My hat goes off to you, invisible hackers.
Speaking of hackers...more specifically visible ones who may not, in fact, be hackers...today's topic is sure to cause a zillion zit-faced youngsters to writhe, gnash their teeth and shatter their poor optical mice.
I speak of the few (many), the proud (not so much), the...
What is a "Griefer"?
The kind of griefing I'm going to focus on is griefing in games. I could go on for Illiads worth of epic prose if I was going to address all onling griefing ever.
Griefing in onling games is a kind of emergent gameplay which is basically exactly what it sounds like. It's strategies or methods of playing a game outside of the original design, or ones that develop from an interaction of basic game elements. A (less malevolent) example of this would be the online economies of games like World of Warcraft. Items increase and decrease in value, just like a real world economy. Further, items can become so valuable that people will pay REAL WORLD money to buy something that equates to a line of code stuck in a server somewhere.
Griefing, however, is simple maliciousness. Well...sometimes, very complex maliciousness. Basically, what a griefer does is live up to the name. Causes another player grief. This is accomplished in any number of ways, using game mechanics to generally ruin another player's day. For example, in team-based First-Person Shooters, doing damage to one's own team or generally getting inthe way of the team doing what they're supposed to.
Griefing is different from laming, which consists of just being ignorant of the rules or generally useless, as griefers choose their targets with focused maliciousness. Lamers are just stupid.
Anshe Chung CNET Interview on Second Life
Second Life was a masterpiece. The Sims had hit on something when they had made ordinary, happy people into mindless zombies slaving over the tiny lives of tiny little people babbling in their tiny little retard-speak. Second Life developers stroked what were no doubt stringy goatees soaked in the stench of pot and debauchery, toiling hard over what would be their next scheme to enslave mankind and put a Democrat in office. Then, it hit them. Why not make a game exactly like the Sims in every way, except with less complexity and much worse graphical interface, and call on people to give up their boring, mundane lives full of rewarding social interaction and opportunity that was not pre-programmed for a few shoddy textures thrown together into what looked vaguely like a human being.
Thus, Second Life was born.
Ailin Graef is the self-styled Rockefeller of Second Life, earning thousands of digital dollars, which convert into a modest salary for this tiny, extremely plain-looking asian girl. Her avatar, Anshe Chung, was brought in for a CNET interview in the only evironment she's every known a modicum of success...Second Life.
The crowd entered their sit commands and chose the emoticons indicating rapt attention. The interview started simple enough, Anshe gesturing jerkily and throwing in the odd, angular smile, when all of a sudden..
DISASTER!!
Griefing at its finest. And I mean, finest.
Final thought
I want to show some more examples, but that'll have to come later.
For now, begin rant:
I think this stuff is hilarious. The ideology of the griefer is to keep people from thinking that just because they've found six hours a day to sink into a digital world and have made hundreds of tens of dollars, real or fake, they are not a success. The highest of the high can be bowed by a bunch of code junkies with a chip in their shoulder and a great sense of irony.
Even if that irony sometimes comes in the form of giant, floating penises.
Griefing is obnoxious. Yes. I don't think anyone would say it wasn't. But you have to admit. It's pretty gol' darn hilarious. I think there's a griefer in all of us. We all have those moments where we just want to sock our boss in the face, even if our boss is the nicest, friendliest, most understanding sod in the world. We all want to knock a little kid's ice cream cone on the ground. We all want to ruin the enjoyment of others once and a while.
Thank Gore for the internet. If it weren't for the web, we'd all be off starting wars and subordinating minorities to do near-slave-labor.
More reading:
WIRED article on griefing - Excellent article, very well written and, I'm not ashamed to say, hilarious :)
No comments:
Post a Comment