
The Problem with Griefers - DanBC
https://www.gamestm.co.uk/discuss/the-problem-with-trolls/
======
anigbrowl
_I personally enjoy trolling other players because of the way something so
little can lead into such an over-the-top angry response_

that's odd, because it's people like this who seem the quickest to get upset
or abusive when they experience defeat. And i don't mean defeat through being
interrupted when they were pursuing some other game objective, but losing in
elective 1-on-1 contests (ie where you choose to go battle some random player
in an arena).

I got into one of those free-to-play games a few years ago and turned out to
be really good at it, so I kept advancing without spending any
money/subscriber points on upgrades. When I started beating people who had
crushed me without mercy as a newbie (but who I had never communicated with) I
would reliably receive torrents of abuse for no other reason than that I'd
won. As far as I can tell such people don't want to _win the game_ they want
to _be the winner_ , so once they've acquired basic competency they devote
most of their effort to bullying weaker players rather than improving their
competitiveness.

~~~
DanBC
But GeneralMinus, for example, probably isn't that good at playing the game.
He's excellent at poking exactly the people you mention - the ones who take it
so seriously.

~~~
anigbrowl
That's the opposite of what I'm saying and I don't know how you drew that
conclusion. I'm saying that griefers are precisely the people who get upset
when they lose _within_ the gameplay framework.

They take up griefing _because_ they are bad losers and griefing gives them a
way to 'win' \- through the social approval of other griefers, which is
reliable enough to slightly outweigh the social payoff from playing
unironically. In the griefing game the currency is the negative attentions of
non-griefing players, and the primary challenge is not getting banned by the
admins. It gives the griefers a sense of power by playing a meta-game whose
existence isn't obvious to other players, but without all the hard work of
actually setting up and running a game service.

They may be crap at whatever the original attractive game is, but they get to
be winners in the 'griefing game' by coopting the other players to be
unwilling participants. Ultimate victory is achieved if the game world becomes
so toxic that everyone else but the griefers eventually stop coming, at which
point the meta-opponents (ie the admins) have been 'beaten' and it's time to
move onto some other game and wreck that. This was a bit easier to observe
back in the days of dial-up MUDs when communities were smaller and you were
likely to run into the same people on multiple platforms.

~~~
__david__
You're espousing the "griefers grief because they aren't good at the game"
viewpoint, which is pretty reductive. There isn't one type of troll/griefer,
and it's not super useful to group them all together—it makes you draw
incorrect conclusions like the one you just made.

~~~
anigbrowl
If you expect to derive encyclopaedic results from explicitly anecdotal
observations then you might be suffering from pedantry and should schedule a
consultation with a licensed epistemologist ASAP.

------
js8
I stopped playing Minecraft on a public server because of griefers. While this
guy can rationalize his antisocial behavior as "people need to lighten up",
it's not really appreciated by others, who often invest their mental
concentration to the game.

Maybe there should be some sort of general gaming account (say Steam could
have that), like a credit score. People who troll others would be more likely
paired up with other trolls, if they so much enjoy company of "lightened up"
people.

~~~
ReverseCold
This exists. [1]

[1]: [http://www.mcbans.com/](http://www.mcbans.com/)

------
stcredzero
My ethos: If you can't enforce against it, then you co-opt it. Macro-miners?
Give them an API. Griefers? Why turn down people who are so motivated to
create interesting content for your game? Betrayal griefing could be co-opted
as a part of the game as the possession of certain players by "the enemy."

------
buzzybee
There are (roughly) four things that can be done about griefing, cheating, and
other toxic behaviors:

1\. Design a game where toxicity is naturally mitigated.

2\. Create limited spaces where people mutually agree on a code of conduct.

3\. Conduct yourself virtuously within your space, to the best of your
ability.

4\. When someone breaks the code of your space, quietly exile them to the
desert.

Ideally everything is possible with point 1 alone, but at scale you inevitably
encounter more and more persistent and skilled adversaries. Point 2 helps
reduce the scale factor. Point 3 controls atmosphere - if you allow yourself
to fly off the handle then you degrade the space. Point 4 is the last resort;
you want conduct to proceed along a planned trajectory, but they consistently
disrupt it. So the best you can do is remove them quickly and quietly before
things explode, because nobody can be counted on to follow point 3 all the
time and once it explodes the next hour or more will be spent discoursing over
vigilantism and victimization and rights and freedoms instead of whatever you
had planned.

The alternative - allow anything to happen and "let people suck it up" \-
basically encourages Lord of the Flies in microcosm, which is very, very bad
for a game. Somehow Twitter has managed to survive with it, though!

------
markbnj
Leeerooooy Jenkins! Seriously, this has been going on forever, and the number
one rule of trolls (and griefers are just trolls, as the piece points out) is
don't give them attention or the reaction they're looking for, and they go
away.

~~~
anigbrowl
I'm tired of that rule being trotted out. that's like saying the best response
to crime is to not let people steal your wallet or they'll keep doing it.
Well, duh, obviously, but a) you don't give any guidance on how to deal with
them when they're actively interfering with your and b) it's not like these
interactions happen in a vacuum or lack a systematic dimension.

'Just ignore it' is _not helpful advice_. It's an elaborate way of saying 'I
don't know what to do about this problem and that lack of ideas is making me
uncomfortable so please stop talking about it.'

~~~
DanBC
It's absolutely the best advice for this kind of trolling though.

They say themselves that most people (80%) don't respond.

[http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-01-04-meet-the-
griefe...](http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-01-04-meet-the-griefers-
article)

^^^> The thing is - just as the victims of prank TV shows mostly laugh things
off once the setup has been exposed - the griefers maintain that most people
simply find their online antics amusing. Obviously they pick the most extreme
reactions for their videos, but the majority of people just laugh at the
silliness on display. Far from being enraged, most gamers are good-humoured
enough that they simply play along.

^^^> Spartan Jay backs this up: "I would say that around 80 per cent of people
that play online games are troll-proof. I guess my videos give people an
unfair assumption of what the gaming community is really like. Most people I
come across on games are fairly chilled out people. Sometimes when making a
video, it can take over an hour before I find someone that will get angry over
my griefing."

When you say

> 'Just ignore it' is not helpful advice.

Well, it is helpful advice for this kind of trolling.

~~~
anigbrowl
Yes, according to the trolls, who I don't think are reliable or honest
people...because they're trolls.

 _the griefers maintain that most people simply find their online antics
amusing_

Isn't this like how bullies maintain that it's all in good fun? 'But it's just
a game' is the #1 excuse bullies give to evade responsibility for their anti-
social behavior. And besides, what if 80% of players do ignore it? why does
that give griefers and right to go about upsetting the 20% who find it
obnoxious or distressing? When griefers say 'they need to lighten up', why is
it they think _other people_ should change behavior in order to accommodate
the griefers' hunger for attention?

 _Well, it is helpful advice for this kind of trolling._

No it isn't. You don't explain how the person who has been targeted by
griefers is supposed to make up the lost time/health points/whatever, or how
they should go about blocking the griefing behavior from their in-game
sensorium. You're just handwaving the problem away and insisting you've solved
it.

Suppose your purpose here is not to actually discuss this but to troll me. By
my replying you got me to stay engaged - a winner is you! If I ignore it you
get to have the last word - a winner is you! I've lurked in enough griefer
forums to have a good idea of how the circle-jerking conversations there play
out.

Now maybe you don't understand the point I was making above and you can't see
what the big deal is, but if that's the case then endlessly restating your
argument isn't going to make you any the wiser.

------
cannonpr
There are generally quite a few forms of griefing, a popular one in Starcraft
was to join a game were people were trying to pad their score 5 humans vs 1
easy computer opponent, then to betray the humans in a 1v4 game (an easy
computer being irrelevant). There was a small asymmetric advantage, you were
preparing for a hard game, they were preparing for an easy one, it was still a
challenge though. What I am trying to point out here is that griefing is quite
complicated and just points out that not everyone gets their enjoyment of a
process by playing with the same rules as others.

~~~
anigbrowl
_not everyone gets their enjoyment of a process by playing with the same rules
as others_

aka cheating because anonymity allows one to get away with it.

If you want a game with different rules, find one. You don't get to invent new
rules for yourself or your buddies and then point to them as justification
when people call you out for behavior inconsistent with the rules _they_ had
agreed to.

I mean, suppose I used my 1337 skillz to look up your home address and then
came around one day and punched you in the nose? I doubt you'd be satisfied
with the excuse that I get my enjoyment by playing with different rules from
you about when physical violence is acceptable.

~~~
cannonpr
While I do feel bringing up physical violence is a bit out of bounds in this
conversation I can humour it. My point wasn't that I condone or condemn the
behaviour, simply that different things motivate different people and if you
wish to reduce a behaviour, a full understanding should come first. The
article explore a bit of that but not enough.

~~~
anigbrowl
I did choose it partly for the startle effect but also to capture the
unexpected character of the griefing behavior when it impinges upon someone
immersed in the game world. Maybe a better (if more absurd) example would be
shooting fireworks at players at a sports game, so they were trying to duck
bright-colored rockets rather than kicking or hitting or throwing a ball. It's
easy to see how this could be quite entertaining, but if it were to become a
regular thing it would get increasingly annoying to the people who wanted to
watch a ball game of some sort, and doubly so to the people who had devoted
themselves to playing at a professional level.

The basic problem with griefing is that it depends on the unwillingness of
some participants for its entertainment value to the other participants. The
non-physicality of this violence - which is often merely replaced by imaginary
violence - doesn't make it OK. It's still a violation insofar as it
circumvents the agreed-upon rules of the game environment.

~~~
cannonpr
I kind of agree in the "depends on the unwillingness of some participants"
however to play is to often discover the boundaries and the rules of the game.
As people often discover in sports, the rules aren't what is written in the
little referees book. After all 'griefing' or as sports people call it,
fouling, is very much a part of the tactics, Many players have made a career
and been rewarded for being good at it. Again, I am not condoning it, I am
just expressing that 'griefing' is probably within the boundaries of 'play',
while for example, I tend to find that direct trolling and personal insults or
threats are not as they are designed to directly injure someones concept of
them selves or their world. Perhaps we just draw the boundary at slightly
different places, however society usually accepts kicking someones sandcastle
down more than punching them in the face. For what it counts I eventually
classified griefing as a relatively immature behaviour, although games like
Neocron, where 'griefing' or in other words all out PVP was allowable, were
interesting. I much prefer your fireworks example lol.

------
ktRolster
_His research details that 59.5 per cent of gamers have intentionally trolled_

That's actually higher than I expected.

------
DanBC
You can't use the CJ phrase - it autokills your comments.

~~~
dang
We unkilled that comment and detached this subthread from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13251962](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13251962)
and marked it off-topic.

