By Kieron Gillen on January 28th, 2008 at 2:22 pm.
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.
Excellent article, although it makes EVE sound truly horrible. And I love the fact that whenever there’s a public event in Second Life, there are a thousand oversized love-lengths hovering patiently on the horizon waiting to strike.
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I’m hoping Jim will drop in with some Eve Stories in the thread. It’s a fascinating place.
KG
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The article kind of misses the point of EVE though. The EVE universe makes no moral judgments upon you; Piracy is just a valid career as miner, industrialist, hotshot PVP pilot or carebear.
The destruction of the Titan, far from being an act of irritating griefing, was a masterful and brilliant act of complacency-roasting that the game’s mechanics are supposed to promote.
Good on them.
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MEat Circus’ point of view asides, griefer are just the same sort of people that don’t return a kids ball kicked over their fence, far too full of self importance for thier own good IMO.
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Eve *is* horrible, which is sort of the appeal of it. The permanent loss of assets has a big impact on a player, and so the extreme difficulty of actually catching and killing someone is rewarded because you know that they’re not just losing a few minutes questing time.
I won’t say any more as I’m writing my next long RPS rant with Eve PvP in mind.
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Accounts of second life griefing, especially the continuous tit-for-tat between the hard right and left, is about the most entertaining thing about the place.
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@Piratepete:
I’m not saying that griefing is good, per se. To me, griefing is normally a sign that a game’s mechanics are broken.
What I’m saying is that the Titan-destruction event wasn’t griefing in any way. It’s exactly the kind of event that EVE is all about. Its entire game mechanics are based around a tangible feeling of loss.
When you lose a ship you’ve spent weeks tooling out it can be bloody heartbreaking. When you’ve got the biggest ship in the galaxy, and are poncing around like you own the sodding place, and then get floored by a group of titttering pilots zerg rushing you in noob-frigates it should be utterly devastating. That’s the feeling you’ve earned with your complacency. It’s what EVE wants you to feel. I wouldn’t have been surprised if each and every member of that corp wept themselves to sleep that night.
It was a brilliant moment in EVE history and they should be congratulated for it.
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@Phil:
Accounts of second life griefing, especially the continuous tit-for-tat between the hard right and left, is about the most entertaining thing about the place.
I mean, Second Lifers are just *asking* to have the piss taken out of them, aren’t they? Frighteningly earnest loons taking refuge away from the shattered remnants of their first life in the badly-rendered escapism of their second. I struggle to think of an environment that’s screaming out for more ridicule and grief than Second Life.
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A good read indeed. And glad to hear you’re still working on that EVE post Jim, looking forward to it.
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^ seconding that
The article says make it seems like only the Goons are playing a whole diffrent kind of EVE but I think its true for any kind of player. The online life of a miner or a pirate in EVE couldnt be more different from each other. Its like two separate games.
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I think this sums up griefing pretty well – it’s not that they’re not playing, it’s just – they’re not playing the same game.
Agree with MC on the missed point re: EVE – equating PvP with griefing is… off. Especially in EVE. (And of course the Titan had to get ‘sploded. It was was a big, scary fleet-eating monstrosity.)
As for Goonfleet…. ignore the E-O forums, and you can play forever without even hearing about them. (Then you find some stragglers pirating in low-sec, bring a few pals and swarm them with Expendables.)
Jim R – \o/
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Another thing: am I the only one getting annoyed at the – seeming – trend of equating in-game assets with the real money you’d get if you – EULA-violatingly – sold them on eBay?
Let me rephrase that. With less convolutions.
Are you the kind of person who watches a fireworks display thinking “that’s 10000 bucks ON FIRE”? Then you have no soul.
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It’s hard to know what to make of the organized griefers. I guess they’re funny until they happen to you.
On the one hand, they’re mean-spirited, mischievous jerks who enjoy kicking over other people’s sandcastles. On the other hand, they really hate furries. Is the enemy of my enemy my friend? I’m so confused :|
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“…Second Lifers… Frighteningly earnest loons taking refuge away from the shattered remnants of their first life in the badly-rendered escapism of their second.”
That’s a pretty broad and ignorant statement.
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The death of the second Titan, by the Goons’ sworn enemies, Band Of Brothers, was actually far closer to griefing, as it directly exploited game mechanics to force the kill.
The first Titan kill was thanks to the pilot being careless, rather than anything else.
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@Nick:
Broad, yes. Ignorant, no.
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I have played City of Heroes, Vanguard (a little bit, would like to go back some day). Tabula Rasa (not much yet) and World of Warcraft (from the beginning). Furthermore I love the concept of MMOs and has read a lot about them, especially from UO, Eve, Asheron’s Call, DAoC or Everquest, games I never played.
My feeling is that the stories from the games I never played are much more interesting and more “human”. They are virtual worlds where power is a key element that motivates player to keep going forward, and abusing of weaker players is one well known way to show that power. I find that games like UO weren’t designed to be “games”, but true alternative worlds, so their designers didn’t care that much if it was frustrating or not, they created a world and a set of rules, letting everyone a lot of freedom to forge their way.
Maybe I don´t want empathy, maybe I want to be a ruthless lone assassin that kills for testing my own skills, or a thief that profit from the dumbness of other player. It is a game of powers, if you don´t want your castle being stolen, put the necesary resources in defending it, if you don´t want to be beaten by the first PK, put more time.
These are empty words from someone who have just played extensively to WoW in a RP server (which in some ways I regret it), but when I read things like the Eve heist, it makes look the game fascinating and more credible as a virtual universe.
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EVE’s underlying concepts interest me greatly, and the ‘tangible feeling of loss’ is perhaps the biggest pull. Id liken it to Diablo II Hardcore mode, perhaps. Any given multiplayer game can be enhanced ten-fold by this alone; although that’s not to say it is something that is applicable to most games.
Unfortunately I’m put off by the whole sci-fi thing immensely.
As for the meta game only known as ‘griefing’, it’s what makes MMOs for me.
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@Butler:
I know what you mean. Griefers frequently display a creativity and flexibility that your average treadmill-monkey never does. In many ways, it’s the people who work out how to break the game and feed the monkeys that drive the game’s evolution.
I mean, you can bet your life that no pilot is ever gonna be complacent again about the UNSINKABLE NATURE of their Titanship Titanic.
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Despite being relatively pro-griefing, and although I’ve never played EVE, I think that the whole event in question is in fact due to poor game design — it shouldn’t have happened.
A fascinating event nonetheless, and one that drew my attention to EVE in the first place.
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@Meat Circus: Whenever I hear the phrase “..XYZ is just asking to be…” I’ immediately reminded of the old “women in mini skirts are asking to be raped” argument.
Second Lifers are a strange bunch, true. Think about them what you like. But they don’t hurt anybody doing it. Hell, I know a lot of people who’ve got really strange interests. I wouldn’t join them in their activities, but I can tolerate them doing it and I’d never call them out for it or spoil it for them.
But those griefers.. They’re just assholes. Pure and simple. There’s nothing clever about their antics. They remind me of the assholes in school who’d made fun of you if they caught you with your d&d or warhammer rulebook.
They see something they don’t understand and instead of just turning away, they need to destroy it for them. Woooo!!
GO MATURE!
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@Okami:
I think you have the griefers wrong. They are not bullies, attacking what they don’t understand in general. In fact, quite the opposite. They understand the games rules and flaws and social norms rather better than you do, which is why they’re so efficient at exploiting them for their own advantage and amusement.
Griefing is a very creative pastime and is to be applauded. Projecting your own childhood neuroses onto them is unfair.
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I really, really wish I could get into EVE as an indepth pursuit, but my dabbling has never really amounted to anything very exciting other than one minor corp war which I indirectly started.
I had just got a shiny new battlecruiser and was mucking around with my load-out when someone in a similar class ship jumped in on top of me. I wasn’t at my sharpest at the time and didn’t make for my safe point – it was my first really major engagement with another player on my own.
I eventually succumbed and lost my ship, but just as a corp mate jumped in and finished him. I was furious at having lost such a big investment, and while the other two people involved chatted in local I found it very hard to keep my anger in check.
I got back to the site of the fight first and looted what was left of my ship, and cleared out the opponent’s ship by way of a small revenge, but the loss festered and I didn’t really play for a few days.
When I came back, it turned out that the corp had taken notice of the attack, despite my being a very low-rung and new member, and in my absence routed the attacker’s entire corp out of several systems, taking out a huge swath of their ships.
I felt quite a bit better despite the impact the war had no doubt had on innocent or uninvolved players.
I submit that in a more coddled PvP environment, that kind of vindication is omitted making griefing a one-way street. It’s really a case of empowering players to make life more difficult in gameplay terms for those who want to live outside the “law”, and I think most people who think and play like that would relish being a pariah.
More social Darwinism, less Systematic or GM nanny services would make MMOs more interesting.
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I think the issue with EvE, though, is that killing someone’s Titan isn’t griefing. After any amount of PvP, most people learn that you don’t want to fly something you aren’t willing to lose . . . because even with the most pleasant and honourable enemies, they’ve still just blown you up.
Griefing in EvE is dropping a jetcan right in front of a newbie station, then lurking around in hopes that some poor fellow who’s blundering about in confusion four minutes into the game will take something out of it so you can shoot him. Or “lending” him some minerals so you can shoot him. Or any of a dozen variations on that tack.
EvE’s a big playground where you get to build your own sandcastles, and kick over other peoples. But it does a fantastic job of making sure that you know what you’re getting into when you sit down at the low-to-no security beach and start grabbing handfulls of sand. Since it’s about ball-stealing and castle-kicking, the “griefers” don’t stand out . . . but even reading the article, there’s still a pretty clear division in mindset. A griefer wants his opponent to stop playing the game. He doesn’t, in the case of EvE, want the alliance he’s fighting to fracture, and its corps to flee the proverbial sinking ship, join other, smaller alliances, and leave them free to move into the territory . . . he wants his opponent to be so frustrated with the untenable position he’s put in to stop playing all together.
He doesn’t want to win the game, he wants to win a personal victory over the other player. Which is why griefing in FPSs isn’t about finding interesting ways to overrun the opponent . . . it’s about shooting your teammates in the back until they get pissed and leave.
I don’t think that griefers drive the evolution of anything . . . if anything, they simply force the makers of games to put more stringent limits on what the players can do, because they can’t trust players to voluntarily play on the same team. They don’t exploit game mechanics to build improbably effective characters . . . they hang around in newbie areas with high-level characters and PK people who can’t defend themselves.
And they don’t simply see things that amuse them and poke fun at them . . . they find a forum or a venue of people they don’t respect and flood it with spam until the place’s users are driven out and the site is shut down. Griefing isn’t about being good enough at your job that you edge someone out of a promotion . . . it’s about seeing someone on the street who’s dressed funny, following them home, then taking a baseball bat to everything in their house.
The only reason it’s an “internet” phenomenom is that you’ve a far smaller chance of being tracked back and arrested for a forum attack then you would for home invasion, assault and battery, and malicious property destruction.
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Meat Circus: Could you _be_ any more arrogant?
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Yes, Ms Aniston. I could _be_ more arrogant, kthx.
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I’m all for creative griefers, Agent provocateurs who break the rules so much that they actually force developers to directly address issues and exploits through effective action, however such sterling examples are the exception rather than the rule.
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Keep it polite, people.
KG
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I’d have to support Circus.
@Stick
Are you the kind of person who watches a fireworks display thinking “that’s 10000 bucks ON FIRE”? Then you have no soul.
That’s a beautiful quote.
Mindless griefing I generally disagree with, but a deliberate and unified effort to effectively break through to the other side is lovely. Especially if it upsets a few people in the process.
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I remember watching a youtube video of some people who had pk’d some characters on WoW because the players had gathered together to hold an in-game memorial to a WoW player who had recently died. Odd as I thought the idea of an in game memorial was in some ways, I remember thinking it was a strange way to get your jollies, especially since it said there were family members and friends of the deceased person there.
Essentially I have always thought it to be a case of people using the relatively safe shield of anonymity as a weapon to attack others. It is an act of empowerment for the people involved who perhaps don’t feel, as many people in society don’t, particularly empowered in real life.
It is an extension of the same fantasies and desires that make people play these games in the first place, to become something else in a game, gathering wealth, becoming influential, or living out other fantasies. Griefing is just another route to achieve the same goals, it seems like a weak argument to suggest it is a protest against these things, they are deriving the same satisfaction from their actions that other players do from theirs.
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Noc: Yeah, I take your point, the boundaries of what could be called griefing doesn’t really apply to EVE where loss of property is the norm. I think the daily life of an EVE player would amount to the worst you could get away with in most other online games though, which is why it always comes up in relation to online misbehaviour.
Just after posting though I was taking out the trash and thinking about if and when I’ve ever griefed or been accused of griefing and an interesting anecdote came to mind.
There was a point on WoW where, on my server at least, but judging from the forums it was pandemic, there was a state of mass-griefing/outright social collapse around the time of the infamous “War Effort” patch to unlock AQ40/20.
Pre-patch, the PvP field of play had an increasing number of people in gear from Molten Core or the fairly new Blackwing Lair which outclassed the blue instance items most people had been contently clad in for a long time, and with no real access to any items outside of raiding they were relegated to cannon fodder.
This built up a lot of resentment, as did the fact that on our server we had really on one elite Alliance guild doing this content, who basically dictated economic balance on the highest-tier of trade goods and items – they charged ungodly amounts of gold merely for a place in a farming run, where you’d get the chance to bid against other customers on anything that dropped which they didn’t need.
The raider/non-raider rift was really apparent once the war effort started. All manner of items had to be submitted from all level bands. At first most people did submit items to get the reward vouchers, but over time they slowly stopped turning anything in and our server’s progress ground to a halt.
The realisation had sunk in that a/ most people doing these hand ins would never see the content they were working to unlock b/ the raid guild’s drive to see this new content had driven the auction prices on most basic trade goods up to insane prices.
Everyone started gouging, gradually increasing the prices until base metals like copper were selling for ten gold a stack to the point that it became unwise to post things for sale on your main character, with raiders whispering sellers insults for their behaviour. These illicit war effort profiteers were driven underground, and I was one of them.
This went on the whole time, with Horde side raiders even coming into IF general chat and abusing the Alliance’s economic griefers for holding the whole realm to ransom.
But the ransom was paid, and my Warrior went all the way to 60 with the finest things in life, epics from the AH were no object and even my epic mount was little effort given the gold I’d amassed had allowed me to start reselling choice items for a steady income.
At first, I think I was probably swept up in the peasant’s rebellion aspect, but in reality I just made my fortune at the expense of another playstyle, and playerbase.
Good times.
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As has been noted, I think Eve is very different from other games in terms of where the line lies. For example, in Jita, a character offers to help people run difficult missions. This character then gangs up with the hopeful newbie and promptly warps him into an ambush possible due to war standings set between a well known griefer and his apparently helpful alt.
On the other hand, for a while I lived in BWF, a gateway 0.0 system which saw alot of action (for about 6 months I fought for or with nearly every alliance that passed through there). As the residents and defenders of this system, we would occasionally be attacked by a small local corp who possessed a mothership. A vessel we had very little chance of defeating and suffered alot of losses to.
Both these scenarios are allowed within the rules of the game, but I think one is griefing whilst the other is entirely agreeable, if somewhat aggravating. In another game however, and against other rules both can seen as griefing.
On the topic of Goons though, I’ve always been quite fond of their tactics. I don’t think they’re griefers (anymore than RA are, who’ve suffered their share of accusations). However, perhaps inevitably, their members contain a sizeable proportion of imbeciles. I recently was in a gang on the Southern front that lost a friendly pilot to a passing Goon. When asked to apologise for shooting a blue ship he instead responded with threats towards my alliance. Thats not griefing, just old fashioned idiocy.
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The funeral crashers were contemptible assholes.
The furrie baiters on the other hand, I find hugely amusing and in many cases, very creative.
I suppose it’s the difference between racist graffiti and Banksy.
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@ BKG: Yeah. But that’s not griefing. You could call it “exploiting,” or “playing aggressively” or whatever, but you were exploiting the game and the other players for personal profit. Whether it was “fair” or not is a matter of opinion, but it’s not griefing.
Griefing would’ve been if you took a rich, high-level character and intentionally screwed up the economy in a lower-level area to send the prices up to a place that no one of a lower level could afford . . . and knowing full well that you’d never make any money out of this scheme, but simply delighting in the fact that you’re making it impossible for low-level players to get anything at all out of the auction house.
It’d be a clever thing to do, to be sure. But all it’s accomplishing is making someone else’s game difficult for your own amusment . . .and if it gets bad enough, making Blizzard regulate the AH at the expense of any legitament entrepreneurs. “Exploiting” provokes players into finding ways to compensate and overcome your advantage . . . but the only steps you can really take from actual griefing are backwards ones.
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http://www.stage6.com/user/FLOOR_MASTER/video/1911646/TEAM-ROOMBA-PRESENTS:-Team-Fortress-2-Griefing
and
http://www.stage6.com/user/FLOOR_MASTER/video/1973259/TEAM-ROOMBA-PRESENTS:-Team-Fortress-2-Griefing-2
Are the two best examples of griefing in my game of choice at the moment. Yet I found both of them hilarious to watch.
Maybe that’s because I don’t have a “home” server that they invaded (although I believe this was mostly down on their own server) and my playing routinely involves flicking servers to find one that I have more fun on or with some custom map I fancy a go at. In MMOs there’s often no escaping… you have a very small area of the world that’s very public in which you can play. You can’t take your game somewhere else.
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@Meat Circus
No I wasn’t saying you condemned griefing, merely that I understood the distinction between griefing and being a sneaky bar steward in Eve.
The post was hastily written, and not phrased well. Look at the amount of typos ffs :)
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Noc: It was considered griefing by the fairly harsh abusers most of my guild got whispers from :P
What I’m saying is that griefing can, in the victim’s eyes, rightly or wrongly, amount to a clash of legitimate play styles or motives as much as unmitigated destruction for destruction’s sake – with a preference for self-defeatism – that’s really just an anarchist standard which accounts for some friction in virtual worlds.
Ninja-looting for example is down to a miss-taught version of the assurance game in the likes of WoW – it goads the player into selfish item grubbing with the left hand and with the right indicates that all items of worth require other item-grubbers to get.
EVE is, to my mind, an example of a game world where daily life would amount to constant griefing for anyone who can’t develop a bit of a mean streak themselves though.
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One of the games most vulnerable to griefing I’ve played recently is Empires, a HL2 mod crossover between RTS and FPS (awesome game, btw, give it a try).
Main griefing points are wasting resources (be it respawn tickets, the moneylike ingame resource or the vehicle limit) by suiciding, spamming jeeps or extremely high cost but crap vehicles or the oh-so-popular comm-flippers which flip the command vehicle on its head or into water (by exploiting game mechanics) after which it slowly takes damage until it’s either dead (and team lost) or some other people notice it and manage to flip it back.
Very annoying and if you’d like to see it in action:
MOVING PICTURES
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I tend to agree with Matt that the griefers are out to get kicks in a similar way to those playing the game “properly.”
I have a mixed view about this, because whilst some griefer activities are genuinely worthwhile, and taking things, especially online, far too seriously is patently silly and ripe for having the mickey taken, a lot of griefers you come across are right pillocks.
In some ways it’s the difference between drawing a copy of the Mona Lisa and putting a mustache on it, and drawing a mustache on the actual Mona Lisa in permanent marker. The first is worthwhile and entertaining, and you could even argue is making a valid point, the second is just idiotic and misunderstanding the point of the exercise. Or in other words, the difference between Brian in Life of Brian being someone with a similar life to Jesus, to Brian actually being Jesus. The problem I have with griefers is that several I’ve come across don’t seem to get the distinction between making valid and quite funny points by taking the mick, and just being insensitive twonks.
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@Champagne O’Leary:
Thank you. I do try. :)
I’m a bit leery of the Apologetics of Griefing. I’d rather apply Occam’s Razor or the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.
Simply, you are immune to face-punching. So, you act out. With more or less style. (Dropping 100 jetcans to lag out system vs. Flying Penis Attack.) But it still says more about you than anything else.
That said, I’d love to have a Proper Talk about the relationships between griefing, exploits, emergent gameplay and canonized exploits (e.g, “advanced movement”) at some point.
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I don’t think the issue is one of whether they’re funny or not. Some griefing activities are hilarious YouTube fodder, and others seem nearly as lame as the objects of their ridicule.
But it seems to me that the issue is more the difference between drawing a cartoon involving Jesus pissing on something, and busting into a church during Sunday Mass and relieving one’s self on the altar. Whether the cartoon is a genuinely funny bit of satire or whether it’s a lame, derivative attempt at Middle School humor isn’t the point . . . but point is that it’s an entirely different thing from actively finding people engaged in one of their own pasttimes and deliberately and maliciously making it impossible for them to congregate/play their game/whatever.
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Having read the article in full over a post work cup of tea, I have to say I find the whole subject rather hollow. For people who are all about not taking the internet seriously, they sure seem to, if not more so than their victims. If there is a point to be made in terms of a flaw with a game, or some such fair enough. But to effectively terrorize people endlessly and without any cause beyond them daring to object to it, is just plain playground harassment, regardless of how much spin is put on it. Would these same people ruin live sporting events given the opportunity? Dash onto the field during the Olympics mens 100 meters you think? After all it’s only sport, what’s the big deal? Or would the notion of a court case, fine/sentence, public exposure and the contempt of millions likely including their families, make that much of a difference? If ‘teh internets’ is not serious for these people, what is? When some one claims they are psychotic, you can pretty much dismiss them as a desperate attention seeker (look, look I am a unique snowflake!!!, watch me soar!!!). The whole point about a state of psychosis is that the afflicted isn’t aware of it.
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It’s a cycle of violence, innit? Little Billy in his Burberry cap gets beaten by his dad, so he goes to school and joins a gang and takes it out on the nerds playing D&D. And the nerds playing D&D can’t physically beat anyone up, so they go online and they form a gang and take it out on innocent players. And they pretend to be hard, but they’re just nerds too.
It’s one of the sad things about the internet. Kadayi just puts it really well: it’s the smartass hypocrisy of griefers that annoys me the most. It’s not serious business? Then why the hell are you dedicating your free time to ruining it?
(Having said that, the TF2 griefing is comedy gold, mainly because it’s not malicious, it’s just a bit of absurd fun.)
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The thing is though with CS or TF2 it’s a short lesson normally, (5 minutes of infamy), and people have the freedom to at least escape to another server or have an admin ban them (I ban plenty), but with the whole MMO/Virtual World scene there isn’t that leeway. You’re getting shat on from on high in WoW, you don’t have anywhere you can escape to, save the exit screen.
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Ah, the griefer. The dirty bastard of the new generation…
For one, Second Lifers deserve a good griefing, because they take that “game” way too seriously.
All this talk of EVE stuff makes me want to play it. Gonna wait for it to come to Steam, though.
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“Deserve” is one of the interesting things about the debate for me. I’m naturally wary of “She Was Asking For It” arguments, y’know…
KG
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Well, the comment in the article that the griefers in EVE only feel that they win once they’ve driven people away from the game never to return does speak volumes.
Another analogy, in agreement with Kadayi, pointing out what the griefers in the article profess to be doing ( this ) and what they are actually doing ( this ). The thing that’s really wrong with griefers is the great delight they take in doing the latter type of activity.
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Well said Kadayi, in several posts above.
If I may say something else, far less eloquently, sometimes being a dick, is just being a dick. The occasional valid point doesn’t justify unmitigated jackassery.
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“For one, Second Lifers deserve a good griefing, because they take that “game” way too seriously.”
Unlike most MMO players then.
I’m just surprised as to why it’s singled out and its players worthy of such vitriol, a lot of them seem to play it for the creative outlets it allows – which no other MMO has. Certainly, it has a large playerbase of “freaks, weirdos, furrys” etc, but that doesn’t make everyone who plays it a raging lifeless pervert, deserving of your scorn.
I don’t play it, I have a few friends who do – they are entirely “normal”.
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I have to admit that I was laughing pretty hard at the TF2 griefing videos. The Engy’s building teleports to trap their team-mates and blocking the exit from the spam had me in stitches. Great stuff.
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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?
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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.
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@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]
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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.
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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?
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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.
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@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…
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Yeah, in the same sense that script kiddies are really l337 hax0rs.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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Sadism (which, let’s face it, is what it boils down to) is acceptable behavior in any venue…. because?
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Because it’s funny.
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Clearly.
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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.
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