Bully Kissing Video: The Fallout
Surely the developers at Rockstar games knew when they included the ability to kiss boys in Bully that someone would eventually discover it. Some of The comments I’ve seen from around the interwebs on this story have ranged from “Right on, that’s great!” to “You know, that’s actually just a bug.” to the inevitable hate mongering. There have also been plenty of comments of the “Why do those gay guys have to make everything gay?” variety.
Perhaps these people should be asking these questions to Rockstar’s developers. It’s not like we went in, hacked the game and recorded new voiceovers. This was obviously a choice on the developer’s part to include such content. It is clearly NOT a bug since there was obviously dialogue recorded for these sequences, and you have your choice of four or five different boys on which to lay the mack down. I applaud Rockstar’s ballsy-ness in actually including the free will to decide who you want to kiss to get your health back. And true to life, not every boy will want to lock lips with you.
I do think though, that this raises some important questions, not the least of which is: Was this content an homage to the real choices we get to make in life, or merely another “Hot Coffee” type stunt to stir the pot and boost sales?
Fruit Brute
Posted to Video Games on 23 October 2006
· Comments (13)
Other stuff like this: boys kissing, bully, gay, jimmy hopkins, rockstar games
Name: Dave
“Was this content an homage to the real choices we get to make in life, or merely another “Hot Coffee” type stunt to stir the pot and boost sales?”
For Rockstar, I don’t think there’s ever a difference between the two.
K
Well, they were crafty enough to get free advertising out of Jack Thompson while simultaneously making him look like a jackass.
So I’d say it’b both reasons.
I can hear those right wing religious nuts now:
“This is just another example of gays pushing the homosexual agenda to make our children gay”
Found this at Gamespot:
Thompson addressed ESRB president Patricia Vance in an e-mail he claimed to have sent to “every major news organization in America and the UK,” as well as a host of lawmakers and industry representatives.
“Dear Ms. Vance,” Thompson wrote, “We just found gay sexual content in Bully, as Jimmy Hopkins makes out with another male student. Good luck with your ‘Teen’ rating now, Patty.”
Man, what a killjoy. If you comment on that article, be sure to show us some love!
How does gay content vs. straight content require a higher rating? I guess we should be thankful we have people to remind us how we’re normal and they’re the ones who need to be fixed.
Good point Steven and I have to agree with KevinQ..
If that kind of argument is going to be used by Thmpson or whoever, it brings up the ncessary question
Are we considered equals? Do they still view gay as abnormal?
If they do, we havent gone far at all
It’s just a kiss, and from the clip it did not seem like the situation was exploited. They could have totally made the situation over the top and made fun of homosexuality; But it genuinely seemed like a tender moment.
Suddenly I feel like buying 10 copies of Bully and giving them out for Christmas. Thanks Jack Thompson for the idea!
This does not seem like a publicity stunt to me! Just good ol’ viral marketing (With a little boy-on-boy action on the side!). Across the nets’ I’ve seen hundreds and hundreds of (mostly) positive comments. Rockstar has done it again, and quite well, might I add.. :P
At Tufas, I assume that by many it is more explicit/abnormal.
The internet at my high school allows full access to dating websites, even ones with clearly explicit heterosexual content, but as soon as I tried to go to a website where clean homosexual content was featured, it was blocked.
Made it really hard to right that paper on furries when half of my sources were blocked. Thankfully Gaygamer.net has avoided being blocked.
Silver R. Wolfe:
“Made it really hard to right that paper on furries when half of my sources were blocked.”
What’s a “furry”?
@Militant Agnostic
Here’s what wikipedia says on it. :3
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furry_fandom
Can he kiss that wrestler? Yum!
Seriously though…I imagine it HAS to have some “stunt” reasoning, otherwise why do it? I mean, I love that kind of content, but it will get a lot of hate mail.
Either way, I think it’s cool because the actual content is pretty benign and not degrading to gay men. It also just makes sense..I mean it IS a boarding school!
why did “they” noticed just bully and completely forgot about sims or singles… also in those games u can let two boys kiss each other… and in the sims 2 u can even marry a boy (i am italian and here u can’t get a homosexual marriage sigh!!)