Bully, a video game produced by Rockstar Games, was first greeted by panic and protest by many organizations. Jack Thompson, an infamous anti-video game activist, went as far as to compare the game to Columbine. Bully made both the Yahoo! list of Top 10 controversial games, and PlayStation Magazine’s Top 10 Games of 2006. Lawsuits were filed in order to prevent the sale of the game.

Two years after the original game went on sale, an extended version titled Bully: Scholarship Edition was released, and this time around, it was greeted with praise, not subpoenas.

The game follows the story of Jimmy Hopkins, a boy from a family with a re-marrying mother and an absent father, who ends up at Bullworth Academy, a no-nonsense private school teeming with bullies in every corner.

Daniel Moon picked the game up after it went on sale. He doesn’t believe it warranted the controversial press that accompanied its release. You are not required to be a bully in the game, he said, it’s a choice for the player to make.

“[However], the content in the game does require violence,” he added, “because, well, it’s a Rockstar game.”

Rockstar is best known for the Grand Theft Auto games.

As Jimmy, you can make friends, though you’ll most likely make enemies, go to class – or if you don’t, try to avoid the consequences – and rise through the social ranks of the school, occasionally bullying, and occasionally helping others.

Bully contains school violence and suggestive themes, but it is a far cry from Columbine, or any extraordinary school violence. Jimmy does have a slingshot, but the only gun in the game shoots potatoes. Everything is non-lethal, though it could get gross, provided stink bombs and itching powder are involved.

Set before the time of cell phones and cyberbullying, Bully brings the player back to the time when the gym locker rooms were the most dangerous place to be, and the library was a haven. Though the methods are primitive, it paints bullying as a social tool, something bullies use to gain power in their social circles.

In the game, Jimmy is always at odds with Gary, a boy that pretends to be his friend, but begins to sabotage him, trying to get him expelled.

“There can be a true friendship and then in order to ‘keep’ that friendship, you have one person begin to control the other,” said Kevin Epling, an anti-bullying activist, “This then becomes a normal thing as one person exerts their authority over the other person.”

Relying on school stereotypes and cliques, Bully nonetheless treats bullying as a multi-dimensional issue, focusing the story on both the victims and bullies.

According to Moon, the game doesn’t go far enough if it is intended to show a realistic picture of bullying.

“It lacks the emotional aspect of feeling like everything is going wrong,” he said, “The character, despite getting into bullied positions, has that angst and arrogance to drive him. Most bullied victims don’t.”

MSNBC reports that the “Cooling Off” law would shut down games played by people under 16 after two hours of play.

Gamers would be able to log in one more time during that 24-hour period, but only after 10 minutes of rest.

This proposed law, and a law passed in November that forbids online gaming by children under 16 from midnight to 6 a.m., are “to prevent school bullying and suicides,” MSNBC reports.

Andrew, 16 and in 10th grade, plays Minecraft at least an hour every day, usually after school. He spends his time building virtual castles and complex machinery in a game that combines the creative power of building blocks and the role-playing element of a video game. Most of the time, he and his friends play on servers where they are protected from griefers.

A griefer is a bully in the world of online games. Griefers don’t play by the rules and attempt to cause as much distress and discomfort for other players as possible.

In Minecraft, griefers go after the creations of other players.

“I’ve seen seven hours of work get completely destroyed,” Andrew said.

Though many servers have griefer protections in place, those protections sometimes get in the way of regular players, Andrew said. Sometimes, playing against a griefer can be fun, since it becomes a competition and the game suddenly has a villain. Other times, griefers trick their way into becoming administrators of a server and destroying everything the players have built, which could waste weeks of work.

Andrew admits to having griefed himself. It can be fun, he said.

Minecraft players can become quite attached to their creations, especially as it takes many days, sometimes months, to create particularly complex or large structures.

These creations are important to the players, even though they are virtual, Andrew said. Though it’s not quite on the same level as his real-life possessions, he, and other Minecraft players, are upset when their hard work is destroyed.

According to Mike Ambinder, an experimental psychologist at Valve Software in Bellevue, WA, many people get pleasure from griefing others, and it often becomes a competition to see who can cause the most chaos.

Griefing can be very similar to bullying, as Andrew and Ambinder attest.

“The mob mentality is a phenomenon that has been extensively studied and definitely seems to be at play here,” Ambinder said.

The more players are engaged in destructive behavior, the more likely others are to join in.

One of Andrew's Minecraft creations.

“When people don’t know each other personally, that will never happen,” Andrew said, referring to the server he and his friends run, but he admits that things are probably different on large, public servers.

There here have been griefing concerns in a bigger game. Recently, World of Warcraft and the company that produces it, Blizzard, have come under fire for being lax on cyberbullying.

World of Warcraft forums are full of players complaining that they have been repeatedly harassed, to the point where they’ve quit the game. Despite cyberbullying being against Blizzard’s terms of use, it is tough to report and punish the bullies. The game’s enormous player base –- more than 10 million subscribers in 2011 -– makes strict control difficult.

Cyberbullying is recognized as a legitimate threat on social networks, but video games are often overlooked as battlegrounds for the same kind of behavior. One World of Warcraft player complained on the forums that a group of players was harassing people by impersonating players and bothering others, bringing blame on their targets. This is similar to Facebook cyberbullying when high school students create fake profiles of fellow students. They then post humiliating information about them, or harass others under their assumed name.

Controlling and preventing griefing is difficult. In World of Warcraft, moderators attempt to ban bullies, but they can’t get them all, because there are so many players. Minecraft servers can be protected against griefers, but the safeguards interfere with legitimate play, Andrew said.

Not all Minecraft servers are protected from griefers.

Minecraft allows you to interact with animals.

“I think it should be individually up to every server or person,” Andrew said.

Even if the server has anti-griefer measures, truly determined players will download modifications to the game that allow them to bypass server protections.

“Research –- our own and that done by psychologists ‘in the wild’ -– seems to confirm that incentivizing positive behavior is stronger and leads to longer-lasting effects than punishing negative behavior,” Ambinder said.

At the end of the day, griefing hurts video games and gamers, Ambinder said, and Valve is hard at work trying to discourage it.

As for Andrew, he will continue building and protecting his creations, hidden away on a private server.