In reality, the well-designed PlayStation 2 title from Rockstar Games is closer to a video game version of the movie "My Bodyguard," with fewer killings (none) than the typical episode of "Murder, She Wrote."
While it has many structural similarities to Rockstar's most notorious title, Bully is, at worst, Grand Theft Auto with misdemeanors. And it exposes the ridiculousness in much of the hysteria surrounding video games, which keep pulling a bigger share of the entertainment dollar but are still misunderstood by a large segment of the public and the media.
There is no blood in Bully, and the most menacing weapon I could get my hands on was a baseball bat. Jimmy can't kill people, and there was less sex talk during the eight hours that I played than the typical 22-minute episode of "The Golden Girls." The biggest knock against Bully is the constant fistfights. (At approximately the halfway point, I had engaged in more than 400.) But the writers are pretty careful to make sure that almost everyone who gets a beat down pretty much deserves it.
The furor that surrounded Bully in recent months highlights the stupidity of trying to ban a game that no one has actually seen.
Even if you agree that video games are too violent, focusing energy on Bully is like trying to raid a crack house and accidentally smashing in the door of the doughnut franchise across the street.