Griefing

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Griefing is the act of engaging in a virtual environment for the particular purpose of causing havoc or creating grief for other members of the environment.

Griefing can take place in any number of different types of virtual environments ranging from forums to massively multiplayer online games. In addition, griefing takes has many different forms and embodies many different actions including, but not limited to, team killing, prop spamming, blocking areas from access, leading groups of monsters to attack unsuspecting players, and exploiting errors in the game code to disrupt the game for other people. It is often viewed as a form of harassment or cheating.

The enigmatic Pac-Man Strikes Again[1]

Usage

Griefing is a verb which is used to refer to the act of performing activities for the sole purpose of causing harm or "grief" in a virtual environment.

Griefer is a noun that is used to refer to those performing acts of griefing. A griefer is not necessarily any user in an environment that causes grief or harm for other players, but rather a person who engages with the complete intention of causing harm for others. Because griefers get pleasure out of acting on other players, they fall into Bartle's killer category.

Examples

A screenshot of a prank by griefers in Second Life

Though originally used to refer to people purposely causing grief in online gaming settings, griefing has come to be a term that is used in a number of different virtual environments. Griefing is often accentuated in environments in which there is a high degree of anonymity.

Videogame Griefing

Griefing commonly occurs in first-person shooters (FPS's). Harassing, screaming, and being obnoxious or vulgar in the game chat are often employed griefing strategies, as well as team killing, path-blocking, and committing any action that harms the griefer's team. Halo 3 Griefing

In the virtual world Second Life, the Terms of Service specifically regulate against griefing. One common method of griefing found in Second Life involves abusing the ability to script objects to harass other users. Common examples of this would be to build objects that are self-replicating and thus can litter an entire area of the game, cause lag, and also overload the server.

"Demotivational" poster which expresses one aspect of ganking.

In the popular massively multiplayer online roleplaying game World of Warcraft, many incidences of griefing can be found. One popular form of griefing that is probably most common is that of ganking. Ganking is usually a term used to describe the act of attacking another person in a very unfair manner, such as attacking someone with a large group of people or by being a much higher level so as not to allow the other person to have any chance of defending herself. Whether or not ganking is considered griefing is often debated by many members of the community. Blizzard's official stance on the subject is that it is not a practice that will go punished by the Game Masters.

There have also been several in-game incidents in World of Warcraft that have gained fame in the WoW universe due to the controversial nature surrounding the griefing. One such incident occurred in 2006 when a guild called Serenity Now proceeded to gank a large number of players that had gathered in an area of the game to hold a funeral memorial service for a player that had died in real life. The people that were organizing the funeral service had posted on the forums before the event in order to let others know that it would be taking place and to ask people not to ruin the event. Despite their efforts at preventing and destruction of the service, the guild Serenity Now gathered together and attacked the funeral service and effectively wiped out all of the mourners. Though many people in the community found this event to be entertaining and Blizzard found it to be allowable within the rules of the game, many others were perturbed at the nature of this griefing. “The organization and presentation of it existed within the WoW universe, but the grief expressed by the players during the funeral was real grief, and the gamers were actually saying goodbye to a friend through a social ceremony” [2].

A popular media reference to ganking is in an episode of South Park entitled "Make Love, Not Warcraft". In the episode, an overweight man that is described as having "absolutely no life" and is named Jenkins (in reference to Leeroy Jenkins), is terrorizing the World of Warcraft and making the game unplayable and thus causing people to abandon World of Warcraft. The boys of South Park ultimately join into the game and after some cooperation on behalf of Blizzard, they defeat the griefer Jenkins. [3]

Other Environments

In 2008, Internet griefers attacked a forum that is run by the nonprofit Epilepsy Foundation. The griefers placed JavaScript in a number of different forum posts which effectively redirected the users' browsers to a web page which had a complex image on it that was designed to cause seizures in both pattern-sensitive and photosensitive epileptics. RyAnne Fultz, a 33-year-old sufferer of pattern-sensitive epilepsy clicked on one of the legitimate-looking links in a forum post posted by one of the griefers and went into a state of paralysis. Other forum users reported getting migraines and headaches after being tricked to click on some of the links posted by the griefers. The Epilepsy Foundation had to temporarily close the site to remove the messages and increase security.[4].

Other examples of griefing, such as the spamming of duplicate images onto a page so as to make it unreadable, can be found in the THE THUNDERDOME.

Four Categories of Griefing

A recent study suggests that there could be four different categories of griefing:

  • Harassment
  • Power Imposition
  • Scamming
  • Greed

The four categories differ along these criteria:

  • How explicit is the intent to grief when in that play style
  • The kind of rules the play style breaks
  • Developer and player perceptions of the play style

Harassment

The griefer’s intention here is “to cause emotional distress to the victim” although in some cases, harassment can be unintentional if the person does not know that his/her behavior upsets other players (i.e. using a term that may be offensive). In harassment, the griefer does not benefit from his/her actions, aside from maybe the enjoyment of seeing the victim suffer. The rules of conduct of many MMORPGs prohibit harassment.

Types of harassment include, but are not limited to slurs, intentional spamming of a chat channel, spatial intrusion, event disruption, stalking, eavesdropping, and threatening. Griefing in the form of harassment is especially common in online forums, where members enjoy taking conversations off-topic, intentionally disagreeing with the common opinion, or to just start controversy, in order to harass a specific member, or the community as a whole. This is also known as flaming or trolling.

Power Imposition

Power itself is not perceived by many players as griefing. Instead, it is considered griefing when “power superiority is manifested through other actions (i.e. player killing) or coupled with other griefing types (i.e. harassment)”

The use of loopholes or underhanded methods to cause another player’s death may be considered griefing. The act of killing another player could be considered griefing if:

  1. The victim’s death offers little or no direct benefit to the player
  2. Verbal abuse accompanies the act
  3. The act is repeated several times
  4. The act is facilitated through the use of loopholes

“Rez killing (when a player resurrects the victim and then kills him/her again) and newbie killing (the killing of new and frequently inexperienced players for fun) are also perceived to be grief play if the player does not significantly benefit from the action, regardless of the Law of Code.” Ganking can also appropriately fit into this category.

Scamming

Scamming refers to a fraudulent business scheme or a swindle. The following are forms of scamming that are also considered grief play:

Trade Scamming: When the scamming is exploitative of poorly designed trading systems
Promise Breaking: When a player promises to do something and then upon the exchange of money does not fulfill their promise
Identity Deception: when a player attempts to deceive by presenting him/herself as someone else

Greed

In grief play, the motive for greed is to benefit, regardless if the action annoys other players. The intention is just to get ahead. The following are forms of greed:

Ninja Looting: Taking loot that was earned by another player, by speed, guile, or a cheat.
Kill Stealing: Where a player attempts to gain benefit by participating in the killing of a mob that is already engaged in a fight with another player or team.
Area Monopolizing: When a player or a group demands exclusive access to an area (for example, in order to be sole occupants to an area where a mob or resource appears)

Effects of Griefers

Many users view griefers as simply a plague of disruption that is there to cause havoc in the game environment simply for the pleasure of causing pain or trouble for other users. As technology and the expansiveness of video games and online environments advances, the opportunity for greater incidences of griefing only continue to advance as well. Some have theorized that griefers, in the future, could result in large scale pranks that may be viewed by some as potential acts of terrorism and may induce civil authorities to take legal action against griefers.[5]

However, griefers do not necessarily have a solely malicious effect on their environments. For both in-game and non-game griefing, griefers expose vulnerabilities and flaws in virtual environments. This leads to security patches and improvements that may protect these environments from being attacked by those whose intentions are not simply to cause grief, but are attacking for personal gain or profit such as malicious hackers.

Ethical Implications

According to Floridi, "Information Ethics" determines what is right and wrong on the basis of four basic moral principles which include the idea that "entropy" or harm should not be caused and should always be prevented and removed from the infosphere. Floridi, p. 24 Floridi also mentions that "The duty of any moral agent should be evaluated in terms of contribution to the sustainable blooming of the infosphere, and any process, action or event that negatively affects the whole infosphere – not just an informational object – should be seen as an increase in its level of entropy and hence an instance of evil." Floridi, p. 24 By this characterization, it is can be deduced that griefing, which is essentially causing nothing but harm in an environment for no other reason than to cause harm, is a source of entropy (harm in the infosphere) and and violates the basic moral principles of Information Ethics as according to Floridi. In this way, griefing could be interpreted to be an unethical pattern of behavior.

Griefing also has ethical implications as a form of cheating. Though the term "griefing" does not always necessarily encompass violating the rules of an environment, many certainly still perform it through the manipulation of the rules or the environment.

Richard Bartle discusses how griefing may reveal certain characteristics about an individual. Bartle 2003, p. 152 Bartle mention a study conducted by Nicholas Lee in 2002 that involved subjects that played MMORPGS (massively multiplayer online roleplaying games). The study was used to analyze the motivations that people have for acting the way they do in online games. The study revealed that some people use grief or "The desire to objectify other players for personal gain" as motivation behind their actions. Bartle describes the players that most likely identify with this kind of motivation are very likely to fall in the killer category of the Bartle Test or, in other words, tend to be the sort of people that like to "dominate others." Bartle 2003, p. 130. This illustrates how griefing can be an indication of an individual's ethical behaviors and tendencies in a virtual environment.

Defending Against Griefers

By creating clauses in the Terms of Service, some videogame companies reserve the right to punish or ban players from their virtual environment if they are found to griefing. EA games talks about grief tactics in its Frequently Asked Questions and mentioned that "[u]sing game mechanics to cause grief to others can also be seen as exploitation, and will treated accordingly by game staff [6].

Others have theorized that having a strong community system would be one of the most effective measures against griefers. [7] Stephen Davis of IT GlobalSecure suggests that having features such as friend lists, reputation statistics, member abilities, and other such features would reduce anonymity and create a closer tie between players and the game. [8] Davis also suggests that simply banning players would not be as effective of a countermeasure as would the development of virtual societies and a virtual justice system for in-game crimes.

See Also

References

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