school sucked.

It’s that exact suckage that makes high school such ripe territory for entertaining storytelling.. How many classic movies and TV shows have channeled the angst and confusion of high school into memorable entertainment? John Hughes made his entire fortune mining teen angst, and triumphant television shows from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to My So-Called Life to Friday Night Lights have put us through high school again and again. Writers never tire of the setting, nor do audiences. And yet in the last 10 years, there have been a mere handful of high school-centric video games. What gives?

I’ve recently been playing an iOS game from Electronic Arts called Surviving High School. It is… it is not the kind of game that I normally play. It’s more of an interactive choose-your-own-adventure than a real game; it features a cartoony look, cheesy music, and in-app purchases and ads that can be really distracting.

And yet I’m in love with it. I first checked it out when our august friend in augustness Tom Bissell wrote of it, “What makes Surviving High School special is that a few of its characters genuinely surprised me, and a number of its scenarios have real emotional bite… This is the rare high school simulacrum in which even parents come across as totally human people.”

This is certainly true, and the characters in the game start off as high school archetypes (e.g. the jerd, the jock, the cheerleader) and almost all wind up diverging from that archetype in surprising ways. Two other things about the game captured my imagination: One, due to its choose-your-own-adventure format, you begin making decisions from the start and never stop throughout. The “gameplay” involves simply tapping buttons on the screen, but it is constantly engaging you and letting you tell your own story. Two, it’s set in a real-life high school, and it has led me to realise how fresh the high school setting still feels.

My favourite Rockstar game isn’t GTA IV or Red Dead Redemption — it’s their 2006 high school game Bully. Bully didn’t have GTA IV’s explosive action and moody story, and it lacked Red Dead‘s incredible vistas and immersive world. But it did have the most enjoyable, fresh-feeling setting of any open-world game I’ve ever played.

Back when the game came out, the inimitable Ian Bogost wrote an article for Gamasutra (which, unfortunately, has vanished from the site) called “Taking Bully Seriously.” His piece captured much of what made the game unique. He introduced it thusly:

Imagine a video game about the difficult life of a typical, but troubled adolescent. He’s the product of a broken home and alienated from his parents, who are more interested in the novelty of their new marriage than in the responsibility of raising a child. He’s been in and out of different schools and finds it hard to make friends. Disappointing relationships make it hard for him to trust other kids, and more so other adults. He acts out and gets in trouble, sometimes from boredom, sometimes from belligerence, and sometimes just to get some attention, since he doesn’t get any at home.

The video game would allow the player to live in the shoes of this typical adolescent during a time-compressed academic calendar year, in order to understand the conflicted social situation for a troubled teen. The game might be appropriate for teenagers, especially as a curative. But it would really be targeted at adults, especially the parents, educators, and policymakers who have the power, authority, and life experience to help counsel teens like him in the real world.

This description sounds like it might have been lifted from a grant proposal for a serious game, one that a researcher might submit to the Department of Education, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), or the National Science Foundation (NSF). But it’s not. It’s the premise for Rockstar Games’ controversial new title, Bully.

Behind all of the banana-peel and cherry-bomb hijinks, Bully taps into something real and relatable: the angst of growing up. It lets us take on the role of another person, a damaged and frustrated kid named Jimmy Hopkins who, over the course of the story, learns to navigate the dangerous waters of high school socialisation.

In Bogost’s article (which I must unfortunately reference by memory), he mentioned how the running audio commentary from student passers-by is a particularly sharp commentary on high school and social norms. As players run about Bullworth Academy, they overhear kids talk about the pressures of homework, their crushes, and their frustrations with themselves and the ways they feel trapped by society’s expectations. I remember noticing the same thing when I played it — the milieu of Bully is immersive, funny, and conveys a unique vibe.

The thing is, high school stories are rarely actually about high school.

When it comes down to it, Bully was simply a lot of fun. It was fun to play as a maladjusted high school kid, it was fun to skip class and romance the cheerleader and set off the smoke detectors. It was fun to get involved in the private lives of the teachers, to stand up for the downtrodden, to put those rich kids in their place! I’d never done these things in a game before, and it was a thrill to have a chance to.

I hear that the Persona games deal with high school-type things as well (though in a much different way), though I must confess ignorance of the series. But in a way similar to how Catherine tackled issues like fear of commitment and infidelity, I could imagine how an Atlus game could effectively (if a bit bizarrely) approach similar subject matter. They are most definitely on my “blindspot” list.

I worked with high school students for seven years, and I probably wouldn’t want to play a game set in the school where I taught. But then, the high schools we visit in pop culture aren’t all that much like the places where we spent out teen years; they’re heightened and iconic, even universal. They tell stories that we can all relate to — we’ve all been there! — while providing exactly the sort of escapist thrill that can make video games so enjoyable in the first place.

Science fiction and fantasy are great, and games set within in those genres have proven to sell well. High school-based games, perhaps not so much. But while we Bully fans hold out increasingly faint but dogged hope for a sequel, I also have hope that we’ll get to play more smaller games like Surviving High School.

So many of my favourite movies and TV shows take place in or around high schools, from Veronica Mars to Friday Night Lights. But the thing is, high school stories are rarely actually about high school. They’re about bucking authority and making friends, about adventure and family, about mysteries and self-exploration. In other words, they’re about life.

High School sucked. And yet I find that I want to go back, even if it’s just in a video game.


The Cheapest NBN 1000 Plans

Looking to bump up your internet connection and save a few bucks? Here are the cheapest plans available.

At Kotaku, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. We have affiliate and advertising partnerships, which means we may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. BTW – prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.

Comments


19 responses to “High School Sucked. Can We Please Have More Games About It?”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *