My husband and I weren’t sure what started the bullying. Our son’s ADHD? Being adopted? Was it because he’d stood up to the bully who called his Black friend a “slave” and demanded he carry his cello? Our son had faced racism early—when a drunk white guy demanded his tiny 6-year-old sister return to China, where we’d adopted her. Luke stood up for her too. Whatever caused the bullying, what matters most was how he finally conquered it.

Luke started playing Lego Star Wars at age 5. I objected to the violence, but when Luke Skywalker (whom we’d named our son after) got blown up, his dad said it was only little Lego pieces flying apart. Years later it was Halo with vivid images of people getting shot, which bothered me, despite the music being better than I’d heard in any video game. As a professional musician, I appreciated that. And since our son was a talented violinist, I thought that hearing fully orchestrated gaming music might inspire his own playing. And I hoped he would spend less time gaming and more time practicing the violin. There’s substantial evidence behind what music study can do for the brain.

But more important than whether our son was gaming or practicing the violin, the sad truth was that on an almost daily basis, Luke was thrown against lockers, backpack ripped off his shoulders, and called every name not fit to print. Gaming was the only world where he had some control. We let him play but also enrolled him in tae kwon do.

His dad started taking him to PAX East, where Luke hooked up with some indie gamers and began beta-testing their video games. One company, Novelline.net (originally Tenwall Creatives), was so grateful for Luke’s enthusiasm and help that when they developed a new game, Bleak, they inserted our son into it as an easter egg. Players could find his name written on a monument: For luke—a young sorcerer whose bright eyes and unwavering support inspired worlds. Needless to say, Luke was thrilled.

“It was inspiring, you know, to be commemorated in something permanent that everyone can see,” Luke says. “While beta-testing Bleak, I learned a lot about the creative design process and the different elements of game development that go into making a game. It made me think, ‘This is something I may actually want to do with my life.’”

After he got his black belt, and after years of holding back as he’d been taught to do at his dojo, Luke finally gave his bully a roundhouse kick that knocked him to the ground. Then he walked out of sixth grade and never went back. “I shouldn’t have to defend myself in order to go to school,” he said at the time. We agreed and home-schooled him for the last six weeks of the school year. For seventh grade, we transferred him to a private school that had zero tolerance for bullying. But he got sick of wearing a jacket and tie to an all-boys school, so we sent him back to a different public school. After graduating from eighth grade, he started ninth at his fourth new school, the local high school.

“It felt like I didn’t have a home in terms of a social place,” Luke says. “Honestly, it was quite lonely. I had the same place to come home to, but at school it was always new people, and I didn’t have my own group of friends. It was always changing. It wasn’t easy to get away from the bullies. It was less of a choice and more of an inevitability of the school day. The bullying stopped after seventh grade. In high school, at 6'3" I no longer got bullied, but there was a rolling effect from what happened. Entering high school, everyone already had their own clique from middle school. Everyone said, ‘Meet some new friends,’ but I was an outcast. Others had established social status. I had a rep of being bullied, so I was marked as cursed.

“People knew my story through one source or another, and I was put on an isolated iceberg. With new schools, I definitely welcomed the new start, but with ADHD comes tremendous social difficulty. And because I was bullied, I didn’t learn the social skills that most kids get, which caused me to be viewed as weird, loud, annoying, and disruptive. I made one friend during junior year whom I met in biology. Matt had moved here from France, so there was no history of my getting bullied for him. But years later, after we had both gone to college, Matt said ‘Yeah, I used to think you were fucking annoying. You used to talk all the goddamned time. Eventually I realized, this guy actually has some interesting things to say.’ Our friendship continues to this day.”

Luke has fast-twitch muscles and lightning-quick reaction time. It’s what made him good at tae kwon do, playing the violin, and gaming. It also made him a good catcher in baseball, where he got the chance during the summer after sixth grade to tag out his fourth-grade bully at home plate. One aspect of ADHD is hyper-focus. Luke could play Lego Star Wars and Super Paper Mario for hours on end, his hands never leaving the remote, his concentration fixed on the screen.

Eventually, Luke started gaming with strangers online. That worried me. We had hoped he would make more IRL friends, but his rep of being bullied followed him like a dark shadow. I’d read that online bullying is real and can be just as damaging as in-person bullying. A 2017 article from the BBC quotes a 16-year-old gamer: "If you're going to school every day and you're being bullied in school, you want to go home to your computer to escape," he says. "So if you're getting more abuse thrown at you, it's going to put you off doing anything social—it has for a lot of people I know, me included.”

Despite my worries, Luke’s online gaming experience turned out to be the opposite of his IRL encounters. Luke met people who had no preconceived notions about him, and his online social world grew. My husband, Keith, commented on this: “IRL friend groups can be limited to a locality. That was the case with Luke in high school, where it was hard to escape his reputation. But online you have the ability to build your own worlds and populate them with friends from all over the world. The ability to break out of the ‘local’ bullying seems to be a key piece to online friendships. Even if there are online bullies, you can always escape them and start over with a clean slate.”

While he was online, we heard Luke laughing a lot, swearing a lot (in the way gamers do), and he just seemed happy. So we let him play. We also hovered nearby for hours until he finished his homework.

“In online gaming spaces, I felt 100 percent more welcome,” Luke says. “When you’re playing a game online with someone, no one gives a fuck what you look like. They don’t care about your race, if you’re tall, if you’re scrawny. The only thing they care about is how well you play the game. And that’s only in competitive games. For cooperative games like Worlds Adrift (one that I played with my lifelong friend Aaron, which very sadly got canceled), GTFO, Destiny 2, VR Chat, and Dungeons and Dragons, people go out of their way to be welcoming and try to introduce people into the community. When you meet people online, you play the game. But there’s also this part of gaming where you chat online. There are people I’ll invite to hang out with me, and then there are my friends, my few close friends.” 

Luke started streaming on Twitch (twitch.tv/Zer0Gravity42). He was good at it. Viewers followed him, and he started hanging out with local high school boys gaming online. A few came over to our place to play. Our son had a VR headset, and lots of them wanted to try it. He got a kick out of sharing his setup and teaching friends how to play Beat Saber.

When it came time to choose a college, Luke was adamant—he wanted to learn to design and create his own video games. We sent him to George Mason University for a summer video game development course so he could find out if he was serious about it, and he developed his first game there. He formed fast friendships with the other student game developers, and when he returned to high school his senior year, he started the first-ever esports club. Overnight it grew to be the biggest club at his high school. Eventually, we found a college with a highly regarded video game development program and a good student orchestra—Rochester Institute of Technology. Freshman year was foreshortened because of the pandemic, and he returned home to take the rest of his courses online.

During quarantine, while the rest of us struggled with being stuck at home and staring at screens, Luke was a natural at it. He formed online relationships instantly through gaming, started streaming again, and even got into a long-distance online relationship, one where they eventually closed the distance. To me, the parent who had been the most afraid of our son’s gaming and online friendships, he proved how wrong I’d been.

It wasn’t as if there weren’t still gamer bullies online—“toxic gamers” are everywhere. But Luke’s history of getting bullied taught him not to engage, and his hyper-focus kept him centered on the game itself. “Bullies online can’t actually do anything to you,” Luke says. “It’s trash-talking kids who have nowhere else to vent their frustration. People want this psychological sense of power that comes from belittling someone else. Eventually, I just started feeling sorry for them.”

Luke returned to campus with social confidence that many of his college peers had lost during the pandemic. He wants to finish college with his game design and development degree to achieve his lifetime ambitions. “My dream is to create a game that changes the way someone looks at life,” Luke says. “I realize it’s a big dream, but I think I can eventually get there.”

The very thing I’d feared is exactly what helped Luke the most. Video gaming not only gave Luke the means to conquer his history of bullying, it helped him discover his future, and pursue it.

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