"I got into griefing from watching Team Avolition," Totz of Vexage Griefing told me. Then there's Perfect Griefer, Grief Nation, The TNT Empire, Unstoppable Luck and Vexage Griefing, formerly known as I Can Has Grief, who I spoke to over Gmail. Team Avolition is among the best known channels. A great many others catalogue the exploits of griefer collectives.
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On YouTube, videos advise on how to proof your buildings against griefers, by building walls lined with obsidian or posting re-spawning witches at your door. You can grief without directly destroying anything at all, by simply causing weeds to grow all over an adversary's home. You can alternate between multiple accounts to stave off getting caught. Once inside, griefing can be every bit as creative as its counterpart: You can set traps, you can steal resources, you can flood a building with lava. Their work goes beyond smashing blocks before that comes the social engineering required to gain access to a victim's server, by somehow convincing the owner to let them join their private world. Minecraft griefers are a community all their own. If Minecraft is a maker culture, it has bred within itself a subculture of destruction. On Urban Dictionary, three out of 12 definitions of "griefer" allude to Minecraft, while a YouTube search for " Minecraft griefer" throws up around 355,000 results. Minecraft is among the best-selling games of all time it makes sense that it would attract antagonists. That's right-we are inviting all PKs, ninja-looters, and scammers to compete against each other to decide, once and for all, who is the World's Greatest Griefer.Įven Wikipedia has a griefer problem, with "tag-team editors" conspiring to undo others' work.īut today, the term "griefer" is most often associated with smashing virtual bricks. Their rallying call was a griefer checklist:ĭo you delight in others' misfortune? Do you think you are the supreme schemer? Then pit yourself against other self-proclaimed masters of mayhem in the first ever World's Greatest Griefer Contest. Gaming fan site Warcry Network hosted a competition in 2004 to find the "World's Greatest Griefer," promising a $5,000 Best Buy gift voucher in return. Traumatic, sexualised griefing in the LambdaMOO MUD was the subject of Julian Dibbell's seminal 1993 essay "A Rape in Cyberspace," which concludes with an oddly prescient discussion of the implications of griefing as "free speech" in a world where words are an extension of the body: "…he more seriously I took the notion of virtual rape, the less seriously I was able to take the notion of freedom of speech, with its tidy division of the world into the symbolic and the real."
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Multi-User Domains (MUDs) in the early 90s were full of griefers. Know Your Meme lists the earliest known use of the term in 2000, in a USENET group discussion of the MMORPG Ultima Online, but the griefing tendency goes back further. By definition, "grief" implies sorrow and loss, an effect deeper than nuisance. Distinct from trolling, which is often done by a single aggressor (griefers like to travel in mobs), and which causes more light-hearted annoyance than actual damage, griefing is brutal and persistent. Gamers and cultural commentators have grappled with the definition of "griefer" for decades. Now, thanks to Minecraft, the griefer is experiencing a renaissance. Griefing was a mainstay of multiplayer online games in the early 2000s. They gang up on newbies, obstructing and reversing progress, burning and demolishing and gleefully wrecking other people's work in the manner of children who kick sandcastles at the beach. In Minecraft, this is what grief sounds like.