27

CHANGING THE GAME ON BULLYING

ABBEY PERL

At first, when I became a gamer, I wasn’t so different from a lot of the other kids who are drawn to online gaming. A lot of us know what it feels like to be bullied, picked on, teased, or even harassed. Bullies are pretty predictable with the things they target about you—including whatever your perceived weakness or strength might be, how you look, talk, or walk, where you live, how much money your family has, or who your friends are or aren’t.

Bullying has been a part of my life ever since I can remember. No matter where I went, it seemed like I never had a safe space to go. The only place where I could feel comfortable—and relieved—was in the world of online gaming. Whenever I played online video games, I felt at ease, knowing my fellow gamers and I had a lot in common. They were my friends who cared for me and loved playing as much as I did. But the more I played, the more I began to detect the online version of bullying.

How did that work? Well, most of the video games I play have chat options—either voice chat or text chat. This helps smoothly coordinate team-oriented games. Unfortunately, it’s this part of gaming culture that gives rise to the same kind of bullying that can happen on the playground, in the halls of school, or on the street. If you’re good at the game or you’re different from other players—watch out. Comments, digs, and questions can become unavoidable if for some reason you find yourself the center of attention.

How old are you? Where do you live? What do your parents do?

As anonymous or low-profile as I try to be, eventually I’m thrust into the spotlight—not because I want to be there but because my fellow gamers realize that, yeah, I’m different from them.

Oh. Yeah. Got it …

Are you a girl?!

It is a little rare to find a girl playing video games, especially the few of us who have the courage to be proud of who we are. In the world of online gaming, though, that immediately changes how you are treated. Once my gender was exposed, the next thing I knew, even more inappropriate questions started to come up—including questions about my relationship status. You would think it would have stopped there, but nope. Once it was out there, I was treated differently all because of my gender.

You’d think that this wouldn’t happen with gamers, a lot of whom were bullied themselves, but in a world that’s unsupervised, where there are no rules and where it’s easy to do and say things without being identified, it happens often that former victims of bullying turn into bullies.

Finally, I came to a crossroad after a very scary incident, when someone tracked down my home address along with the names of my parents, and posted the info online for everyone to see. It made me feel uncomfortable and unsafe.

This was a breaking point for me. After dragging myself through pain and suffering, I decided to make a change. Not just for me, but for all the gamers out there who were being made to feel unsafe while doing something they otherwise loved.

In a reality check moment, I thought long and hard and realized, I had a choice: Leave the game, or change the game.

My answer was easy. No way was I going to be pushed into leaving. So my next question was to figure out what I could do to promote change in my online and offline communities.

Hmm. That’s when it hit me:

Why not start a movement?

As simple as it sounds, I wanted to be different from other movements and organizations. I wanted to connect and relate to my peers in a way that would attract them to want to do more. After months of hard work and planning, my organization emerged to pave the way for kindness and compassion among all.

Kind Mind Collective—originally Diverse Gaming Coalition—provides kindness curriculum to students and adults across the country. As an organization, we do it this way to get people involved in the movement, without preaching or lecturing but still getting them to think about the values and codes of behavior they might not have considered before. In a space where we all have so much content and so many voices grabbing for attention, it’s important to find a way to give people reasons to relate and want to be a part of what you’re doing. And we are always coming up with new and exciting ways to do that.

You know I love video games, right, Abbey? I love your story. I love how you took your own pain and experiences and channeled them into creating a world in which you—and so many others—could feel safe. I’ve also been confronted with the question of leaving the game or changing the game, and I’m grateful you and I both chose to change it. For more resources on how to combat online harassment, check out HeartMob or Kind Mind Collective.

Our recent project involves an antibullying comic book that follows Asher, the main character, whose gender is deliberately nonbinary and who is a person of color—two aspects of identity increasingly subjected to bullying these days. With this comic, we hope to tackle such issues that need more attention while promoting mental health, self-care and, most important, kindness.

Overall, I am proud of where I have come since I was a victim of bullying. Unfortunately, bullying does affect people every day. The nonprofit StopBullying.gov asserts that kids who are bullied can feel like they are different, powerless, unpopular, and alone. My feeling is that we need to come together and be stronger than the bullies. Never let a bully drag you down from what you love doing most, because that means the bad guys win. Don’t let them stop you from pushing yourself to do what can fundamentally change the game—and the world.