The Griefers

The Raven has long been fascinated by online culture, ever since a Wired article in the late 80s mentioned textual environments like MOOs and MUDs. Back then, just finding LambdaMoo took some real sleuthing—telnet hops to research labs and interviews with admins. Eventually, though, the Raven knocked on the virtual door and discovered online novels being co-written by thousands of people, using a combination of real-time dialogue and static descriptive environments to generate castles of the mind.

Talk about a lit-geek's paradise—these worlds were built for fast typists with active imaginations and a flair for adverbial turns of phrase. But they were also cooperative ventures requiring participants to stay "in character" and generate contextually sensible language. Sure, there were occasional problems with spammers, little kids, anti-social types, but not enough to ruin the party. By the time the graphical versions like Ultima Online came along, the Raven was busy earning a living, but take a look at the screenshot from Ultima at right. We think the mind's eye has better graphic support, but in fact, the doll-house style world of Ultima is actually rather close to the Can-D experience Philip K. Dick describes in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. The descriptions of addiction certainly sound the same.

If you aren't plugged into the online gaming world, consider yourself lucky. These things take serious amounts of time and energy and often consume what would otherwise be a productive existence. One devotee of the genre keeps a blog wherein he notes the classic profile:

Typical online gamer stuff: staying up until all hours and grabbing 1 or 2 hours sleep before work, staying up all night and then going to work, skipping things to be online, scheduling events around an online event. Granted, it doesn't sound like much, but when you are a father and have children, it's a big thing. It puts a strain on every part of your life if you let it.

Another hazard to contend with appears to be the psychotic punk. A story today by the LA Times cites "griefers," a class of savvy gamers who prowl the big online game worlds with one mission: "To make others cry. They stalk, hurl insults, extort, form gangs, kill and loot." This looked interesting, as I hadn't heard the word "griefer" before, so this morning I called a young man I know who plays these kinds of things.

"What can you tell me about 'griefers'?" I asked him.

"What?" He didn't understand.

"Y'know, people who get online to screw around with other players."

"Oh... You mean 'jerks,' yeah, there's some."

"A big problem?"

"Not really. Mostly with the free games, like Runescape. Subscription games don't have much, because people are paying to be there."

This made sense. But I thought I'd work the angle a bit more. Turns out Salon carried a story a few months back, focusing on these noncooperative types and it looks like the issue may grow in seriousness, as an estimated "2 to 3 million more people" are expected to jump into online gaming by 2005. So who are the online bullies? Are we just talking socially deficient adolescents? Computer Games Online ran a story by Cindy Yans last November about the subject of griefing that offered some explanation:

Did Majestic designers not notice somehow that their game would be the ultimate Shangri-la for Griefers? I don't think so. The concept was so intriguing—the idea of The Game insinuating itself into players lives, blurring the line between fiction and reality—so intriguing that they may have forgotten how much fun it is to be a real dick.

Indeed, there are a lot of dicks out there, as the article notes in a quote taken from a gaming developers' conference:

"Will all the women in the room please stand up?" an overwrought British developer fumes. "It's white males, all wearing glasses! Look at us!" Still, of the 250,000 people registered on the Galaxies community site, LucasArts staffers estimate that only 10 to 15 percent are women.

An editorial at Evilavatar.com, an online resource for gamers, suggests that as long as people are gathering socially, there will always be those who yearn to toss a box of yellow dye in the swimming pool:

What can we do about griefers then? Well ... nothing. Griefers have worked themselves into that class of problems that includes terrorism, Columbian narcotics, police buddy movies, and Jerry Falwell. Despite our best efforts, we just can't seem to purge our culture of these things, because in the long run there's very little anyone can do about another person's capacity to be an unapologetic ass.

Another editorial on the subject, over at xpd8.net echoes that observation in nearly the same terms: "I believe the griefer feels that by exploiting a game and ruining another gamer's night, he proves his intelligence and gets to flex his virtual muscles." So a gamer's evening is kaput—no big deal, right? Consider this story about online gangs in this month's Yahoo Internet Life mag. Cases of frustrated gamers physically killing griefers have occurred. Here's one from an Internet cafe in Singapore, in which a young man named Qiyong has assassinated another player owned by Tan in the game Counter-Strike:

Tan leaps up from his chair and begins screaming at Qiyong. They begin shoving each other as the others watch. In a flash, Tan pulls a knife from his pocket, sinking it into Qiyong's back. This time the blood is real.

Several domestic US cases of this sort are cited as well, of online mayhem carrying over into real life. Of course, there are happy endings, too. Over at the Ultima Online homepage there are tales of online couples who meet in the game and go on to tie the knot in person.

If online role-playing environments provide a symbolic context for social activity, then common psychological behaviors, both good and bad, will be part of that experience. Some journalists covering the griefing story are picking up on the finer nuances of what it means to be running multiple lives with separate emotional states.