Is it really so bad to be bad?

Colleen 'momgamer' Hannon's rant about the 'hate-filled miasma' that clouds player vs. player interactions has me thinking... While I understand her point - maybe people want to be able to engage in a little friendly PvP without being subjected to a continuum of crap that begins with infantile lewdness and extends to potentially damaging attacks characterized by bigotry, misanthropy and vitriolic abuse - I can't help but wonder if there is a larger phenomenon that we're missing.

Most of us are pretty comfortable with the idea that videogames can provide arenas for transgressive play that allows people to explore taboos and societal no-no's with impunity.  I can mow down pedestrians in GTA, get the delicious thrill of doing something I would never, ever do in real life and then go back to my usual existence of not even being able to kill ants in my kitchen without feeling guilty about it.  There are even those that suggest that these types of activities fill an important psychological need:  in most animals play is preparation for real life.  I even wrote a paper about this recently - I summarize some thinking on play and its role in human development:

To overlook play as a critical component of the human experience is to miss an opportunity to leverage an inherent human capability for learning that is also a drive rooted in basic survival strategies. Play, as a state, is simply an opportunity for unfocused, open-ended experimentation, often in an environment that has been designed to allow for a range of experiences, some prescribed, but some almost entirely emergent... With respect to this alternative framing, rather than to say that one is 'at play'€™ it would be more descriptive to say that one is 'in play', that is, one is carving out a space in which experimentation is safe and possible -€“ this state is non-linear, unfocused on a particular end result, and allows for creative thinking, innovative problem solving, and shifts in perspective... Play also serves as a motivating force, but it is most powerfully an apparatus for allowing experimentation outside of limitations of physical practicality or other opportunity barriers, e.g. the difficulty of training for natural disasters, that arise from needing to develop competency in an area that is highly dependent on experiences that are not frequently encountered.

Okay, so here's an opportunity barrier:  how often do we get to see what happens when we are jerks to others?  One of my hypotheses is that there is not so much a griefer archetype, so much as there are people who play at griefing just to see what happens when they do.  Wreaking havoc in the real world just carries too high a cost.  For some people, the temptation to be a little bit evil is overshadowed by a more pragmatic drive to conform to societal norms.  But games let us play at being evil!  And that means a lot more than picking the bad faction.  For many there is a larger game of general obnoxiousness and seeing how people respond to our barbs... distasteful to be sure, but maybe there is more to it than first meets the eye...

We can argue all day long about whether there are people who are inherently evil, but the truth is that most people aren't.  It doesn't make evolutionary sense to be mean to others when our survival is so often rooted in the fitness of the group.  But (warning: I'm going all post-modern here) this sort of play is just as integral to the development of identity in a complex society as play-fighting is for lion cubs.  How do people respond if I do something?  What can I get away with?  What behaviors subject me to a penalty of some sort?  This is especially important for young people who are in the process of identity formation.  There are billions of options for how to be.  Which ways work best, make one feel the best, allow for maximum success?  Which contribute to Shirky's advantages of youth?  Is it good for the doormat to learn a thing or two about steamrolling?

Or maybe there is a cathartic effect at work?  Isn't it better to take out my aggressions in some PvP rather than beating my wife or kids, or pulling someone out of their car and beating the bejeezus out of them when they cut me off in traffic?  The world is a horrible, frustrating place.  Where else is that anger going to go?  In Killing Monsters, Gerard Jones notes  that catharsis comes from the Greek word 'katharsis', meaning 'a release of dangerous emotions' (Artistotle was apparently a  fan; Karl Lorenz made it a theory), and requires that 'emotions be stimulated before they can be released'.  And yes, this thinking has been generally applied as a justification (controversially, to say the least) that violent videogames aren't so bad after all.  So let's say there's something to it.  Could it also be applied to these nasty social interactions?  Or does allowing them to happen perpetuate more of the same, a game of hateful, desensitizing one-upsmanship?  Is there any rationale for applying what Jones says about violence to social transgression as well?

Anthropologists and psychologists who study play, however, have shown that there are many other functions, as well -- one of which is to enable children to be just what they know they will never be...  Playing with rage is a valuable way to reduce its power.  Being evil and destructive in imagination is a vital compensation for the wildness we all have to surrender on the way to being good people. (p. 11)

I agree with momgamer that it sucks that well-meaning people get driven away from environments overrun by nasty people who have no qualms about ruining everyone's fun.   A new sheriff (and lots of deputies) might be just the thing.  Cultures are mutable.  They are a collective creation of the individuals who contribute to them: their beliefs and other patterns that emerge over time.  Change can be effected, but to do so requires speaking up.  You want a voice of non-bigoted reason in the Barrens chat?  Then speak up.  Find facing the Warthog repulsive?  Go ahead and say so.  Silence is sanction to continue.  Model some positive behavior.  But let's also accept that every game culture doesn't need to be palatable to everyone.  I'm sure that none of us really think that stealing police cars and running over innocent people is okay, but is there perhaps a place for it in certain digital spaces?  Instead of knee-jerk reactions to transgression, how about asking why we do it?  That's much more interesting.

Comments

[Sutro]

Interestingly, I recently tried something to this effect in the PvP-centric MMO Shadowbane, and it... well, it didn't go so well.

For a little background, Shadowbane is approaching equity popularity in Asian countries as it is in the West. This is because its Asian publisher (En-Tranz) went under and shuttered its servers, and the game overall (a relative commercial failure and now solely advertising supported) hasn't fared well enough to open Asia-specific servers since. Thus, Asian players - with the fully enabled Chinese/Korean language pack UI - join up on English-speaking servers.

If you know anything at all about Shadowbane, you can probably see where this went. (hint: not uphill.) The lack of ability to communicate resulted in Asiatic guilds banding together against other guilds. Just as in history, when you can't communicate to establish things like truces or alliances, this tends to happen.

A large aspect of Shadowbane now is a virtual race war. The now-single Asian guild fields well upward of 100 people to each event to take a city, far more than the client can support. This single entity cleaned out two of Shadowbane's five servers, making them completely uncompetitive by basically killing all of the competition. There's like 40 people who log onto one of them. This entity has very nearly wrecked a third, and probably will in the short term.

Of the two that are left, one has "legacy" equipment gained from a program in the beginning of Shadowbane's history that ramps their power level enough to take on even numbers, and the other server has a restricted ruleset and the community basically plays "whack-a-mole" with any city this group takes.

The ugly part is that there is a very real racial aspect to this, on both sides. Shadowbane has drastically reduced CS staff (maybe two that are part-time from Ubisoft,) and since it's free to play with no verification of location, there's no incentive to hold back. Thus you get things such as "rice pickers" and such yelled at these events. If I understood Chinese, I imagine I'd see much the same from the other side. Google's Chinese translator has been illuminating.

What I proposed on the forums is that the restricted rules server, as a community, consider a program with sundown restrictions on size, etc., to let an Asian guild, if interested, hold a city on the server. It was shot down by over 50 people and every major political stakeholder on the server.

I'd like to think it was because any solution to it dies becuase of inherent complexity as opposed to the "just wipe 'em" attitude. But I'm almost positive there's a much more sinister racism undertone at work.

-Sutro

[Charles Cameron]

Lisa writes:

I'm sure that none of us really think that stealing police cars and running over innocent people is okay, but is there perhaps a place for it in certain digital spaces?

Here's my question: does it matter, in moral terms, whether an "innocent person" is the avatar of a living player or an NPC?

*

In the greater system which includes players (capable of feelings) avatars (presumably incapable of feeling but capable of transmitting in-game feelings to their players) NPCs (presumably able neither to feel nor to pass feelings along) and robots (I'm thinking here of human-seeming robots, the Tin Man / c3pio thrown in here as a sort of out-of-game equivalent of the NPC) one might suppose it harmless to insult or injure NPCs and robots, questionable whether insult or injury to an avatar insults or injures its human player, and clearly harmful to insult or injure one's fellow humans.

One might also consider the cases of actors, the players of body-contact sports – and on the quasi-robotic side, such religious entities as golems and tulpas.

In a game of rugby, tackling the opponent is "all in good fun" and if someone's knee gets skinned along the way, no big deal – but if a boxer not only knocks out but kills an opponent, it is likely considered "overkill" as knockouts go – even Mike Tyson biting off an opponent's ear was outside the Marquess of Queensbury Rules.

*

What I'm getting at is that morality should probably take into account the degree of conscious human identification with a virtual victim – while also believing we're getting perilously close to the place where Asimov's tidy little laws of robotics run up against the Turing Uncertainty Principle.

In Ender's Game, it's not always clear whether a gamer is fighting a battle purely within the game, or also "on the board of life".

Indeed Krishna – an avatar is the original sense of the term, a visible manifestation of the principle of Godhead among us, spoke of some of the warriors before him on the battlefield of Kurukshetra as already dead, telling his disciple Arjuna to dispatch them without qualms for that reason – and in Peter Brooks' brilliant stage adaptation of the Mahabharata, personally carried "with infinite slowness" the arrow from Arjuna's bow which at last kills the mighty Bhishma.

What is real? Our game-infected world is coming more and more, it seems, to resemble just one of many levels of reality in an eXistenZ- or Matrix-like maze. I believe I have quoted Plotinus before, in a comment on Nate Combs' post What is missing is the chaos of battle:

Men directing their weapons against each other -- under doom of death yet neatly lined up to fight as in the pyrrhic sword-dances of their sport -- this is enough to tell us that all human intentions are but play, that death is nothing terrible, that to die in a war or in a fight is but to taste a little beforehand what old age has in store, to go away earlier and come back the sooner. ... Murders, death in all its guises, the reduction and sacking of cities, all must be to us just such a spectacle as the changing scenes of a play; all is but the varied incident of a plot, costume on and off, acted grief and lament. For on earth, in all the succession of life, it is not the Soul within but the Shadow outside of the authentic man, that grieves and complains and acts out the plot on this world stage which men have dotted with stages of their own constructing. All this is the doing of man knowing no more than to live the lower and outer life, and never perceiving that, in his weeping and in his graver doings alike, he is but at play…

In some final analysis, morality itself may be the "in game" function by which we are calibrated and assessed, and life itself the Game.

[Verilazic]

You want a voice of non-bigoted reason in the Barrens chat? Then speak up.

Bingo. Practically speaking, I find the key to dealing with a lot of trolls to be my initial attitude/expectations. I don't expect to be able to reason with them, or be able to get useful information or discussion out of them. In Barrens chat, for instance, I treat it simply as a source of entertainment, and have fun using higher level language/humor/sarcasm/etc on the bigots. It's actually kinda fun when someone who was formerly ignoring the chat out of disgust chimes in with a "lol."

Approaching the situation with anything along the line of "Lets all be friends," or "Stop being a " has never worked in my experience. Playing a subtle "role model" has worked to a degree however. Not always, but sometimes the average level of intelligence displayed increases a bit. It's like a game; the way to "defeat" the trolls isn't as easy as just asking them. That'd be like using cheat codes, and unfortunately, I haven't found any for trolls. Or rather, the few that have worked never worked on more than one individual. ;)

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

Well, there is little doubt that some players are directly attention-seeking (the so-called "Killer" in Bartle-terms) and yes, of course, that doesn't imply evilness... It is a game, you get to do what you get away with doing. There are no important norms outside your own group (i.e. those you want to affiliate yourself with). The game operator and the game community is largely irrelevant.

There are however quite strong out-group and stereotyping mechanisms in play. Not being able to see the other person (see disinhibition) probably accelerate those features of the human mind... The worst online "griefing" isn't any of the actions suggested, but plain old cruel gossip which any individual will be incapable of protecting themselves against as they never get to see it performed... That is what those I have interviewed have suggested anyway. (might be specific to hardcore socializers)

Besides destructive gossip, you have cliques who disrespect out-groups and therefore don't see them entitled to "kindness". In a MMO the out-groups can be the majority... Why shouldn't they want to "have fun making fun" of the out-group? They are only over-reacting care-bears anyway. It's only a game. Get over it.

Reckless is fun.

[Prokofy Neva]

I disagree.

Since you're going to mine various religious traditions for justification of exciting the emotions in a "catharctic way", let's look at St. Augustine who famously wrote about the theater as something that the pious young man should avoid, precisely because it did excite his emotions and make him expend his soul on crying over tragedies that in fact had not occurred.

I simply don't buy this "hydraulic" analogy of the human being's psyche, that he has pent-up killing emotions, or sexual energies, that must be "released" or that there is some "damage" somewhere occuring from "overflow". If anything, if you're going to use hydraulic analogies like this, you could just as well posit that by priming the pump all the time cranking people up to kill and kill and kill you are "manufacturing" energies that wouldn't have existed otherwise.

No one can draw a direct causal line between the increase in school shootings and various forms of violence among youth that has worsened in the same decades that they all grew up on video games. Around this gang at TN, it's tantamount to heresy to even ask people to think about the overall spiritual connections between these phenomenon -- so much does the whole field of ludology depend on game companies to keep it in business. But, can't we think?

In his book "Synthetic Worlds," Castronova explains how game manufacturers had to get rid of this no-holds-barred PvP stuff because people just kept killing the hell out of each other for no reason and not even playing the game -- and not behaving as honourable warriors, respecting their enemy to live for another battle. It was just pure ganking. Why descend to that level?

Obviously, if you're going to allow killing, then there's that other controversial topic called "ageplay" which amounts to simulated child pornography about which reams are being written now. So if you want to posit anything-goes worlds, then you have to ask yourself whether child rape is something you wish to encourage. Or for that matter, whether you'd like to give your blessing to all the realy extreme violent and sadistic BDSM activity in SL and the astonishing degradation of people in Gor and such, in cages, kennels, etc.

What is the purpose of this kind of erosion of moral borders online? It makes for a nastier online world. It encourages people to be evil, even though you claim they aren't, inherently. If they spend all their time online night and day, they begin to acquire the habits of evil everywhere, not just in games. Why do you think there is a firewall between games "and the rest of the Internet" even if there could be a firewall between online and offline lives?
(and I don't think there is).

While games can't have heavy moral prescriptions or they aren't fun, and efforts to instill moral lessons into games can fall very flat and make them boring, you have to ask whether game makers, like other mass entertainers, don't have a certain societal minimal norm to uphold against extreme degradation. If they don't want to ask this question and answer it themselves reasonably, regulators will answer it for them.

[Rich Bryant]

> St. Augustine who famously wrote about the theater as something that the pious young man should avoid, precisely because it did excite his emotions and make him expend his soul on crying over tragedies that in fact had not occurred.

Yeah, but Augustine was an idiot. He strongly argued that faith could (and should) be beaten into children and young women.

You really don't help yourself with cherry-picked quotes from bigots, Prok.

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

Prokofy, I agree with you in general. I don't think "Gor-online" is particularly healthy, it does invite victims to submit themselves to dangerous and violent people and has real-life connotations. This is however just moral. What players should and shouldn't do isn't particularly interesting, what they actually do, think and feel is interesting. Irrespective of why they act that way. (The why cannot easily be investigated anyway.)

Players don't respond to moral reasoning in MMOs, they respond to their local culture/norms/psyche/playful-desires. You aren't evil if you stab someone in the back in a MMO, or kill newbies, you are just enjoying the freedom of recklessness. You aren't being gross if you pinch somebodies ass or give them a french kiss online, you just have that-kind-of-humour. Etc.

I disagree with the original poster's assumption that people imagine themselves evil (and benefit from that) when they enact unpopular deeds in online games. They tease, ACT LOUD and expose others to badly construed practical jokes, etc.

I think that is the more common frame than "I am going to cause real life pain to that person over there". Of course, there are notable exceptions...

[Jesse]

Has anyone concidered the fact that you can just turn off /general chat? I mean when you walking down the street and you see some crazy lunitic spouting off about God or see a begger with a sign that says "Will F*** for food" do you imediately call the police or do you just simply filter it out and go on with your daily business?
As for Ganking... Pretty easy solution, play on a PvE server. I've always found it amazing how much people can find problems with in a game environment. There are many tools that Bliz/Ubi/Sony/etc has placed in these games to remove the ability for these people to infringe on your personal space.
We can also look at the more recent plethora of in game gold spam that has be hammering the servers of late. For weeks I've been fielding grief from my guildies about how bad it is etc... Yet the momment I got annoyed with it, I checked curse, found SpamSentry and haven't seen a piece of spam since. I've suggested this option to each and every person who has complained to me about it, and I would bet that half the responses are essentially an expectation that Blizzard fix the problem. Why? What ever happened to personal liberty and controlling one's own game experience? If you don't like something fix it yourself. If you stub your toe on a piece of furnature do you go to the furnature store that you bought it from and complain? No, why? Because thats totally rediculous. Bliz has done thier due dilligance in fixing the code as fast as they could, but some things like freedom of action and a really open UI Mod system will always allow for people to abuse it. If you really don't like it, just ignore it. And if you REALLY don't like it, stop playing, you control your fate in these games, the reliance on the developers to 'fix' these sorts of issues really boggles my mind as a Game Dev myself.

-Jess

[Lucas]

Why do people behave badly in games? Because we can.

In real life, if you decide you don't like what someone's saying, popping them in the jaw is usually not the best solution. More than likely, in exchange for having them shut up for a few minutes, you're going to jail for a few days. Not exactly an equitable trade.

But what if there were no repercussions for one's behavior in real life? What if it were anarchy on the streets--biggest, toughest, most aggressive person gets to do whatever they want unless a group of people get up the courage to stop them?

I'm not saying that everyone has a bully inside of them--I've met people that I believe simply don't have that aspect to their personalities. But I would say that many if not most of us do have that "beast" within. And if there were no repercussions--as there often aren't in games--then that beast will be released.

A better question than "why do we act this way?" is "why is this behavior enabled and even encouraged by virtual space designers?"

Why are the repercussions--by design--so few and so weak?

[ron meiners]

Lisa this is a really awesome post. I think you capture a very exciting perspective on online experience, and apply it to a really appropriate variety of experience. I may have to respond in detail tomorrow, when I'm more lively... but I very much agree that the understanding of these behaviors should be rooted in a perspective of human motivation that encompasses the delight in experimentation, and certainly social experimentation, that the online interaction affords us, in the variety of virtual cultures (so to speak) this creates, in the way that online culture becomes clearly dynamic, and that culture becomes clearly emergent almost by definition... in the way that some of the dynamics of cultural interaction become so clear online - ie., in affecting the tone of Barrens Chat, in realizing that our voices are the ones that define our culture, and that if we use them adroitly we can have a huge impact. And you so clearly root this perspective in a model of human motivation that starts with the premise that participants are genuinely engaged with their experience... and that the product of that experience will influence the forms of future understanding and behavior. Ie., this stuff isn't just people behaving badly, it's a form of experimentation that grows out of and feeds back in to the "rest" of our lives, and that the chance to experiment with lowered consequences enables us to learn... more effectively. Something like that.

One piece more: again, that this is the motivation, or a large part of it. That we seek these experiences as a way to experiment and learn. And that part of the joy is that we can finally play more freely with elements of social interaction that we're immersed in every day of our lives.

Anyway, thanks... great post.

[Neils Clark]

Great post, Lisa.

I think what primarily charges this topic is the level of reality. There's a continuum between games like Star Wars: kotor (single player) and, say, high-speed RL street racing. In kotor, you can kill thousands and hurt nobody. A tricked out civic at 100 mph can kill a family of five. MMOs are games, but there’s a heightened level of reality. The ‘ganked’ also learn.

That said, I never could quite resist griefing pre-patch WoW paladins. Somebody had to make their grind challenging.

And that highlights the fact that these worlds are more complex not only in terms of intra-world rules, but also in how different cultures may relate to them. Some of the modes of experience within them may hold marked similarities with the primary world – but to some degree each game (and arguably each server) is an organic ecosystem.

But you wanted to know why, and I think that you’ve brought out some of the key areas.

I’ve had one idea for some time, playing on George Gerbner’s mean world theory. Media is no longer only passively consumed. With interactivity thrown into the loop, instead of just perceive the world as a more dangerous place, we’ve got to act. We might feel the need, for instance, to kick people from the group because we suspect that they’ll ninja roll on the randomly dropped epics we’ve been grinding. I call it mean world recycling. And while it can explain why some of these things happen inside of the game, I think that what charges this topic is, again, the interplay between these primary and secondary worlds. It suddenly matters because it can affect real world feelings, bank accounts, even marriages and business partnerships. You're not necessarily crashing a Civic into an innocent family, but you might be the bullies or gang members camping the basketball court, or the rain at recess.

Trashing someone's day to play could cause them to flip out and lose their job, or their raid guild might target your girlfriend/boyfriend's character for the next month.

That real world charge is woven deeply into the how and the why.

Again, great post.

[Ace Albion]

I think it's more to do with expectations of behaviour.

Conflicts in these expectations come about when two people have different inherent expectations of how the "game" works, or, in the case of actually spiteful players, when one deliberately plays against the expectation of the other.

So you get people who gank because they came into the game seeing that the game allows it, the game is set up for it, and that's how they choose to play. No actual, inherent malice, just a, maybe aggressive, way of playing. If enough people hold with this approach and/or it's guided by the developers, it becomes the culture of the game.

This is how EVE online is. There is nowhere at all, anywhere in the EVE universe where you are "safe" from the actions of another player, except being sat in a space station. There's no checkbox somewhere to say "don't hurt me" and for the most part I get the impression that EVE players accept this grim vision of the universe.

Then you've got someone who'll wander their level 70 orc warrior into Astranaar and kill all the NPCs. Maybe they do it because to them, any action against the alliance is fair game (even on a PvE server), or maybe they do it because they're a "spiteful wee shite" set on ruining as many people's fun as possible. You'd have to ask them.

So sure, you can suggest that some people who are "griefers" are just playing a different way, on a case by case basis, but I think it's also fair to say that there are people out there who get malicious glee out of causing upset to others. Preferably through the relatively consequence-free medium of internet games.

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

there are people out there who get malicious glee out of causing upset to others.

Yes, but is it malicious if they believe that those that are upset are upset about something they shouldn't bet upset about? Or is malice bad?

Take for instance the creator of the Queer Duck movie. He was afraid that it could be taken as gay-bashing, but considered it as success when he saw people complaining about gay-content instead. He obviously (and rightfully) felt that getting someone upset about the presence of homosexuality in the media was a good thing. There is a political difference, but the mechanism is the same and politics is moral anyway:

Hey, get over it. It is only a game, being affected by others is part of it. Go play a single player game if you can't handle it.

Hey, get over it. Homosexuality is intergral to society, being affected is part of it. Turn off the TV if you can't handle it.

Who gets to define what is malice and what is invention or intervention?

[JuJutsu]

"And if you REALLY don't like it, stop playing, you control your fate in these games, the reliance on the developers to 'fix' these sorts of issues really boggles my mind as a Game Dev myself."

Good advice. Let me know what games you work on so I can avoid them in advance.

[Andy Havens]

Ola said: "Yes, but is it malicious if they believe that those that are upset are upset about something they shouldn't bet upset about? Or is malice bad?"

Is malice bad? The intent to cause pain or distress to another person, usually without sufficient reason?

Uh... Yeah!

If I know that my actions are going to cause you grief, then doing something to harm you is malicious and, in most people's codes of conduct, "bad." You can call that bad behavior a number of things: ignorant, childish, egotistical, mean-spirited, shallow, morally bankrupt, sociopathic, etc. There are many fine reasons for behaving badly. But reasons do not excuse behavior, just explain it.

Certainly there are times when doing things that cause pain (to yourself and others) is warranted, "good" (in the aggregate) and not malicious. Your "Queer Duck" analogy is way off the mark, I think. The creator did not do it with the prime motive of causing harm; it was not a malicious act. It was a thoughtful act that he calculated might have a negative impact on some and a positive on others.

If you go into a gaming situation not knowing what somebody's stance is r.e. a particular type of behavior, then, sure... give people some slack. If you belong to a guild that is into major trash-talk, and the new kid didn't understand that and gets his feelings hurt, I agree: tough it up.

But griefing is rarely that inadvertent. The *intention* is to piss people off, neh? You don't see level 60 paladins chowing through noob areas for a greater social good, or because they want to make a point about chaos theory. They do it because, to them, it's fun to make other people suffer. A bit. The virtual equivalent of noogies.

You can argue about whether or not the overall effects of low-impact maliciousness are positive or negative, sure. Maybe blowing off some steam and tweaking some random, faceless players will keep Mr. Malicious from being as mean a boss or kicking his dog. I don't think so, but you can argue it.

What you can't argue -- at least nobody has done so meaningfully yet -- is that malicious behavior is, in itself, anything but what the word implies; mean and self-centered.

If your character is malicious, yeah... roleplay that 'till the end of the day. Fine. But most behavior we're talking about here is not in-character stuff, but player spew. And it happens in chat rooms, IM, on the boards, blogs, servs, etc.

You want to have a, "Yo' Mama" fight out on the playground, ok. The context is there for us to go nuts. But if you come to my house and trash-talk my mom while she serving you lunch? That's just malicious. And bad.

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

Oh, you misinterpret. The "Queer Duck" author was clearly pleased that his movie had a "negative impact" on people who cannot stand homosexuality.

Malicious is a very value-loaded term. PvP gankers are pleased to have a "negative impact" on people who want to turn their game into care-bear land. There is in principle no difference, just that more people would accept the "Queer Duck" author's motives as noble, and the PvPer as an evil ass. That however is just a distribution of opinion...

[Lisa Galarneau]

Honestly I don't have a terribly strong opinion either way on this topic, but I do think it's interesting to think about.

For one thing, I don't disagree with Prok at all. I certainly empathized with Ted Castranova, for instance, when he talked about the need for sanctuary and safety in online spaces. But I do wonder if this debate is easy to bifurcate with black and white thinking... it's kind of like the rabid idealism that characterizes the abstinence-only movement, or those who oppose needle exchange programs or vaccines for HPV. There is an idea that giving an inch towards a non-ideal promotes a certain type of behavior... What I'm saying is that while it's not ideal for people to abuse each other in virtual spaces, it is definitely better than the alternative: people abusing each other in physical space. The heart of my question, though, is whether such behavior serves as an outlet for aggressive feelings that people might not be dealing with adequately (would that Virginia Tech guy have been a little less likely to go on a killing spree in RL if he had spent more time ganking in WoW?), or does the freedom to do so create an expectation that it's okay to extend that behavior into RL? Or is there no correlation at all? Most people who study media violence will agree that it's a constellation of factors that determine whether someone behaves violently - media violence can be a contributing factor but it's a chicken and egg problem (maybe violent people are drawn to violent media?)

Anyway, my point is only that things are seldom as simple as they might superficially seem, and it's interesting to dig a little deeper. Thanks for the nice comments!

[Prokofy Neva]

But I do wonder if this debate is easy to bifurcate with black and white thinking... it's kind of like the rabid idealism that characterizes the abstinence-only movement, or those who oppose needle exchange programs or vaccines for HPV. There is an idea that giving an inch towards a non-ideal promotes a certain type of behavior..

Oh, stop it, Lisa. I'm not rabid and extreme. Why is it that *I* could be "rabid and extreme" (and yes, you are implying it, and no, you don't get off the hook by writing a contorted preface like "I don't disagree with Prok" but...)

Why is it that the people who advocate child molestation, capture and rape roleplay, extreme bondage and sadism, masochistic and cruel forms of enslavement and death aren't the rabid and extreme ones, and *I'm* rabid and extreme and likened to those advocating "abstinence"? Huh?

Why is it that people who have no restraint get to call others extremists?

[JuJutsu]

"What I'm saying is that while it's not ideal for people to abuse each other in virtual spaces, it is definitely better than the alternative: people abusing each other in physical space."

True. And you could make the case that verbal abuse is better than physical abuse. But it's still abuse and it's still bad.

I'm in agreement with Andy
"What you can't argue -- at least nobody has done so meaningfully yet -- is that malicious behavior is, in itself, anything but what the word implies; mean and self-centered."

[Lisa Galarneau]

Hey, Prok, I didn't say, nor was I implying, that you are either rabid or extreme. I don't know you well enough to make that kind of judgment. I just think it's interesting to think what, if any, shades of grey are acceptable when it comes to trangressive play. Is it possible that on some level there is a game that people buy into unintentionally just by playing in spaces where there are a variety of conflicting interests and ideas about what is acceptable? Verbal banter is commonplace in just about every competitive play environment - what we're talking about here is a question of degree. The safety of anonymity certainly seems to encourage a level of vitriol that would otherwise be unacceptable (would you use the same tone in person, for instance, that you are comfortable using here?) I'm not saying that any of this is okay (not at all!), but I do wonder how much of it is a type of (misguided?) play, rather than actual maliciousness. Or I suppose one can argue that it's impossible to play at being malicious without actually being malicious, but again I'm not so sure. I think playing thusly might be an important part of identity creation for some people - they experience it, find it satisfying or unsatisfying, and decide how to proceed based on those experiences. I dunno, though - I'm just asking the question. ;-)

[Bart Stewart]

Great questions, Lisa, and great to see a linkback to the previous "Is the Horde Evil" debate where some of these issues also came up. I like your willingness to really dig into the people-centric aspect, rather than just the game-centric stuff (although -- as Ace Albion points out -- the game rules matter).

As a quick aside, I'm with Ola and others on the question of who griefs. I expect there are some opportunists who go with griefing-friendly rules or an existing griefer culture, but my belief is that for most of these folks, toying with other players or pushing on game rules is an innately prompted sensation-seeking behavior, not something that's learned. (The joy these folks demonstrate in poking holes in expectations is why I prefer to use the word "Manipulators" to describe them, rather than the original "Killer" term.)

That said -- and Richard may want to object to this -- I'm curious whether there is or ought to be a distinction made between being playing a "bad" character and using one's character to be a "bad" person. Is there a meaningful difference? I think so, but I'm curious to hear what others here think.

If I go around in a game world slapping people at random, uttering the vilest epithets, and generally being a PITA, am I absolved of evil if I can say, "No, no, that's not me, that's how my Barbarian was raised, I'm just playing the character correctly"?

Games may let me play at being bad (and I'm one of those who suspects that games offer a healthy escape valve for letting out aggressive/negative feelings), but when you allow characters to be bad, doesn't that attract the people who'll (ab)use the system to be bad as a person?

If avatars in virtual worlds are controlled by real people, where's the boundary that separates virtual transgressions from real transgressions?

--Bart

[Andy Havens]

Ola said: "PvP gankers are pleased to have a "negative impact" on people who want to turn their game into care-bear land."

A playground bully has a negative impact on the kids he beats up, but he's "pleased to have a negative impact" on the snot-nosed wussies who want to turn the space into a girl-scout camp.

Right. And Gandhi had a negative impact on the people who wanted to continue imperialist rule of India. Mandela had a negative impact on folks who wanted to continue apartheid. My getting to the movie theater early has a negative impact on anybody who gets there later and wants the seat I take.

What we're talking about here is motive and context. If you and your guildmates have real issues on a PvP server with other players who aren't abiding by the norms of the server, and you use appropriate in-game violent play, strategy, etc. in order to affect a change... sure. But I wouldn't call that malicious. You have an end or a goal *beyond* the griefing, after having reached which, one assumes... the activities will stop. For example, if the carebears on a PvP are all whiny because they can't gather for little parties and what-not without getting ganked by opponents... that's stoopid. They need to post guards and have high level allies on hand; that's part of the deal with PvP. Accept it or go home.

But what we're talking about here is not something where there is, usually, a specific positive purpose with some -- possibly beneficial -- pain caused. We're talking about pain as purpose. We're talking about griefing, I think, rather than ganking.

Bart asks: "If I go around in a game world slapping people at random, uttering the vilest epithets, and generally being a PITA, am I absolved of evil if I can say, "No, no, that's not me, that's how my Barbarian was raised, I'm just playing the character correctly"?"

You are certainly absolved of evil (or at least malice) in this case. By me, anyways. But remember that your *character* would never, for example, address a player, but only other characters with those vilest epithets. Your character would not corpse camp... because that's a player/game mechanism, not a character mechanism. Your character might kill an enemy NPC... but not more than once (that would be a player thing, not a character thing, eh?).

I'm not saying that all behavior that pisses somebody off is malicious. And I'm not saying we should always avoid confrontations. But I am saying that there are plenty of people who engage in outright malicious behavior that is in no way inside the magic circle; it's not your character being an ass, it's you.

[Lisa Galarneau]

Andy said:

But I am saying that there are plenty of people who engage in outright malicious behavior that is in no way inside the magic circle; it's not your character being an ass, it's you.

But this assumes that there is only one magic circle. What about the problem of colliding magic circles? That's the problem I think we have here... plus people treat others like NPCs - not so different than how self-absorbed people navigate the world solipsistically anyway.

I prolly have more to say about this, but my co-worker tells me that it's time for drinks.

[Thomas Malaby]

We covered a fair amount of this ground a few months ago as well, and I thought I'd link to one of the particularly insightful contributions, from David Simkins, who wrote about how we have good reasons for wanting social conventions to emerge that govern fair play (with all the moral connotations that implies). He reminds us that the code, and the ToS, aren't sufficient to govern player behavior (though they can get in the way of the conventions even emerging). Relatedly, Mathew Reuter commented that playing any game with other people generates a moral load on us to participate according to an expectation that we are not ruining someone else's experience. Experimenting (in the mode of experience often labeled 'play') is something we all do, but no experimentation, it seems to me, absolves us of this responsibility.

[Andy Havens]

Lisa said: "But this assumes that there is only one magic circle."

Nope. I said, "There are plenty of people who engage in outright malicious behavior that is in no way inside the magic circle." OK, the "the" implies one. But when I say, "in no way," I mean in *no* way inside anything that could reasonably be called the magic circle.

If my idea of fun/games at a sporting event is to run out onto the field and trip the players... well, ok. Is that behavior inside my "magic circle." Maybe. But guess what? Nobody else cares. The fans will break they foot off in my personal magic circle if I do that.

If a bunch of kids decide that the way they're going to have fun at the playground is to steal all the other kids' balls and throw them on the roof... etc. etc.

Just because one (or many) people think something is fun, it doesn't count as "OK" if it's inappropriate to the context. We may disagree about the best way to play a game, or what constitutes a good player or debate the niceties of various rules... but if you abandon entirely the basic codes of play and associated behavior, you are outside the magic circle. You aren't playing the game anymore; you're playing with the game.

Killing someone with a baseball bat doesn't transform murder into a game of baseball, and utilizing an MMO platform specifically to cause other players trouble -- outside the bounds of what kinds of trouble everybody signed up for -- is (again) malicious.

I love that Eve has declared itself an absolute, anything-goes zone. That's fantastic. You go in, you watch your back. And your sides. And your friend's insides. It's chaos all the way down. Super. For that game, if you get in and then start crying that you're being treated badly... I have no pitty. It's ultimate fighting. Malicious good; the more mal your licious, the better. Most cool.

But in spaces that have Marquis of Queensburry rules, biting, gouging and a knee in the jimmies is malicious. It's outside the circle. It lessens a game space by turning it into a vehicle/platform for other, possibly overlapping, behaviors.

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

Thomas Malaby: Experimenting (in the mode of experience often labeled 'play') is something we all do, but no experimentation, it seems to me, absolves us of this responsibility.

Is this moral or is it ethics?

In a real game I would take Andy's side, but that is because I don't want to participate in PvP-gank-heaven. If the ganker wrapped his actions up in decent RP, then I would take the ganker's side, because I want to participate in a hardcore RP-heaven.

For a hardcore RPer, your position would be against the ethics. Because the ethics of hardcore RP is that you never yield to OOC, even if the other player is OOC. Always, always respond IC. There are of course many "schools" of RPing, much like there are many schools of philosophy. So what ethics you follow is highly personal.

I think the ethics of game-play is quite different from the ethics of life. E.g., I am not willing to accept Gandhi as a role model for game-players.

Operators have to take responsibility for negotiating between player-ethics. Screw the TOS, that is just a tool that enables the game-operator to do their job. We cannot blame the player. Ever. (Unless they explicitly attack the player, rather than the character.)

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

To avoid any misunderstanding: with hardcore RP, I mean what you might consider "total immersion". That might entail RPing not only the character, but also an imaginative player playing and imaginative character to such an extent that the real player cease to exist. There is a lot of educational potential in this (see Lisa's reference to learning etc).

The players are rivers. A force of nature. They aren't an entity you can reason with (maybe in very shallow waters). They are entitled to follow their desires in a game-setting, no matter what the TOS or societal norms says. If the designers can't keep all the water in one stream, then they have to design differently. Online games are anarchies, you get what you enable through design (social game-master programs inclusive). Game-operators are players too, just with bigger guns.

I'd hate the day when in-game behaviour gets regulated by law.

[Ace Albion]

@Ola: Are you trying to say there are no people out there who are maliciously gleeful at causing upset to others? Because those are the people I was talking about, as a counterpoint to the suggestion that there isn't any such thing as nasty mean people at all.

If you've demonstrated another motive for causing upset (education) then that's cool too. It doesn't make the actual spiteful wee shites any less spiteful, nor does it include them in your collection of noble antagonists. They're different people. I'm not sure what educational or political point a level 70 killing off all the quest givers in a low level WoW village would be making, but you could always ask them. If I was a gambler, I'd bet on the likely answer being "lol stfu fag iz a gmae lol". But that's just a guess.

It's not "just a game" and it's not "just people being mean." There's a myriad motives, beliefs, expectations, cultural assumptions. I never, in any way, suggested that griefers are all spiteful morons, I thought I'd been clear on that.

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

Ace, what I say is that we will not know the true motives for why people act in a particular way and that the term "malice" is something the observers stick to a particular "player" in order disqualify them from playing a game. Moreover I think that reasoning about their motives is somewhat irrelevant in a game-context as it is indeed a fictional setting for play. I don't attribute any level of responsibility to the players. I attribute all responsibility to the operator of the game and the implemented rules of the game-engine. (At least in theory, on the philosophical level.)

For instance. Some of the best roleplayers I've met would probably be labeled "malicious" by non-roleplayers when they play their stupid Troll-like character to perfection. They do indeed enjoy non-roleplayers being pissed off and these vicims are interpreting them as annoying and rude players (rather than characters). To me, that is great game play, and wonderful acting. Those victims are pissed off because they don't "get it", that's a nice artistic touch to "griefing". The artist includes the opposition in his stage-play. Wonderful! Those victims also get their entertainment from such players, they get pissed off, but at least they aren't bored! And they certainly aren't harmed as human beings. Many board games invite players to be maliciously gleeful too, that is often the fun factor, and often it is part of marketing too (i.e. see Jackson's card games). So yes, of course players do that stuff, but is it bad per se. Is it unethical? Is it unethical to be an ass, in a game? Most classical games are set up to handle that, and invite that behaviour. Some even invite cheating as long as you don't get caught. Malice brings excitement. Too much excitement is too much, which is where operators need to step in.

In the end you might end up with having to distinguish between players who have style and those who don't. People who shares your values and those that don't. Some players even find role-play by itself offensive. I personally find players who don't even try to role-play "offensive". That's a good reason to not play MMOs.

I'm not claiming that Queer-Duck is an example of education. I am claiming that it is an example of resistance to a particular value-system. I see nothing abnormal with players resisting rules that are imposed on them by others. They might not get away with it, and that's ok. I'm not saying that they should be pampered.

The real problem with MMOs is that players spend too much of their life in it. What happens in them becomes too important for the players' well-being and self-esteem. And the games are designed to encourage that. If a session lasted for 20 minutes twice a week the impact would be less. Of course, it used to be worse. Games used to have perma-death. Maybe the players of 2007 could use a bit of education by playing a perma-death game.

(None of this holds for non-fictional systems like. I am assuming a game and playground here.)

[Amarilla]

"The players are rivers. A force of nature. They aren't an entity you can reason with (maybe in very shallow waters). They are entitled to follow their desires in a game-setting, no matter what the TOS or societal norms says. If the designers can't keep all the water in one stream, then they have to design differently. Online games are anarchies, you get what you enable through design (social game-master programs inclusive). Game-operators are players too, just with bigger guns.

I'd hate the day when in-game behaviour gets regulated by law."

Katrina.
And put a bit of cocaine in each and every Juice can . And do it for money; not for politics, not for religion , not for your country. Not for Humanity.Not for children. Not for fun. Enjoy the party.