I was going to save this for the Sunday Papers next week, but after Jim and I have a chat, I figure it deserves to talked about all on its lonesome. Julian Dibbell writes an extensive piece for Wired on Griefing, the communities that support it and similar malarkies.
“Pwnage, zerging, phat lewts — online gaming has birthed a rich lexicon. But none, perhaps, deserves our attention as much as the notion of the griefer. Broadly speaking, a griefer is an online version of the spoilsport — someone who takes pleasure in shattering the world of play itself. Not that griefers don’t like online games. It’s just that what they most enjoy about those games is making other players not enjoy them. They are corpse campers, noob baiters, kill stealers, ninja looters. Their work is complete when the victims log off in a huff.”
Much is stuff you’ll almost certainly know if you’ve been following online life, but the interest is in the details. Of particular note is the closing vignette with SA-head man Kyanka, expressing how blessedly untouched he is by online vilification. What it made me think of is the old thought that there really are two sorts of people online – those who are capable of empathy (and, indeed, sympathy) through the intermediary of an electronic channel, and those who simply aren’t. What the anecdote neatly illustrates is that actually works both ways.
Zeno, how exactly do they deserve it from enjoying their hobby? What’s the big deal to anyone else, unless their interests directly impinge on yours in a majorly negative fashion? If people want to dress up and role play as sexy chipmunks in a virtual world, who but the truly lifeless really gives a stuff?
So, years ago, bored on a night like this, I decided to try out some free game or other. I picked, completely at random, the current MMO on free trial, There.
I fired it up, and came into a bleak gamespace, with unhelpful hints about how to move about. I tried a few basic commands, and a few ways to move, and failed. Some improbable-looking dude came past on some flying skateboard and made a remark to his buddies “Hey check out the n00b!”
So I logged out, and uninstalled that turd of an online-shopping mall nightmare I never wanted to have on my hard drive anyway.
That guy wasn’t a griefer; he was a “well socialized member of the online community.”
That’s the spark that drives griefers. Our real-world social order has its misfits, its outcasts who congregate in the diverse urban centers and flee the homogeneous villages. And, yeah, those same reasons drive the sociopaths to the same circles.
Now these real-world misfits and outcasts (and sociopaths) create an online world, with an online social order, and a value system that gives them social standing. And what happens? We get misfits, outcasts and sociopaths in the virtual worlds!
So, just as in the real world, griefers are a complex lot, and I hesitate to group them all together.
Griefers are the game equivalent of the forum troll. Many are adolescent males, with testosterone poisoning and socialization issues (I had my TF2 “voice” volume turned all the way down for months because some kids thought blowing in the mic was cool). But the better ones seem to have different goals than getting people to quit. After all, it’s a poor parasite that kills the host quickly.
First off, the griefer justifies his (almost always a he) actions by pointing to the offensiveness or inaccessibility of the social order. He’s never going to be the 10,000+ forum post champion guild leader with tons of loot. Come to think of it, that’s not what he values either. And his goal is to point to the absurdity of it all. Basically, the Griefer denies the core values on which the society is built.
Second, the griefer’s goal is not to make the target quit, but to make the target grossly transgress the rules of the game. Getting the other guy to quit the game is weak tea. If that other guy has built her or his core identity around the game, s/he’ll likely break the rules before then (hence the “death threats” as a badge of honor).
The griefer has less invested in the game and targets those who have the most sunk in to the social value associated with the game. Like those at the top of the “social order”, the griefer works by exploiting the disconnect between the game rules and the rules of the society built around the game. Unlike those “bosses”, the griefer works purely to destroy.
So I think of There, and the memory of it makes me wish I had stuck around purely to make other people miserable. The moral of the story: even the marginalized can have their own communities online, but they will always be challenged by the people they marginalize (and 13-year-old boys).
And, lest someone think this is a paean to griefing: the same phenomenon occurs in the real world. Just look at any number of acts of religious antagonism performed by extreme Christian groups in the US in the past couple of years. Hate is energy too, and people feed on it.
@Dinger: If we’re going to look at it this way, then, are we going to consider it a legit position to say “I support hate crimes because they help force the evolution of law enforcement?”
“If they didn’t want me to shoot that [insert slur of choice here]. then they wouldn’t've given me a gun, would they?”
[Edit: added for elaboration:
The issue is not of satire. It's not of pointing out the silliness of it all. Because that's not griefing. I don't play a lot of, say, CounterStrike, because I think that as a shooter, it's pretty silly. And that there are a lot of people that take their ability to put a little reticle on top of another person's head much, much to seriously.
But while the feeling of alienation is natural, the proper - and even most basic - response is "fuck this, I'm going to go do something else." At what point do you say "I don't like what they're doing, I think it's silly, so I'm going to actively attempt to prevent him from deriving any pleasure from the activity."
Whether it's a proper hate crime, a youth gang, or just some jerk on the internet, it's the same sort of behavior. And the thing that's so interesting is not that it happens, but that there's so much support for it. That a good, solid portion of the internet doesn't see too much wrong with going and screwing with all the furries on SecondLIfe.
Nobody just seems to extrapolate back to how that's the same thing as no seeing anything wrong with getting your neighbors together and breaking down the door and beating half to death the gay man that lives down the hall.[/edit]
I think there’s a difference between concocting elaborate pranks with the primary goal of making people laugh (at the cost of some people’s irritation) and actively trying to ruin the game experience for anyone, and it’s odd to me that people seem to lump the two together under the same term most of the time.
How would you have them distinguish it exactly? What’s the difference beyond the range of the target? Is targeting a minority, an individual, or group any worse or better than targeting everyone? Or is it a case that’s it’s acceptable as long as it’s not interfering with you?
Well Noc, the point I was trying to convey is that often, the repulsive aspects of griefing are joined with something attractive, unlike, to take your example, gay bashing.
It could be, as Malkav suggests, that we’re simply confusing pranksters and assholes. But I doubt it, and my reason is that a “good griefer” (henceforth a “Charlie Brown” griefer, and by “good”, I mean “effective”, not in any ethical sense) pulls the pranks to make the victim reveal just how seriously he or she takes the game (on MMO flight sims, this was often done by, after destroying the player’s aircraft and forcing a bailout, shooting the parachute, and thereby violating some unwritten “gentleman’s code”)). On the other hand, a “Lucy” griefer makes social inferiors suffer for the benefits it gives in the community (padding your score by camping n00bs, for example). The assholes are part of the dominant social order, and the pranksters are out of it. (Of course, there are the untouchables, like the morons blowing on the microphone, but that’s another story…)
Let’s take a controversial example, the WoW funeral that was posted on YouTube. At the heart was something serious: a real person really died. This person was part of an online WoW community, and evidently a person of status therein. So they hold a funeral.
Stop for a second. Funerals aren’t rites of passage for the person being celebrated. They are defining acts of a community. They reify at a given moment the social order, and by extension, the political one (for an extreme example, see many high-profile funerals in the Middle East these days).
So, you have participants in the game who are not members of the community, or who are marginalized ones. And they come and raise trouble at a high-profile funeral? Gee, that doesn’t happen in the real world, ever. To make things worse, they’re given additional license since the “community” has limited sanctioning power.
Did I find the results entertaining? Not particularly. But I’ve seen MMO funeral griefing for a decade now, and what happens, as well as the uproar it causes, is pretty much predictable.
Alright, so to return to the “gay bashing” example. “Gay Bashing” is a classic case of repressing a minority group. “Lucy” griefers attack minority groups in online communities, and they don’t get penalized for it; in fact, they do it for the rewards. “Charlie Browns” go after the player hegemony. They won’t try to “run the furries out of town”, just irritate them by mocking their plush utopia, and hopefully irritate them into spouting some self-righteous nonsense, or better yet, into making death threats. It’s not the same thing as intimidating them into silence at all. So, no, I don’t buy your slippery slope argument.
An area to organize a community (relatively) free of censure and (somewhat) emboldened by semi-anonymity carries with it the price that those who oppose your group, whether by choice or compulsion, are also relatively free of censure and emboldened by semi-anonymity. It’s the price of freedom; don’t feed the trolls.
@Meat Circus:
My childhood neuroses have nothing to do with it. Well, maybe a bit. I’ve grown tired of and allergic to assholes over the years.
On to your arguments, which really are non arguments You’re mixing up things here any way you like. I’ve never said, they don’t understand the fundamental mechanics of the game itself. Of course they have to, in order to fully exploit it. But they don’t understand the people playing it and why they do it, they find it ridiculous and then set out to destroy this experience for them.
Exploiting the rules of a game for your own amusement and in the process destroying the fun for others is NOT the exact opposite of beeing a bully.
They are bullies. Bullies who use their understanding of a game to attack people who they feel superior too. Small minded little assholes.
Beeing cruel to others (and griefing is a form of cruelty) for your own amusement is the very definition of beeing an asshole. Just because something is very creative doesn’t mean it’s to be applauded. A very creative asshole is still an asshole.
The whole EVE thing: Well, EVE is a harsh place and worse things have happened there to people. Though usually these ploys were far more creative than spamming cheap fighters to take out capital ships…
I’m trying to grasp what we’re all, in one way or another, calling ‘griefing.’ If, in WoW for example, I use Mind Control and throw a character off a cliff is that griefing? Does it being in a Battleground change it?
I’ve always seen griefing as someone who dedicates their time to ruining someone elses time. The reasons they do so don’t change that it’s griefing. And when I sau ‘ruining someone elses time,’ I don’t mean killing them in PvP or something. I mean targetting someone (or a group, or a server, or whatever) and doing your damndest to prevent them from doing normal in-game things, with no actual benefit to themselves.
Camping someone’s corpse, for example, I would see as griefing. They don’t gain anything by standing there, except to waste the other persons time.
Can I throw another analogy on the pyre?
Griefers are the guys who thought it was hilarious to run up and knock over the chess board in the middle of a game and run away giggling and shouting insults.
By and large they are exactly the same people. There are some that are immensly clever and inventive, meta-gaming games, poking holes in many a fantasy balloon for the possible beneift of bringing people back to reality. But it’s just too easy to be tritely obstructive. The inventive pave the way by discovering exploits. The ‘lulz’ clowns need only rinse and repeat.
I’ve never been on the end of it myself (haven’t gamed online in years). Most articles like the above generally seem to talk about the more sophisticated stuff or the base stuff. It seems rather incomplete a picture like that though. but I don’t know how prevalent this stuff is.
It occurs to me that the reason for this is that they aren’t the same thing. I’m not arguing that the basic act is different or that griefing is in any way justified. However, as Kadayi said far above, griefing in a game like CS or TF2 doesn’t seem as bad as the same behavior in WoW or any other MMO, because the matches are so short and there’s always another server to jump to. In a similar way, anyone online can always ‘leave’ (go offline) in a way is difficult or impossible in real life. In other words, since the cost of avoiding the assholes is lower online than offline, perhaps people view the abuse as less severe, too.
And, lest someone think this is a paean to griefing: the same phenomenon occurs in the real world. Just look at any number of acts of religious antagonism performed by extreme Christian groups in the US in the past couple of years.
unless you’re thinking of the westboro baptist church (i.e. god hates fags) i think comparing manifestations of religious belief to online gaming grossly misunderstands the nature of both phenomena.
personally, i think that’s ridiculously out of line with what is happening in second life (or anywhere online). a bunch of wbc fucks showing up at your loved one’s funeral to picket it (over their unrelated fundraising scheme / theological warfare routine) is on an entirely different kind of behavior.*
and i’ve heard people say “but it’s the same thing just on a different scale.”
no, it’s really not. and we instinctively understand this because we do not generally pursue legal or extra-legal action against those who play these games in online environments. at some point most everyone realizes this very fundamentally because they do not take that next step, the step that someone would normally take in physical interactions. comparing this kind of thing to physical interactions is a dead end, and maybe indicative of a larger social phenomena that may or may not be a far more serious problem than a bunch of fuckfaces emotionally brutalizing the easily-brutalized. (and, as an unintended consequence, increasing the amount of pleasure said fuckfaces experience from their chores.)
perhaps it’s a symptom of people taking what should be sidebars to our lives far too seriously; or proof that any type of social conflict is very difficult to not take personally, even if it’s completely depersonalized and anonymous. i don’t know. it worries me, though, because i think it has larger repercussions than griefing ever will.
some people are dicks, and second life probably needs better dick-catching measures if this is genuinely a problem and not here-and-there examples. i would imagine any steps taken would result in lessening the free-form measure that makes second life compelling for users, which means the answer lies not in linden labs but in the users themselves.
*edit: i realize i may be in the minority with this position, but i mean no disprect to anyone.
Well, WBC could be an example, but it’s not the best one. Better would be the recently publicized case of the US Bible-Belt Satellite channel “Faith TV” announcing they would be showing a guy eating a cookie with a depiction of Muhammed on it.
Or, if you want another fine example, courtesy of the Beeb, enjoy this spot of fun.
Now, that is griefing. Pretending superiority over another social group, mocking their values, and getting them to break the rules of normal interaction.
Actually, that is the goal: getting the other person or group to take action that goes outside of the game, so that they themselves demonstrate how ludicrous their gaming has become.
Griefers don’t cheat: they stay within the physical rules of the game (and usually outside of the social rules) and try to get the victim to break both rules.
But in playing their own game, they set up their own social order.
I find it interesting (and incidentally very sad) that what ‘griefers’ are really making war on is passion – how dare anyone be passionate about anything? Passion for ‘unimportant’, ‘unnecessary’, even ‘ridiculous’ and ‘insane’ pastimes has reinvented the world time and time again since humans first crawled out of the primordial muck. No, not every Second Lifer is going to turn into a DaVinci… but that passion can LEAD to a DaVinci popping up seemingly out of nowhere, and NObody should scoff at, much less try to destroy, the tiny spark of life that passion – passion found ANYwhere, may kindle.
Well, WBC could be an example, but it’s not the best one. Better would be the recently publicized case of the US Bible-Belt Satellite channel “Faith TV” announcing they would be showing a guy eating a cookie with a depiction of Muhammed on it.
except that’s legitimate political speech, if – to be overly kind – extremely rough around the edges. there’s an obvious point in the u.s. (at least) to be made that jesus is fair game for any artist with a sack of chocolate and a butt-plug.
Yeah, in the same sense that script kiddies are really l337 hax0rs.
So, griefing: morally equivalent to rape, quite possibly responsible for suppressing a modern-day equivalent to Leonardo da Vinci. However, gentlemen, we’re overlooking an important point: would Hitler have approved?
I find the sappy romanticizing of griefers in this thread bizarre.
They are assholes trying to destroy the enjoyment of the game for others. There is no noble cause. They simply enjoy removing a channel for others enjoyment.
I’ve played on a WoW PvP server for 3 years. When I camp someone until they log out, tell my guild to kill them on sight, and then camp them until they log out every time they are seen in the game world; I am not trying to understand the game world or create a real feeling of loss for the player. They’ve simply angered me and I don’t want them to enjoy the game anymore.
Basically, a lot of you are spewing overwrought bullshit to explain the apathetic or sadistic actions of angst ridden 15 year olds.
Pitying you for taking ‘Teh internets’ soo seriously yes. Romanticizing, I don’t think so. You’ll find the article is the one full of the eulogies and backslappers.
That’s my point. “Free Speech” is legal, just as what griefers do is within the rules of the game. And, both the example I cited, and your colorful counterexample, are essentially cases of antagonism. Nobody exercises “Free Speech” for “Free Speech’s” sake. People exercise “Free Speech” for a purpose. And, in that case, the purpose is to piss people off. Griefers are no different.
And by the way, assholes don’t feel angst, even if they are 15 years old.
AntiGriefer: Greifers are bullies.
ProGriefer: Your opinion carries no weight as you have been affected by bullying as a child.
PG: Griefing is creative, which makes it ok. It even makes it commendable.
AG: You can be creative without ruining peoples shit.
PG: Your opinion carries no weight as you have been affected by griefing
AG: You are ruining people’s gaming experiences.
PG: The internet is not real so I can do what I want and if you don’t like it, it’s your own fault for taking it too seriously.
AG: It’s not too serious, but gaming is something people simply like to do and you are preventing them from doing it.
PG: But it’s not real.
AG: Sure it is, players are real people, spending real time and, as mentioned in the article, sometimes real money.
PG: Exactly, it’s fun to piss them off for real.
AG: But you just said it’s ok to grief because it wasn’t…
PG: Your opinion carries no weight as you have been affected by bullying as a child.
AG: Wait, what if someone followed you around in your everyday life (real life) and constantly harrassed you and…
PG: LALALALALA can’t hear you, you got upset, hahaha, nahahah.
Side-stepping sarcasm, the “affected by bullying” argument always throws me. Surely pretty much everyone has been affected by Bullying, in a “I’ve seen what it does to other humans” sort of way.
Unless you didn’t notice. In which case, well, you’re a bit of a sociopath, y’know.
KG
Sadism (which, let’s face it, is what it boils down to) is acceptable behavior in any venue…. because?
Because it’s funny.
Clearly.
This has been one of the more interesting discussions I have read recently.
I think that a lot of this griefing behaviour exists due to the limitations imposed on sanction capabilities that are inevitably part of a game or online world.
People generally avoid pissing others off for a mixture of two reasons, internal ones generated by feeling of guilt or empathy etc. and external ones generated by a fear of sanction in what ever form it will come in.
The internal ones come from socialisation, but we all know some nutter who pays them little regard. The sanctions are in place so that we can deal with those people.
In the real world this is done with laws and other rules.
These laws are often deliberately left open to some degree of interpretation so a judge or whoever can choose to some degree how to deploy them.
In a technical world this is not easy to do. You cannot think of everything that might happen. You cannot code vaguaries that can be applied when needed by an appropriate authority. The world has rock hard rules and is full of loop holes.
The griefers live in these loopholes. Something that they could not get away with in the real world where catch all rules would result in some form of a kicking being handed out. But neither can I see the virtual world closing them, so they will continue to be there.