I suck at LoL (League of Legends).
My friends play it a lot, and one guy in particular really tried coaching me for a while so that I could learn the nuances that I had missed over the decades since it was first released. Mostly I just ended up disappointing him, but there was something that he said that I remember well, because I thought it was a pretty good metaphore for life.
You dont need to be the strongest player to be useful in combat. You just need to be able to deal enough damage, to deter them from attacking in the first place.
A strategy in LoL is to 'poke' the enemy, which is to launch small attacks against an enemy, knowing that it wont be enough to do serious damage. You are trying to either, goad them into attacking you (and hopefully you have some friends nearby, waiting in the bushes), or you are trying to chip away at their health slowly, so that they don't realise how low their hit points are actually getting. Then you can dive in for a finisher attack before they know which way is up.
It's in the poke that my friend's wisdom comes in. If you make a poke expensive, meaning, if you trade damage with your opponent, instead of just letting them poke down your hit points without resistance, then they will be less likely to do it. If every time they try to fire a shot at you, you also fire one back, then their very strategy no longer works. They arent chipping away at your health so that can dive in to finish you off. Their health is also dropping, which now opens them up to the same possibility. No good for them.
Immediately, this got me thinking to bullying.
I used to find it strange, when I was a child, that people talked so much shit. There was an art to hurling insults before a fight, and I never understood it. If you're going to throw a punch, surely that says all they need to know? However, something that I had overlooked was what causes some arguments to collapse into fighting, and what other times allows both parties to just... walk away from each other.
-- I should quickly clarify here that I am specifically talking about schoolyard bullying, in an area where fights were common - I'm not suggesting that throwing hands is always a more logical solution to a verbal disagreement with someone. --
The insults were a show of your dedication to the cause. If you were willing to make yourself look stupid, angrily comparing someone's mum to this or that animal whilst trying to keep a straight face, and fumbling punch lines in bad jokes while the audience makes fun of you, then perhaps you were serious enough to commit to the physical actions, too. Remaining quiet indicated that you weren't interested in the confrontation, which usually also means you wouldn't fight back, if the fighting started.
All the insults and strange displays of behaviour were attempts to make the pokes expensive, because ultimately, they weren't strong enough to fight.
So I guess what I'm saying is, if you dont want to be bullied at school, play some League of Legends, and start talking more shit.
- Aluca Sol 