A griefer, is generally accepted as a person who derives enjoyment from being obstructive, diminishing the enjoyment of others, preventing the enjoyment of others, wasting your time, and so forth. Depending on the environment, there may be a wide variety of specific behaviours (kill-stealing, blocking, training, player-killing, team-killing etc). They don't enjoy Second Life the way you or I enjoy Second Life. They enjoy it when they make you sad, or unhappy, or frustrated. Especially when you show it. Face it – it's easier to destroy than to create – and it requires comparatively little effort or talent.Griefers are the criminals and felons in the attenuated universes of MMO rules and regulations. Some griefers operate in groups, moving from one MMO to another, causing discomfort and annoyance on larger scales, and then moving on. Some are loners, bent solely on their own enjoyment at the expense of others. Some are just new, and haven't yet grasped the existence of the rules, let alone their precise nature – succumbing to the common virtual world fallacy "That which is possible is permitted."We can largely discount this last group, the majority of whom often socialise quickly after their first warning from the management. The remaining two groups have more in common. Something we all have in common is a sense of insecurity – whether we are aware of it or not. We each deal with it in different ways. The griefer acts out against others, like a school yard bully, causing trouble that's difficult to prevent. Making themselves feel bigger by diminishing others. Some do it in words, some in actions, some in blogs, some in forums. These are the people who scrape a coin along the paintwork of your car, spray badly-spelled graffiti on your fence and release computer viruses into the wild.
We often accuse griefers of being young, as if such behaviour is more common among the young than the old, for which there is little evidence. We often accuse griefers of being stupid, which they are not – no more so than the rest of us, in any case. We associate them with particular online services, nationalities, educational levels, income groups.
That's like suggesting one race is more criminally inclined than another. It's basic bigotry. Griefers are just folks. I make no apology for their woeful behaviour here. A griefer can be your brother, your daughter, your father, your aunt, your boss. You cannot screen for them. You can't establish a test. You can't install a gate to keep griefers out, and lets everyone else in. Griefers will pay to grief, if it comes to that. They used to do that in Second Life, and will again, if that's what's required.
It's an imperfect world, and we'll have to get by with imperfect solutions. Ultimately, though, societies and communities are stronger against griefers than individuals. They're less assailable, and ultimately provide increasingly poor targets.
Griefing isn't going to go away. Work with your community for ideas and solutions. If you need tools you don't have, put your proposals together and make feature requests. Griefing is something we'll only ever be able to control as a community. We can't do it without Linden Lab, and Linden Lab can't do it without us.
1. Tatero, it's not "racism" to report the valid facts about griefing, which those of us with ample inworld experience of a long period with many thousands of customers, can confirm:
a) Griefers do in fact tend to be young people. They're often teen-agers or 19-20 year olds. They are schooled in playing first-person shooters alone or with friends in their rooms after school for a decade or more by the time they come to Second Life, and they view it naively with something that feels like cynicism as a vast playing field for an FPS game. Shoot the homesteader, shoot the class instructor, shoot the mall manager are all fun games for them.
b) Griefers are also unhappy, insecure largely male 30-somethings who do enjoy seeing others being humiliated and like to systematically and methodically re-lieve that pleasure for themselves over and over. The overwhelming majority of serious griefers like grid-crashers, sexual predators, vindictive mafias are male. That's all there is to it. We all know that. No need to be politically correct about it.
Merely telling people the rules does take care of some who are belated socializers but it can't remove from them their absolute convinction that SL is an FPS game for them. So the only way to eliminate that conviction is to have really swift and persuasive punishment. That comes often merely in a ban, but it sometimes takes 3 days. I think the Lindens could successfully add to their existing menu of punishment leveling by having more 1 day or 3 day punishment and repeat punishment levels to try to train up this youth addicted to shooting other human beings. When they begin to see that their socializing with peers and access to content is withdrawn, they will put the guns away.
As for the older, persistent, psychopathic griefers, a harsher punitive regime of longer and swifter bans and permabans and hash-marking to determine alts is in order. The Lindens just need a more flexible punishment system to accommodate both styles of griefing.
Posted at 1:10PM on Nov 3rd 2006 by Prokofy Neva