This week sees thousands of children throughout the country wake up and realise with stark horror that the summer holidays are over and school beckons.
Most adults can remember the sudden system shock of these mornings; the alarm going off unreasonably early, the shivering cold of the bathroom, the family gathered in stony silence around the table, munching forlornly on soggy toast. Games such as Resident Evil or Silent Hill have conjured few horrors that compare with entering a new classroom and meeting an unfamiliar teacher who may or may not prove to be an authoritarian sociopath.
This sense of fear and loathing was perhaps why, when my dad used to get home from work and find me watching Grange Hill, he would always tut and say ‘haven’t you had enough of school?’. But of course, for several generations of kids in the UK, Grange Hill was our way of confronting and processing the horrors of secondary education. Tucker was our mate. Zammo was our cautionary fable.
Children have a need to place their lives in context, and to experience and experiment with the boundaries put in front of them – this is why so much kids and young adult fiction is based in schools, from Malory Towers to Hogwarts, from Degrassi High to Sunnydale. The culture and social systems of schools are what we know and understand at that age, so to see them tested, bested and ridiculed by clever, funny pupils is deeply cathartic.
Inputs, mechanics and dynamics
So why have there been so few major video games based in schools? For many years children and teenagers were the absolute target demographic of the industry – why did it not look at the books, television and movies aimed at this market and seek to get in on the action?
Partly it’s about inputs and mechanics. Mainstream games throughout the history of the medium have largely been about traversal and shooting stuff, because these elements make sense when the user interface is a box with a stick and a couple of buttons.
School fiction tends to be about social dynamics – the interplay between different groups of pupils or between pupils and teachers – and these elements are tricky to simulate in a video game. Also, schools are very familiar, self-contained environments pupils very quickly learn to navigate, so you lose the sense of progress and exploration that fantasy adventures provide. Successful video games often provide escapist fantasies, so an epic quest in which you have to get from the sports hall to the maths block by 11am or risk going on report perhaps doesn’t produce the right level of emotional stimulus.
It’s a shame, because there have been notable examples. The classic Spectrum and Commodore 64 title Skool Daze put you in the role of a young pupil at a large comprehensive, who must steal his report card from a safe in the staff room. But the appeal of the real game was just wandering around the simple 2D school building, interacting with other characters, including high school archetypes like the swot, the bully and the tearaway.
The developers David and Helen Reidy understood the anarchic appeal of user-generated content, and so made all the teacher names customisable; if you wanted to be pursued around the building by Mr Shitface you could be. Skool Daze also let you write on the blackboards and randomly punch other students – and these elements proved incredibly therapeutic. Similarly, the same year also saw the release of the arcade game Mikie, by Japanese publisher Konami, which had you navigating a series of school rooms, picking up love hearts from your girlfriend, while avoiding or – much more satisfyingly – headbutting teachers.
Later, the massively underrated game Bully from Grand Theft Auto creator Rockstar, gave you a much more complex and grownup school environment to explore and subvert. This time the protagonist, Jimmy Hopkins, existed in a huge open world, populated by a fascinating variety of pupils, teachers, secrets and sub-quests. You could go on dates, you could let off fire extinguishers, you could manufacture stink bombs in the chemistry lab – but the main aim was to rise up through the social ranks of the school, out-bullying, or out-thinking the various thugs and gangs, in a kind of young adult take on the GTA series. Again, the adventure provided catharsis, presenting a strict school environment that you could subvert without any real-world comeback.
School games have been more common in Japan, where dozens of school-based manga and anime have provided useful source material. The Persona series of role-playing games and the Tokimeki Memorial dating sims both use school settings to explore complex pupil relationships, the former brilliantly combining the daily grind of school with demonic invasions and super powers, in a manner reminiscent of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series.
Primed for a comeback?
Recently, mainstream video games have started to explore more subtle and authentic narrative ideas, so perhaps we’re heading into a renaissance for school-based adventures. The brilliant Life is Strange, which has a prequel launching this week, brings real drama and anxiety into its tale of a photography student, Max Caulfield, who discovers she has the power to rewind time and must use it to save her town from a coming storm. The game cleverly subverts the archetypal characters of school fiction, and by contrasting the epic disaster narrative with the more subtle dramas of suicide, emotional abuse and burgeoning sexuality, it creates something truly involving and immersive.
School is where we’re created as social beings, it sets a path for us as functioning (or non-functioning) adults. Even into old age, when stress hits, it often feeds into our dreams as exam anxiety nightmares – we find ourselves in cold school halls looking at questions that don’t make sense, or looking down to realise we’re naked. The subtle terror of being in a closed environment, living to a strict timetable, and surrounded by unreadable people, never really leaves us. Every moment in our school lives there are is a ‘what if’ scenario waiting to happen. What if I ask that boy out? What if I take art instead of chemistry? What if I fail? Everything feels perilous and loaded.
To find this idea taken to its logical conclusion, it’s worth checking out the Korean game White Day, first released in 2001, but recently remade and only just translated to English. Here, a pupil finds himself trapped in a school with a supernatural history, interacting with weird pupils and monstrous teaching staff, trying to find an exit. The game renders into physical reality the idea that every school is inhabited by the ghosts of those who have wandered the corridors before us, and that there is something constrictive and overpowering about these authoritarian spaces.
Some people are calling it the most terrifying survival horror experience since the original titles of the PlayStation era. But if any game ever gets close to the terror of waking up on the first day of school after the summer holidays are over, those with timid dispositions should give it a very wide berth indeed.
