Ganking the Meaning out of Games

Steven "Play No Evil" Davis, in a great comment on Mark Wallace's thread, asked the following question:

Is griefing simply emergent play that some folks don't like?

I think this is an interesting question to pursue, and I'm going to take a somewhat provocative stance and answer "no," partly to explore some territory and partly because I think there's a case to be made against griefing that doesn't founder on a libertarian objection (i.e., that if some people do something in a low-consequence environment, then it must be fun to them/their choice, and therefore must be okay).

I should state at the outset that studying cheating, griefing, and similar topics is not a principal part of my research, and there are several esteemed folks around here that do it, so I hope to learn from them if they'd like to weigh in. Here, I'm just following through on some ideas that have been percolating on meaning and games, and how they might help us answer Steven's question.

To begin this speculation, the first thing I'm going to do is narrow the topic a fair bit. Rather than discuss "griefing" in the broad sense, I'm going to focus on one activity in MMOGs that is often seen as griefing: ganking. Very specifically, I'm talking about a human player, piloting a higher-level/better geared toon, attacking a toon that is much lower level, without any other circumstances (game objectives and narratives), histories (they, or their guilds, know each other or similar), or players (on either side) involved. This is simply the killing (frequently, one-shotting) of another toon by a vastly more powerful toon. I'm drawing my sense of this phenomenon from the open PvP servers of World of Warcraft -- other games/server types may vary considerably and interestingly.

What I would like to suggest is that this kind of PvP is meaningless. Or, perhaps more precisely, that the meaning it has is so narrow, rationalized, and improverished that it is outside of, or rejects, the game in which it is situated. Games, as ends in and of themselves, are things that can generate new meanings and experiences. For the ganker, however, ganking is a means to other ends ("Personal best crit!"), not a potentially generative new experience. (And, by the way, please keep in mind that I am not talking about all PvP -- there are many other kinds, both institutionally designed by the developer and emergent, which would not fit with the argument I'm making here.)

I'm speculating that ganking happens when a player who does not want to be challenged to play a game (i.e., encounters where the outcome is contingent), instead opts to do something where the outcome is a foregone conclusion: kill a player that is vastly lower in capabilities. If meaning is found at the meeting point of inherited systems of interpretation (cultural expectations) and the performative demands of singular circumstances (something I talked about here), then ganking is a denial of that meaning. It is a retreat from the demands of the new, and it signals a disposition that does not want to be performatively challenged. Ganking lower level players is, then, a somewhat pathetic attempt to feel, well, something. But that something is not the meaning that participating in a challenging game would create -- it is removed from that. If there is no contingency, it follows that there is no meaning -- all you have left is an impoverished environment where pointless negative reciprocity (I was ganked at L24, so I’ll gank at L60) reigns.

It might be argued against this that an environment of open PvP, rather than erasing contingency, actually spawns it, generating a wide open landscape of ganking possibility for the lower level players. This would be a way to argue that there is still a game, on a broader level, and it is a cat-and-mouse game. The difference in capabilities once the battle is joined is not in question -- the cat wins -- but the game is actually about avoiding that encounter (thanks to David Simkins for voicing this argument to me). This is an interesting way to go, and I agree that it can turn out this way, under certain game design conditions. I would argue, however (again, I'm being provocative to see where this leads), that in WoW this doesn't hold, because the architecture of the game is not very flexible about alternative places to go to accomplish objectives. The quests for any given level are in a small set of vastly distributed places, and the transportation costs (in time) for low level characters are high. This means that if someone is trying to get quests done in Stranglethorn Vale, there is not a viable game in avoiding the gankers -- they have every advantage also in the "meta" game of cat-and-mouse. For most players, this means that the ganking feels, again, like a foregone conclusion, it is only the question of when it will happen that is utterly contingent (that is, too contingent). In neither aspect is there a performative challenge for the gankee or the ganker. One is left with either too much determination, or too much chaos; either way leads to a loss of meaning.

So why does it happen at all, if it's so meaningless? To answer this, one would have to make a normative, critical claim (and goodness knows those are popular around here). One would have to say that what happens is that the game objectives get replaced by utterly personal objectives, individualistic and empty goals that are the simulacra of actual (new) meaning. Gankers, this argument would say, are getting their jollies in an endless circle of confirming their own expectations, mistaking the increasing number of notches on their belt for actual personal development. In fact, this line of reasoning would argue, they are each stuck in an iron cage of false objectives.

Now, I can spin this argument out, and understand how to get from point A to point B, and it's consistent with my experience and preferences. But, on the other hand, I have lots of friends who enjoy open PvP, even the random but inevitable ganking part of it, so I hesitate. I'm also certainly one to be wary of normative claims about other people's experiences ("Yes, yes -- you say you're having a good time, but you're really just deluding yourself").

On the other hand, the argument that if people choose to do something in these domains it is just a different "style of gameplay," and therefore morally unassailable, also rubs me the wrong way. It seems to rest not only on a separation of play from real experience (and I have a whole set of strong empirical objections to that view), but also on a modernist, individualistic ethic -- it's all about the individual experience, this seems to say, and that should be our final arbiter of all matters ethical.

I don't have any real answers here, but I'm quite taken with the notion that ganking is, effectively, not a game, and with thinking through the consequences for meaning and experience that follow from this. To what extent this could be extended to other kinds of griefing, I'm not sure, but it does seem to me that quite a few players out there actually don't seem to want to play a game at all.

Comments

[Smokey]

Some people are just dicks, don't overthink it.

[Thomas Malaby]

@Smokey: Lol. Well, that's certainly my strategy when I'm playing.

[Bruce Baugh]

Makes excellent sense, Thomas. I'm not opposed to the "I don't actually want to play a game" attitude - I've been known to log on when I'm tired and frustrated, and just want to beat the snot out of something without worrying about it. It's the doing it at someone else's expense that I'm opposed to; I think it's better to take it out on software that doesn't care (like running low-level instances for things to disenchant).

[JuJutsu]

"I'm not sure, but it does seem to me that quite a few players out there actually don't seem to want to play a game at all."

To tie it back to the emergent gameplay article, I know [second hand] of one instance where the ganking was part of an intra-guild contest to 'collect kills' from a list of professions [back when SWG had professions]. Given my knowledge of the people in the other guild I'd have to say it also supports the "Smokey Model" of ganking.

[dave]

"So why does it happen at all, if it's so meaningless?"

Because as children we watch ganking in cartoons. Then we grow up and watch ganking in the movies. We are told that movies are only pretend and we can't act out the behaviors we see on the screen.

Then, we are placed in front of a tv like device and given the opportunity to engage in the very same behavior that we have witnessed but been denied.

What red-blooded kid wouldn't gank?

On a data related note: I wonder what a comparison of gankers vs. non gankers would show on some measure of empathy?

[Matt Mihaly]

Ganking is no more or less meaningless than killing a dragon to get a piece of virtual armor. One activity is just less likely to annoy others.

--matt

[Thomas Malaby]

I disagree, Matt (as the whole piece lays out). Killing the dragon is not (necessarily, or even ordinarily) a foregone conclusion.

[Miraj]

Ganking is an effective method of quickly attracting the attention of more powerful players. Cause enough havoc and it saves you the trouble of searching for a good fight.

When I ganked in games where looting was possible (uo, shadowbane, eve), I did it as an alternative to farming. Players are potentially intelligent and potentially suprising; killing mobs is masturbation.

[Thomas]

Killing lowlevel players is also just masturbation. None of you seem to consider the power-fantasy of it.

Probably gankers are people with a desire to "get back" at life and other people. They feel strong this way.

[Cael]

Lvl 60 killing lvl10 is just as much masturbation if not, to use Scott Jennings' particularly piquant phrase, "rape simulation".

[Timothy Burke]

I think to some extent you define away the ambiguity here by excluding all "game-proper" practices which might still be labeled or understood as ganking by some of the participants. (e.g., killing other players no matter how weak they are if they are contesting your ability to extract resources; killing other players when they are in situations of relative hopelessness such as deep in a fight with a difficult mob; repeatedly killing other players who are far weaker than oneself as retaliation for that player having ganked others weaker than himself). There are a great many practices that many players might refer to as "ganking" which nevertheless have pretty sound competitive justifications. (Where the use of the word "gank" is partially about saying that when I get killed in a vulnerable situation, it was a gank; when I kill someone else in a vulnerable situation that is in my mind competitively justified, I won a fight.)

Even in the narrow definition that you propose, I could see a kind of tendentious reply from certain gankers who might claim that they were attempting to inhibit the competitive capacity of an opposing faction by slowing the advancement of all players on that faction. (e.g., a level 70 Alliance player ganking level 20ish Blood Elf paladins and defending his actions as a competitive attempt to slow the Horde from getting paladins into higher level PvP). It would be fair to see that as a tissue-thin alibi rather than a genuinely ludic understanding of behavior, but then we're increasingly forced into a context where we're trying to sort "play" from "sociality" in a fashion that mirrors attempts to sort "erotica" from "pornography". In both cases, this quickly becomes a fig leaf disguising a more ordinary kind of evaluative claim, that one practice is good and the other bad.

Which means Smokey is kind of right--that the smarter play might be to just talk about this as a moral claim about behavior than as a ludic claim about what is or is not a game.

[Hirebrand]

Perhaps the players are fulfilling their role as soldiers in a game of war, or perhaps they are ganking to draw out suitable opponents from the opposite side.

[J L Borghead]

Ganking isn't just for kids. My coworker(he's in his late 30s) usually chats with me about his latest successes with his warlock on a WoW pvp server. Before the expansion came out he told me how every now and then he would sometimes gank "noobs" if he was particularly bored.

Now that the expansion has arrived he is more focused on leveling up his character. In this case the game is suitably engaging enough to keep my coworker occupied. Seeing his behavior before the expansion, I think boredom can be a major catalyst for ganking. I know he isn't the only one on a pvp server that was temporarily distracted by the sudden availability of new content & advancement. But regular game content (even non-trivial PvP) can only keep a player engrossed for so long. As a result, people do things that are trivial within the game structure - like ganking. I'm not saying that there aren't malicious people that enjoy ganking more than the game. I just think that a lot of times people are just looking for ways to amuse themselves. Developers cannot create unlimited content on their own.

@Miraj - I think the kind of ganking Thomas is describing is the completely trivial kind - i.e. I walk up to you, hit one key on my keyboard and you die instantly. UO, since it wasn't based on a level system, did not have the kind of ridiculously uneven odds that ganking in WoW has. Looking at the games you mentioned, I think this kind of ganking would bore you fairly quickly.

[Russell]

I belive it is simply playing out a power fantasy.

Many people are not "powerful" in their everyday lives. They may be physically weak, unattractive (ergo weak in sexual prowess), work under a boss (most everyone submits to a boss of some kind), etc.

And so the act of exercising extraordinary power over another player is in and of itself gratifying.

Having said that, In all the various MMOs I've played, I choose not to play on wild-PVP servers. Being ganked is so onerous to me, that it only serves to frustrate what would otherwise be a pleasant gaming experience, and thus is counter-productive. Being ganked outweighs, the fun that might be derrived from ganking.

Of course, having said *THAT* going on a rampage every so often and taking out lower level things (players or monsters) can be a hoot!

In general, I love a game that pits me against other players, as opposed to AI, but its only fun when they are on a relatively same skill level as myself. (gaking/being ganked is not as fun as pulling out a close call victory)

[Modulo]

Gaming is like a horse. The quests/missions are the bit and bridle that determine where you go, and ganking is the spurs that encourage you to get there faster. That's a crappy analogy but it's the best I could think of on the spur of the moment (no pun intended).

[ashok]

Would it constitute a proof that ganking is not a part of game behavior if less people played because of ganking?

I realize that such a thought is suspect, because some games have high entry costs that keep people away anyway, and are still games (i.e. to learn the rules and understand why certain strategies in chess are effective, others not, takes an incredible amount of time).

Further, does massive multiplayer online gaming have an idea of community built into it? After all, a chess player that acted like a ganker - perhaps challenging people from ages 5-10 into a game and dusting them (I do this, they're the only competition I can beat on Yahoo chess, I really suck and actually lose a few of these) - might make chess less fun to play for some, against him, but he could be steered around (unless you're on Yahoo Chess and are like 10), and that has no consequences for the game's reputation as a whole.

I dunno. I could be talking about apples and oranges, and Wittgenstein famously asked in the Investigations about the meaning of the word "game" and came to the conclusion haha.

[Ryan Hart]

As an avid ganker and a fan of ganking (and being ganked on some strange level), I can say that I gank as an Orc Warlock for a lot of reasons. I'll list some here.

1) Because the friends that I might be helping want to vicariously live the kill through their higher level guardian.
2) Because the alliance are scum and need to die (for RP purposes.)
3) Because watching another player die, looking at my friends in the same run and saying "Enjoy the run back!" is just fun.
4) Because I can. Because if I press '4' on my keyboard, it puts Corruption on someone who can't do anything about it. I get to reaffirm the strength of my character by proving to myself (and presumably to the victim) that I have achieved a level of power that makes it so simple, so easy to kill someone.

Ganking is definitely emergent gameplay, I suppose I either don't understand or don't agree with Thomas here.

What seems to be totally ignored in the above article is the situation where a high level toon approaches a character he could presumably "one-shot," but doesn't. Why wouldn't he? This question is just as important as why he would.

I know that I OFTEN run right by players that I could kill without a doubt and at no expense to me. Why don't I kill them if it wouldn't even take me any more time?

Furthermore, here's a situation I run into a lot when I'm the victim. I will often expend great resources and take great risks to try to get away from someone trying to gank me. If I know that this person can't one shot me, I go to great lengths to get away from them. Some of my most fond memories from playing many hours of World of Warcraft are the great escapes that I've made!

Ganking is by no means a foregone conclusion.

[ick]

How is ganking ( as defined by the OP ) any different than the following real life behaviors?

* 8th graders bullying 2nd graders?
* people who kill/torture innocent creatures needlessly?
* soliders killing/torture innocent civilians / POWs?

The difference between ganking in virtual worlds (as it exists today) and ganking in the real life is that in virtual worlds, there are no consequences to the ganker. In fact, the consequences can be more fun (e.g. more global PVP actions, be famous/infamous...)

I speculate that people's social behavior in these sort of games is how they would behave in a world without consequences. In a virtual world, they can justify it as part of the game play (e.g. they ask for it by rolling on a PVP server, they are evil bad guys, no one gets hurt, it's just a game...) but really, their behavior is just a reflection of who they are (IMHO).

[Peter Weijnen]

Your take on wether or not ganking equals griefing should logically depend on what you see as the 'game'.

Of course, that assumes that you also consider 'ganking' the use of mutliple characters to compete with singlular ones, or the use of larger teams to compete with smaller ones, in such combinations that the larger numbers do not simply offset another advantage the smaller team has.

Anyway, assuming that this meaning of the work 'ganking', which is as far as I know the more correct use of the two, there's a fairly strong case to be made in defence of this strategy especially in games that base in part on competition on a team level where for exmaple combat has significant economic impact.

An example. If my team competes with yours. And if the use of a ganking-based tactic that gives me an unfair edge (unfair in terms of my side having a definate advantage in a single competitive encounter), will decide the singular encounter in question with my team winning it then that can by no means be equalled to being 'griefing' since that encounter is but one of a series in an ongoing competition between two teams that may start out equal in a broader scope.

As such ganking cannot be stated to be griefing. Such definition would totally depend on the context of broader gameplay, even if the singular encounter is a foregone conclusion because of the use of ganking tactics.

[Deniticus]

Ganking is just virtual bullying and a mostly manifestation of the same sociopathy. In the RL, its probably the result of a cycle of oppression and subjugation, so the bully lashes out in the virtual world against the defenseless.

In the RL, its addressed by social constructs-- parents, schools, other groups in the case of "minor bullying" and by the rule of law in the case of "major bullying."

Whereas the shame factor or shunning may have an impact in RL, it really has no impact in the game world unless the devs build a meaningful shame/dishonor system into the game (i.e., a PCs negative actions result in negative rep such that some faction's NPCs become KoS or NPC goods and services become expensive of unavailable).

Likewise, there generally hasn't been any sort of rule of law that devs have applied that could prevent this kind of bullying. Similar to the reputational hit though, as a proxy for the long arm of the law and a clear penalty for bad behavior, big angry vindictive capricious gods could smote offending players in a fit of divine justice (e.g., lowbie X is a devotee of diety Y; gets ganked by player Z who gets smoted by diety Y, loses faction, item durability, cursed for a period of time, loss of xp, etc.).

Something like this doesn't prevent the slaughter of the innocents (especially if there might be some tactical reason for it) but attaches consequences to it such that it is not simply an idle act of boredom.

[Raph]

I wrote an article in response to this, but the trackback isn't showing up. Therefore:

Ganking, meaning, and playing as you are

[Prokofy Neva]

Moral relativism.

[Tom Boellstorff]

Good piece, Thomas, and this isn't moral relativism, Prok - we've got to be able to sustain both descriptive and prescriptive modes of argumentation or we won't get anywhere. I appreciate Thomas stepping out of his comfort zone and starting a discussion on a topic that by his own admission isn't the focus of his research. I think that's one of the best things that these kinds of fora are for and it inspires me to take the risk someday. What makes the piece particularly useful in my opinion is the focus on ganking. I've been working on a rough typology of griefing - of forms of sociality commonly glossed as "griefing" - and this is one important kind, quite distinct from, say, racist speech, sexual assault, trying to crash the grid, spamming a group im, etc. Thinking through such rough typologies and how they apply within and between various virtual worlds will, I suspect, be an interesting and fruitful line of inquiry. Okay, gotta run to a meeting with the head of the Indonesian National AIDS Commission here in Java (not the program lol, conceptual whiplash)...

[Dermo]

I just wonder at the idea that someone performs a completely meaningless task in the context of a game because they are bored. If they are bored by the game why not shut it down and play something else? Is it sunk costs due to the subscription?

[Prokofy Neva]

Of course it's moral relativism. Thomas is being incredibly morally relativistic here. I've explained ad nauseum how this "griefing" that he is imagining in some haloed metaverse as "emergent play" is just plain, ordinary, banal evil, and plain, ordinary, garden-variety crime of the sort that police really prosecute in the really real world. Yet he's not conceding that, and staying blinkered inside a walled-garden type of game and discussing this -- when in fact we already see anecdotally how in places like South Korea and Russia, the game disputes and rivalries break out into real life and people even kill others in real life.

Saying that griefing may be just something positive that someone hasn't learned to recognize yet because they aren't open-minded enough is tantamount to saying that terrorism isn't terrorism in RL, and isn't wrong, because the terrorists are poor, have unhappy childhoods, and have ecstatic religious beliefs and special cultures that we should all just learn to understand, and we should all just change our policies to suit them because otherwise they unleash terrorism. It's a terrible sliding scale that adapts to an evil without identifying it, even.

[Prokofy Neva]

Tom, I hope you and your colleagues are ok and didn't get affected by the flood, BTW!

The typologies of griefing might seem like an interesting academic study to you. To me, they're a business loss. To many others, they constitute bullying that drives them out of a world. It's wrong.

[Thomas Malaby]

@Prok: (You haven't responded to several other recent responses from me, so I don't hold out much hope here...) You didn't read the original post carefully enough. You are attributing to me the *opposite* of the view I speculate (admittedly, with some ambivalence) about.

Lots of great comments -- thank you. I'll respond when I have a bit more time.

[magicback (Frank)]

Thomas, you said:

"For most players, this means that the ganking feels, again, like a foregone conclusion, it is only the question of when it will happen that is utterly contingent (that is, too contingent). In neither aspect is there a performative challenge for the gankee or the ganker. One is left with either too much determination, or too much chaos; either way leads to a loss of meaning."

Why does this leads either way to a loss of meaning?

Also, as Timonthy state, where one does not see meaning others may see or "delude themselves" a certain meaning in actions.

And as Ryan Hart asks, "why not?"

Removing any moral conditions, consequences, contingencies, hacks, or exploits, it's an act allowed by gameplay mechanics. Comparatively, it could be the same as an assassin skipping, hopping, and picking flowers (use-based skill systems).

Frank

[ErikC]

Aren't there ever anti-griefers? Self-designated virtual vigilantes or Virtualantes (hehe) who lie in wait or chase prospective griefers and give them a taste of their own medicine?

If so, this playing out of human behaviour, may not make for Disneyfication, but it is interesting to me at least. And if as drama it interests players, the griefer vs antigriefer (virtualante) scenario may make the initial business loss worthwhile on a macro scale, bringing new players to the operation.

[ErikC]

Aren't there ever anti-griefers? Self-designated virtual vigilantes or Virtualantes (hehe) who lie in wait or chase prospective griefers and give them a taste of their own medicine?

If so, this playing out of human behaviour, may not make for Disneyfication, but it is interesting to me at least. And if as drama it interests players, the griefer vs antigriefer (virtualante) scenario may make the initial business loss worthwhile on a macro scale, bringing new players to the operation.

[J L Borghead]

@Dermo: While the money invested in a subscription-based MMORPG makes us reluctant to quit a game, I think the social aspects of the game are what keeps us around long after the game loses its initial appeal. There's a strong desire to stick with a game in order to play with the guild or other friends.

[John Arras]

Um, I think this is being overanalyzed. If we assume that people act much as they do in real life in games, and that some people are just assholes who need to pick on things that are smaller and weaker than them, then these people are just acting out those desires in the game. Probably because there isn't anything in their real life that they can abuse. They even justify it with the same kinds of things that rl abusers do: "it was done to me so I'm going to do it to someone else".

I used to enjoy open PvP and ganking a long time ago on MUDs, but as time went on, it stopped being fun, so I won't play on open PvP games anymore. I think there are differences in how I viewed people, and I consider growing up to be the process of repeatedly realizing you're being a douchebag and deciding to not be a douchebag in that way anymore. I expect many gankers will grow out of it, but some are just sick.

[Prokofy Neva]

No, Thomas, not at all, not at all. I see right through y your gambit. Merely *asking* the question is *already* to admit, give permission to, entertain, allow, and bless moral relativism.

You then try to dance around it and say "I'll answer no, even without tripping up on my libertarianism.

If I haven't answered a post, it's not deliberate. Sometimes there is just such a huge amount of noise on these blogs that signals are missed, or else I'm just busy.

Your entertaining this thesis and enabling legions of idiots to imply there is something "progressive" about griefing is what makes universities so dangerous and destructive to the minds of youth, and brings our nations to such perilous states.

Seriously, Thomas, how do you think this works? Just now, in WoW, I see my son struggling in frustration to do some action with a pet he's taming or something. And some griefer comes along and wilds him, disturbs the pet, prevents him from doing the taming or whatever it was -- "just because". "Why is he doing that?" I ask, thinking of Terra Nova. "Could he be in fact engaging in an emergent form of play that perhaps you just don't ask?" I inquire.

My son stares at me. "No, he's just being an asshole," he explains. Like, wow, dude, that's all it is.

So how could this work? You imagine, oh, religious sects persecuted in Europe for being sects or infidels or unbelievers who flee to America and set up a new, idealistic country, and you say, see, the powers-that-be thought they were infidels, dissidents, griefers, but hey, in fact they were just creative, forging a new belief system. Ok, so pursuing that analogy, imagine, oh, Australia, full of criminals. Or, hmm, the breakdown of sexual mores in the 1960s. Or gay liberation in the 1980s. Sure, they had their side effects like AIDS and whatnot, but hey, on balance, isn't it all good? Somebody said it was griefing and behaviour they didn't like, but they were just Puritans, and they shouldn't get in the way of people's emergent sense of fun.

Except...when you have someone who forces you to look at a shower of tubgirl pictures (or log off) or defaces your real-life picture, where's the good? Where's the progress? Where's the art? Where's the gay liberation? The breaking of chains of conformity to forge new belief systems?

No, there's none of it. It's just laughing at someone's misfortune, taking glee in causing them grief. It's just being an asshole, and you cannot improve upon that 14-year-old's wisdom about WoW one whit.

[Prokofy Neva]

*just don't like

[Lapsus]

Its no more, and nothing less than virtual vandalism. The act is as meaningful. Who cares if a window is broken and then is replaced? The person who replaced it and the person who gained satisfaction from breaking it.

In the end, its the same. No consequence, something of value to one or few people is broken for a time and then mended. Feelings are hurt, but little more than that.

Lets continue the analogy a bit. How many times would it take for your mailbox to be knocked down before you decided to move? What if you were renting? What if you were just crashing on a friends couch?

How many times would you have to be ganked to consider leaving a game you've invested some time in? What if you'd just bought the game and were in your "free" month of introductory play? What if it was a trial preview with a buddy key?

The only way you can leave a mark on a static game world is through the people you interact with, for good or for ill.

Perhaps they're just carving their initials in it.

[Jen Dornan]

I will admit, I too have some strange affection for gankers because I love the great escape. My favorite game play moment in my personal history of gaming is when I somehow managed to kill a player 9 levels above me when he/she tried to kill me in the middle of an NPC battle. I do, however, believe that most gankers are fundamentally children (no matter their biological age) who just want to make someone else feel lousy.

That said I don’t agree with some comments here. Perhaps I’m taking things too far but I’ll ask – are MMOs really just games? If so, then I think we can discuss things like ganking in terms of emergent game play and can compare PKing to killing an NPC dragon or picking flowers.

But, the second we start discussing these virtual worlds in terms of genuine community, places of real human sociality and the like, don’t we have to acknowledge that things like ganking can also have potentially real consequences? Just like bullying on the school yard where no “real” damage is done, I do think the human needs and emotions often tied to games shouldn’t be ignored. I am very uncomfortable with arguments that rely on the statement “it’s only a game” at their foundation when I find so much of human society reflected, reproduced, and even sometimes created whole cloth in virtual worlds.

[Anemos]

"I think there's a case to be made against griefing that doesn't founder on a libertarian objection (i.e., that if some people do something in a low-consequence environment, then it must be fun to them/their choice, and therefore must be okay)."

This is not a libertarian argument. Libertarians believe anything is alright as long as it does not negatively effect another person. Then you are infringing on his natural rights.

Sorry I'm not sure if this is important to your point, but that is more of an anarchist argument.

[Thomas Malaby]

@Prok: I don't know who you're talking to, but it's not me. /shrug

[Prokofy Neva]

Why can't you take responsibility for encouraging griefers, Thomas? Of course I'm talking to you.

[Prokofy Neva]

BTW, Thomas, let me break it down to you again, since your constant refrain is that I have "misread" you or "not read you" as if always, there is some uber subtle reading of your text just aruond the corner beyond reach.

Not so.

When you write something like this:

>On the other hand, the argument that if people choose to do something in these domains it is just a different "style of gameplay," and therefore morally unassailable, also rubs me the wrong way.

everything seems fine -- good work!

Then you elaborate:

>It seems to rest not only on a separation of play from real experience (and I have a whole set of strong empirical objections to that view), but also on a modernist, individualistic ethic -- it's all about the individual experience, this seems to say, and that should be our final arbiter of all matters ethical.

Yes, the word salading you can see here, the deliberate misreading, the refusing to accept the obvious in good faith; the inability to share a concept like "real life crime" and a constant literalist, trolling bantering about it being some sword or helm -- see it all here in spades.

But then, having said these good things, that require a moral fortititude to carry through on, you then undo it all with this:

>I don't have any real answers here.

Why? You just gave your answers. There's really something to be said for standing up to bullies, standing up for meaning, standing up for universality, standing up for empirical information that shows this word-salad post-modernist noir griefing stuff is the Big Lie.

And yet you won't take that extra step. Instead, you make it seem like it's just an interesting Thursday afternoon seminar.

[Cael]

Stop derailing, Prokofy. Grind your axe somewhere else.

[Daztur]

I think a lot of you are missing a lot of ramifications here.

In Classical political-economic theory a State of Nature once existed in which people could gank each other more or less at will and there was very little recourse for the gankees (see Hobbes, Locke, etc.).

All of this wasn't much fun for the gankees (nor for a lot of gankers, who got ganked by someone one step higher up the food chain or when his guard was down) and in order to avoid getting ganked people agreed upon Social Contracts in which they would provide each other with mutual protection and get rid of the gankers.

If you remove the possibility of ganking you remove the primary reason for societies to form. By removing the primary reason for tight-knit societies to form you cut off a whole category of emergent gaming off at the knees.

Now games in which its impossible for players to leave the state of nature (its too easy for gankers to come right back and keep on ganking no matter how many times you kill them) aren't good but neither are games that shove players into a sort of Eden in which the kind of ganking that kick-starts societies isn't much good either.

What's needed is for there always be the danger of ganking but also have there be things that people can do about it (just like in the real world). In games in which you have this (for example swaths of 0.0 space with no NPC stations) you have the most complex societies and the most interesting examples of emergent gaming. For example BoB was able to set up the first large-scale taxation system I've ever heard of in a MMORPG with their slave corps.

[Prokofy Neva]

'I told you, Winston,' he said, 'that metaphysics is not your strong point. The word you are trying to think of is solipsism. But you are mistaken. This is not solipsism. Collective solipsism, if you like. But that is a different thing: in fact, the opposite thing. All this is a digression,' he added in a different tone. 'The real power, the power we have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but over men.' He paused, and for a moment assumed again his air of a schoolmaster questioning a promising pupil: 'How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?'

Winston thought. 'By making him suffer,' he said.

'Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery is torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always -- do not forget this, Winston -- always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- for ever.'

George Orwell, 1984

[Cael]

Now THAT was worthwhile! Thanks.

[Cael]

And i should really assert some power over hitting the return key...

Orwell knew what Winston Smith did not. One does not assert power over another man only by making him suffer - in fact, i'd call that the crudest and least satisfying form of power - but rather by asserting control.

Personal preference is obviously a major factor in the type of control asserted (some prefer overt which is also, to my mind, crude and rather risible, whereas some prefer covert - the act of making someone else think he's doing his own will when in fact he merely carries out yours).

Control is equally possible in online games but requires a fairly forceful personality and a degree of intelligence which i tend to assume is beyond the casual ganker.

We're all after control online and offline. Online it is a matter of playing the developer's game (asserting control over the mechanics) or not (asserting control over the only mutable part of the environment - your fellow players).

I guess to those who have killed off any remaining semblances of a braincell by grinding through to uber, ganking is the most accessible form of control.

[Tom Boellstorff]

Prok - first, thanks for asking about the floods! People who are interested can check out my blog: tomsindoblog.blogspot.com. I got out before it was too bad, but had a couple close calls with the water and I have friends who have lost everything. It's hard to see and I'm doing what I can to comfort them.

Now let me try to moderate this a bit and please forgive me-Prok, Thomas, and everyone else-if I mangle things. This is sorta fun for me because I can't access sl worth a damn from Indonesia at the moment so this is my fix.

Prok, you know how much I respect you and I know all of the amazing stuff you do in sl. I have seen you do positive things inside of sl that most people on these blogs don't see, and frankly I think you have made some of the most insightful analyses of sl culture out there. I will always stick up for you because I know what you do inside sl. But you're talking past Thomas's post.

Thomas's analysis is emphatically *not* moral relativism, which is a very misunderstood concept anyway. It dates to the early twentieth century and references Einstein's theory of relativity and its implications for a point of view (nothing slippery about it). Trying to understand why people do X is not the same thing as condoning X and there's nothing slippery about it. Trying to stand in someone else's shoes-to see the world from their eyes-doesn't mean you think standing in them is right or enjoyable or that you mean to stand there in your own life. This is what Susan Harding calls studying "the repugnant other" (in my book manuscript I talk about this at greater length). There has been some wonderful research by anthropologists, sociologists, criminologists, etc., on racist skinhead groups, hackers, men who physically abuse their wives, etc., with the goal of understanding why what they do makes sense to them within the cultural logics that shape their thinking. The effort to understand those cultural logics has nothing to do with supporting or not supporting those cultural logics. That is the crucial difference between descriptive and proscriptive argumentation I mentioned in my earlier post.

Thomas's post is an important and insightful contribution and like any such good contribution it is stimulating debate and hopefully further research and analysis. But it's not cultural relativism unless my still-lingering jet lag has totally scrambled my head. In my HIV work, for instance, I and others have studied people who engage in behaviors I find immoral and repulsive, and in the right contexts I and others say so, but there are also contexts where one is trying to understand the logic behind their thinking without judging it at that moment. That's not Orwellian. In fact, it saves lives.

Even the most "descriptive" analysis has proscriptive implications in some way, and even the most "prescriptive" analysis typically engages in some descriptive analysis, but that doesn't mean everything is sliding into everything else. Genres of writing and analysis do exist. They do different kinds of work. Not everyone likes writing or reading work in those various genres. Work in any genre can be good or bad in various ways, but it's not fair to condemn the genre as a whole imho.

Part of what Terra Nova and similar sites obviously can be is sites for a different kind of intellectual exchange, one that pushes established boundaries. I have to say I'm not convinced it's a successful experiment so far, but there is amazing potential, and the posts by Thomas and several other writers have been good examples of this. I include many of Prok's Second Thoughts posts in this category as well. Speaking of other blogs more than this one, I find the potshots and digressions less helpful.

[Mathew Reuther]

I mainly lurk but something struck me as amusing while reading this thread.

Prokofy Neva engages in a refined form of ganking on a what seems to be a daily basis. Forum ganking. That is: the blind-side attack launched upon an individual who (in their own eyes) is minding their own business and not spouting off with any support for this, that, or the other evil found within the VWs. Yet along comes Prok wielding the mighty "argument of smiting +6" and whoops . . . ganked.

Something I've learned is that you can't know what someone is thinking. Which is what makes discussions like these ultimately theoretical exercises unless they're combined with serious research (something which is not my bag to be honest) . . . so why Prok insists upon knowing the hidden meaning behind people's words is beyond me.

[Peter Crowther]

A newbie here, bounced to this article by a referral from another blog. I'm a player on WoW, but have run my own MUD since early 1990. We saw (and occasionally see, and have had to develop administrative systems to manage) griefing - and, when the combat system was enabled, ganking - on a regular basis. So I guess I'm coming at this from a MUD PoV rather than a MMOG PoV.

Why do people do it? Ultimately, because they're playing a (variety of) different game(s) from the nominal one. One has to draw a sharp distinction between the player and the player's (potentially multiple) avatars/characters/toons on different servers and different games. The player may have had a bad day at work/school and want to kick something; they may have communication difficulties and therefore use different means of gaining attention (we've had a couple of folks like this on my MUD); they may be control freaks (like me) who prefer to have mastery over something and don't especially like the challenge, but who still fancy indulging in a spot of PvP. This driver for the *player* is then expressed via the *avatar*. I think trying to ascribe a single reason to all gankers is oversimplification - we've had a plethora of stated reasons when I've challenged folks on the MUD to explain their actions.

Interestingly, most of the gankers have ended up socialising much more effectively when the veil of character was drawn back and player-to-player (rather than avatar-to-avatar) communication was introduced. Dropping by and saying "Hi, I'm Peter, I'm the GM of this place and I'd like to talk to you about what you're doing" tended to stop the process in its tracks, and I'd get a spiel about how tired/bored/whatever the player was. We matched the games we were playing, both dropping into the RL source of the behaviour rather than the virtual outcome, and *in general* the behaviour stopped and the ganker turned out to be a human who was quite happy to behave in a different way if that was more rewarding to them in RL.

Aside ref control-freakery: Chris Bateman's blog (http://onlyagame.typepad.com if memory serves) contains a very interesting discussion about temperament theory and gamer types. Notably, there's a significant minority of players (probably 1 in 8) who don't particularly like to be challenged while playing. It'd be interesting to see how many gankers fall into that category.

[Ken Fox]

Doesn't WoW teach players that grinding through thousands of easy kills is the ultimate "level 60" achievement?

Why do we expect players to treat PvP differently after the game has reinforced the behavior of ganking in PvE?

WoW doesn't give 1st level players any tools to mitigate risk when encountering a level 60. Gank is the only possible outcome (although the level 60 could ignore the level 1, that goes against *everything* the game has taught).

Anyways, WoW PvP is just broken. Code is law and WoW's law doesn't work for world PvP. PvP must have elements of risk, risk mitigation and, most importantly, roles for people of various game/gear levels. This last point is obviously a huge problem because of all the player battleground balancing that must happen for a "fair" fight.

[Prokofy Neva]

No, Tom, I'm not "talking past" Thomas, and that's just plain condescending. I'm making a simple, direct appeal to his higher ideals and morality. Opening up the topic is indeed a sliding scale.

What I do or don't do inside or outside SL isn't material, Tom, and you don't have to couch an argument in these terms.

Seriously, I don't get why you and others are complexifying it. It's not about the need to study deviance -- that's all understood, study it, tag it, analyze it, label it. It's not about something like an AIDS study.

It's about accepting the unacceptable, even with a question mark, that says griefing, of the serious kind I've outlined in living detail, is merely "a form of play you don't like". The reason why I confront Thomas specifically on this moral relativism is because he even says that it "rubs him the wrong way". He even says, "One would have to say that what happens is that the game objectives get replaced by utterly personal objectives, individualistic and empty goals that are the simulacra of actual (new) meaning." But then he abandons these positions and insights and says he has "no ideas," and *refuses to take a stand* in the name of "study". And that's why I find indefensible. Scholars are not required to abandon the very framework of the humanities in order to make studies. They are the required to adopt nihilism to study nihilism.

So that's just where it goes wrong, and I've made the most ordinary and direct critique of that. It's not about relativism and the need to study the repugnant other. Nobody is taking away from him the right to make any study, discuss any far-fetched hypothetical.

But at the end of the day, the bright red line between culture and criminal is visible. Between game and crime. Thomas is implying that there is no norm which he can get behind. Anshe being penised is merely a cultural artifact, a kind of tribal ritual by foreigners that we're to endlessly stretch our moral horizons for and endlessly even empathize with. We're to zoom our camera angles so far out, that we no longer accept any frame. There is no longer a "misdeed" but only an endless serious of "deeds" which are not "good" or "bad" but only "differently abled".

It's to abandon not only morality, but just plain garden variety critical judgement. It's especially annoying since in his own original post, he makes some forrays into indicating he won't accept facile multiculturalism, but then rounds about and emphatically puts himself into the most facile of multi-culti camps, "I'm also certainly one to be wary of normative claims about other people's experiences."

Endlessly descriptive, and then, in the name of not being rigidly *prescriptive," failing to abide by basic reason. Some forms of culture that some find criminal in fact are merely cultures that one can describe dispassionately. Some forms of crime in one society are in fact cultural artifacts in another. There is a vast capacity in human experience. But only at a very extreme -- very extreme spectrum -- can you refuse to make normative the idea that people holding press conferences shouldn't be bombarded by penises. End of story. If you can't muster at least that much "frame," there is no university, there is no civilization, there is just the endless parade of penises, there is the jack boot coming down on the human face, over and over.

Tom, seriously, you are just prey to the latest mental fashions with this one. If you are going to apply your own multi-culti fasions, in fact you'll have to concede that you are not "right" and I am not "wrong" but I'm just "different". Yet you're not doing that, eh? You're trying to show me up as "incorrect".