I totally agree Pete
but addiction to video games which can happen, is chemical, its just the endorphines the brain releases arent brought on by drugs and its therefore safer, as in crack overloads and destroys the pleasure centers of your brain meaning sex becomes forever meaningless.

In the end theres probably some root or link to the new right in many of these idiotic robots,

Conservatism tends to rely on fear and or idiocy (tax cuts mean a better deal for the poorest) to get votes. And the old methods of morally pamnicking the populace dont work that well because nowadays the news keeps up a steady stream of them.

Lets just hope all this bulls**t gets itself over with so we can get back to being concerned about the quality of todays games.

1) Warhammer online is not released yet.

2) The sexuality in WoW and other MMOs is little to none and most MMOs are rated teen because the violence isn't graphic or realistic at all.

3) The average age of an MMO player is 24 and I have never seen an example of MMO marketing directed at children. (they don't have credit cards)

4) WoW as well as other games have parental controls that can limit the amount of time a child plays the game.

5) Being "addicted" to an MMO is completely different than the chemical addiction to drugs or alcohol.

6) Griefing has been around since games became playable online and is just part of the experience.

pretty much sums up the stupidity of this article.

LOL, nothing like an article on griefing to bring out the griefers :) The most amusing thing about the repliers here is an almost fundamental contempt for anyone who plays differently than they do. The problem with such a 1-sided view is that they're completely useless for any discussion that involves more than their own solution ("my way rox, all others suxxor!")

And griefing is not "emergent gameplay" anymore than murdering someone with a corkscrew is "innovative appliance usage". The kind of game play that devs are looking for is player-driven content that pulls people into the game, not stuff that drives them away.

Bottom line, the VAST majority of people out there who want to play MMO's don't want to play PvP/griefing/open competition. How can I say that? Because WoW is controlled PvP and has more players than all other domestic MMO's that have ever existed...combined. Griefers don't want to be on servers with other PvPr's, they get their asses kicked. They want to be on servers that contain people to victimize.

And yes, griefing has been around since the earliest days where people could gather online. I was in a dial-up BBS MUD in '88 that had griefers in it. Madison Avenue is, as always, behind the curve, because most games today are controlling griefing such that it's almost non-existent. Every patch, Blizzard adds things that prevent people from griefing, and more and more people sign up to play the game.

My favorite story of online griefing came from CoH, where a woman was cyber-raped using emotes. Could she have logged off? Of course. How about /ignore? Sure. Nope, she was "too stunned" to do anything, so she just sat there and took it. I'm sorry, but I have no pity for someone who finds out they are on fire, then stares at the fire in rapt fascination while it burns them vs just putting it out.

Or the person who was afk, came back and found they had been cyber /emote raped and paged up to read it all, and THEN was emotionally scarred and went all public about it.

Good lord people, the games have tools to prevent it, and if you don't use them, you have only yourself to blame.

Black takes the opportunity to weigh in on the MMO addiction controversy:

I personally believe these are addictive games, because you have kids playing them for many, many hours a day, and putting their lives on hold basically to play some of these, like World of Warcraft and Warhammer.

They have a strong violent nature and a lot of sexuality in them.

I really hope Black isn't talking about MMO's being very violent and sexual. I haven't played one that is, Espically WoW!

^^ Anti-Griefer, and proud of it.

Any child who steps out of his house (such as to go play a sport) has to deal with "griefers" in person. I will never understand why anyone thinks it is healthy for kids to be sheltered from the least bit of teasing.

Wait a minute, when did we take the power away from the parents????

*snip* It will give parents their power back. */snip*

Sorry, if you are too freaking weak to control your children's habits when appropriate, then your kids are already screwed.

The only thing that has been taken away from parents is the right to discipline your kids how you choose. I'm not talking about physical abuse (and to clarify, I don't believe getting a spanking is physical abuse), but good old fashioned parenting...

I suppose it balances though, the Government takes away your right to discipline your children, they now apparently get away with murder so the Government takes away your need to supervise your children by putting safety pads on EVERYTHING.

I don't know why they didn't just lobotomise everyone to save time. Would make life so much easier.

Griefing, like most forms of bullying, is easily ignored. A lot of MMO's have an ignore or block function (which comes in handy dealing with dumbasses on COH).

I just LOVE how these issues which exist in every single other sphere of human experience are somehow different when they appear on TEH INTERWEBS! OH NOES! WHO WILL THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!?!?!

Scapegoating pure and simple. These people and groups need to demonise something to feel that they are doing their jobs.

A little bit sad really.

i really hate using using this term to refer to women, but who the fuck does this bitch think she is? she's too ignorant to be a real doctor, and the fact that MMORPG's have been around for quite some time, and now that they just noticed griefers, shows exactly how out of touch these "experts" are when it comes to kids who play MMORPG's, but this isn't what pisses me off, the fact that whore compares the video game industry to the tobacco industry is insulting to not only the game industry, but also the gamer community, i can rant all day, but i have carpal tunnel thanks to working late last night on my laptop

Took 'em long enough to figure it out. But seriously though, it does get annoying being called everything from n****r to ch**k to j*w to k**e and so forth online....

Anyway, lets not feed the trolls, kids.

@ ZeRu: You may have a point there...

Couple interesting points made...

Cyber bullying is a quasi-issue right now.. Pretty much, some jerk at school gets your Kid's AIM SN and suddenly he's getting spammed with annoying stuff. it's really both parties, the victim and the bully, that make cyber-bullying a problem because when a younger kid gets angry he often lashes out instead of doing the reasonable thing, which would be just to block the cyber-bully or walk away.

Most cycber-bullying is tame as far as internet griefing goes, though. Shit, if one person can get your email address, you can end up with a mountain of spam in moments. In online games, instant-messengers, message boards, and anywhere else, though, griefing is nothing.
Say you're being bothered on WoW by some jerk, you walk away to another zone. Say someone is making fun of you on IRC, you block them.

I'm kind of wasting time explaining this to people who already know, but this is just further evidence of the main-stream media making an ass of themselves to the current generation by sensationalizing stuff we already know about.

@ janarius

Again, its best to ignore a person that wastes their time on you. Many MMOs have warp options to get around, and if they are that arsed to find you and waste their time, take a break and log off, or simply chat with a friend while ignore the messages from that person.
If they spend several hours waiting for you in game after you logged off to another character then they are simply wasting more of their time and will be angry at everything else.
You can also simply log off, its not like you need to play a game to live.

"It will give parents their power back. Because right now these marketers are going straight after the young ones to try to get them addicted at an early age, and it’s like a parent trying to fight tobacco and alcohol. It’s very difficult."

That made me chuckle. I'm 21, yet every time I go to a store to purchase a game, I'm carded. Which, to me, shows that these parents are buying the games for their children. The parents have their power. They just choose to buy these games for their children, not knowing what they are.

I know if I were buying a game that had demons on the front of it for my kid, I'd check the back to see if it were suitable for my kid.

In before Anonymous

In other news, there's water at the bottom of the ocean.

There have been griefers longer than there have been MMOs. They were there back in the days of MUDs in the early 90s.

Warhammer isn't out yet. Good job

And I don't know what they are talking about. Credit Cards are required for WoW, so you kinda need to be an adult or have your parent give you that responsibility.

And the industry is doing a fine job. They have parental controls inside the consolle (but it helps if parents knew what they were doing), they also have ways to IGNORE players and perhaps report them so the admins or GMs would handle that.

Afterall, an MMO is another world, and just like real world, some people just dont give a S**T

Oh yeah, because as soon as a griefing attack starts, you can't leave, your logout button is shut off.{/sarcasm}

The media have drafted in psychologists to tell us that griefing is cyberbullying? Who let all these crybabies onto the net to play games in the first place? Sigh...

If we're bringing psychologists into this, then allow me to take the RD Laing route and explain to everyone that griefing isn't something a gamer does, it's a relationship between the gamer and those running the game.

First off, I'll point out something that seems to have gone unnoticed. In today's gaming scene, griefing is emergent, competitive gameplay. With the passive 'nobody is allowed to interact with another player without written mutual in-game consent' games that are passed off as MMOs these days, anyone who devises a method of pissing another player off is doing something that the game designer not only didn't intend, but probably actively tried to prevent. Nobody seems to have noticed that griefing is exactly that 'emergent gameplay' stuff (i.e. things gamers do that the game designer didn't think of) that games designers have wet dreams over.

Now with that point over, I want to point out that the so-called problem of "griefing" is due to changes in the way games are made and played today, and isn't actually some sort of social or psychological problem that the supposed 'griefer' has. You see, back in the day, 'griefing' didn't have a name, and nobody thought it was bad. Griefing was, back then, gameplay.

I cut my online gaming teeth on the old school British MUD games. Not the watered down TinyMUDS and TinyMUSHes and LPmud and Dikumud that came around later, but the likes of MIST at Essex University (I was a little to young for MUD1) and Abermud. These were text-only proto-MMORPG games (think multiplayer Zork, say) where your experience points were persistent, like today's MMOs, but there was rampant and vicious playerkilling, and if you were killed, you lost EVERYTHING, period. If some smartarsed player cast a 'force' spell on you to make you attack the immortal archwizard you were talking to, and you didn't flee from the wizard in time, you lost the lot, game over player one, back to 0 points to start all over again. Find a sneaky way to cause a huge and dangerous monster to wander around the "safe" rooms that the newbies were hanging out, and the admins would stand around and laugh, and maybe remove the monster, if they were in a strange mood that day. You were NEVER safe when you played the earliest MUD games. Even the admins were liable to murder you on a whim. Read Lorry's essay 'Confessions of an Archwizard' (Lorry is and was the Machiavelli of MUD) for a taste of the Hobbesian microcosm that old-school online gaming was. For these games, all the other people playing the game were obstacles you had to overcome in order to reach whatever level you needed to become wizard. And in that world, griefing was unheard of, since anything that would now be griefing would then be just gameplay.

So why the attitude change? The "problem" of griefing has two causes:

The first is that online MUD games started to have competition. Around 1989 or so, the source code for a number of MUD games started to hit the net - games like TinyMUD or LPmud, and TinyMUSH and whathaveyou. That meant a huge rise in the number of MUD servers, and correspondingly, the players had a choice. That way, the players who wanted to talk went to chatrooms and MUSHes with no combat system at all, the RPGers went to games where people all gave themselves tedious character descriptions (full of drivel like 'DragonPonce the RabbitSlayer is a level 4 sewer elf, who wears the banner of the Boogerian Empire on his dark chainmail. Although a low level character, you can tell from the gleam in his eyes that he is going to go far in this world'), the people who wanted to passively kill NPCs all day long went to their favourite LPmud or DikuMUD, and the playerkillers just played boring games full of nobody but other playerkillers killing each other with semi-automated scripts. Think text-only quake, with aimbots. The playerbase fragmented, and it became impossible for any place to have the sortof cosmopolitan 'Every kind of gamer is here' community you got on the Essex server. And pretty much every game, other than the playerkiller-only games, began to crack down on the playerkilling and other forms of competitive behaviour, since the people who played those games, wanted to be left alone to kill computer controlled NPCs without being hassled - and they had somewhere else to go.

Secondly, the fact that there's money involved gives players an inflated sense of entitlement. A hefty percentage of the people paying $20 per month for their right to play WoW or Everquest or whatever, expect to be able to win the game if they put in enough hours. They don't want to be hassled with the need for having enough skills to survive the playerkillers and 'griefers' to win. Money and time should be enough win games (even multiplayer ones!), and not skill...

In that climate (admins needing to keep the players to keep paying money, and players demanding the right to win the game because they're paying big money to play, and the fact that there are always ten more MMO's out there willing to give people whatever it is they want), players are just not allowed to become obstacles to another player winning the game. Hence "griefing" becomes banned, and is now, apparently, on the road to becoming a psychological disorder.

Funny that in some ways games are becoming LESS violent, not more, yet the media still finds ways to complain...

Marketing to kids? Yeah right, I don't recall kids on MMO commercial ads or anything that hints for kids. As I recall, I never seen a tv commercial for toys, games or anything directed to kids in Canada. Internet ad, I see more WoW characters than real humans in ads. Kids are influenced by word of mouth, is that called marketing? I think not.

@ JC

Cyber-bullying is an issue to me. It's more like an extension of existing real life bullying. Even though, there are options to block off strangers and people they don't like in sites like myspace or msn. MMO's don't have the option for players to block or boot undesirable players. I don't remember any studies on video game bullying, but i guess pwning and griefing is a form of bullying if done as the sole and persistent activity, like any bully in RL.

I never heard of a warhammer online, but I personally love the RTS games.
However, WOW has a monthly fee, kids obviously need to keep paying money each day in order to keep it going, and that requires a *GASP* Credit Card!
These games aren't even marketed to children, at most its marketed to children by older children through word of mouth.
This article is silly as it makes it look like parents can't control their children from such content especially with the ESRB and credit cards involved. If children are controlling their lives, there's something seriously wrong.
I guess Black just wants her name in the news like any idiot that goes, "oh shit, I'm on TV!"
Griefing is also very old, and there are tons of reasons why it happens or perceptions as to why it happens.
Marketing the games doesn't happen, I have to keep an eye on some of my nephews/nieces and I never see online games (except that Toon-town thing) marketed to children on children programming.
WOW only shows up on other programs that a child isn't likely to watch, and again, monthly fees, so its a choice to the parent to pay or not.

No offense to you Dennis, but I don't consider Cyber-bulling an issue. You can easily sever connections to such things unless you're getting hacked and rather not "log" off. Every form of cyber-bulling can simply be blocked or you can ignore it.

Dr. Sally needs to come to grips with the AMA's latest decision to NOT put video game addiction as a psychological disease. As for "strong violent nature" and "sexuality in them," welcome to the human race. The most frustrating thing about this article is that it isn't about MMO "griefers" at all.

"These marketers are going straight after the young ones to try to get them addicted at an early age."

Unless they're putting them on in children's TV, then I don't see the logic. Warcraft is hardly aimed specifically at kids.

these "griefers" are just "n00bs" that talk too much trash for their own good and couldnt hold anything they say in game to power in reality.

theyare usually young teenagers (13-16) or 30 somethings that have nothing better to do
yet they can be younger or older they just usually tend to fall in this cattegory

hi nice post, i enjoyed it

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