By Dmitri Barvinok
Staff writer

Andrew, 16 and in 10th grade, plays Minecraft at least an hour every day, usually after school. He spends his time building virtual castles and complex machinery in a game that combines the creative power of building blocks and the role-playing element of a video game. Most of the time, he and his friends play on servers where they are protected from griefers.

A griefer is a bully in the world of online games. Griefers don’t play by the rules and attempt to cause as much distress and discomfort for other players as possible.

In Minecraft, griefers go after the creations of other players.

“I’ve seen seven hours of work get completely destroyed,” Andrew said.

Though many servers have griefer protections in place, those protections sometimes get in the way of regular players, Andrew said. Sometimes, playing against a griefer can be fun, since it becomes a competition and the game suddenly has a villain. Other times, griefers trick their way into becoming administrators of a server and destroying everything the players have built, which could waste weeks of work.

Andrew admits to having griefed himself. It can be fun, he said.

Minecraft players can become quite attached to their creations, especially as it takes many days, sometimes months, to create particularly complex or large structures.

These creations are important to the players, even though they are virtual, Andrew said. Though it’s not quite on the same level as his real-life possessions, he, and other Minecraft players, are upset when their hard work is destroyed.

According to Mike Ambinder, an experimental psychologist at Valve Software in Bellevue, WA, many people get pleasure from griefing others, and it often becomes a competition to see who can cause the most chaos.

Griefing can be very similar to bullying, as Andrew and Ambinder attest.

“The mob mentality is a phenomenon that has been extensively studied and definitely seems to be at play here,” Ambinder said.

The more players are engaged in destructive behavior, the more likely others are to join in.

One of Andrew's Minecraft creations.
As with other forms of bullying, players sometimes get singled out and picked on.

“When people don’t know each other personally, that will never happen,” Andrew said, referring to the server he and his friends run, but he admits that things are probably different on large, public servers.

There here have been griefing concerns in a bigger game. Recently, World of Warcraft and the company that produces it, Blizzard, have come under fire for being lax on cyberbullying.

World of Warcraft forums are full of players complaining that they have been repeatedly harassed, to the point where they’ve quit the game. Despite cyberbullying being against Blizzard’s terms of use, it is tough to report and punish the bullies. The game’s enormous player base –- more than 10 million subscribers in 2011 -– makes strict control difficult.

Cyberbullying is recognized as a legitimate threat on social networks, but video games are often overlooked as battlegrounds for the same kind of behavior. One World of Warcraft player complained on the forums that a group of players was harassing people by impersonating players and bothering others, bringing blame on their targets. This is similar to Facebook cyberbullying when high school students create fake profiles of fellow students. They then post humiliating information about them, or harass others under their assumed name.

Controlling and preventing griefing is difficult. In World of Warcraft, moderators attempt to ban bullies, but they can’t get them all, because there are so many players. Minecraft servers can be protected against griefers, but the safeguards interfere with legitimate play, Andrew said.

Not all Minecraft servers are protected from griefers.

Minecraft allows you to interact with animals.

“I think it should be individually up to every server or person,” Andrew said.

Even if the server has anti-griefer measures, truly determined players will download modifications to the game that allow them to bypass server protections.

“Research –- our own and that done by psychologists ‘in the wild’ -– seems to confirm that incentivizing positive behavior is stronger and leads to longer-lasting effects than punishing negative behavior,” Ambinder said.

At the end of the day, griefing hurts video games and gamers, Ambinder said, and Valve is hard at work trying to discourage it.

As for Andrew, he will continue building and protecting his creations, hidden away on a private server.

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14 Comments

  1. I wish you had already created the app and it doesn’t seem so. My son was bullied today in your game and they used cursing when destroying or stealing his work of more than five hours and after that the boy that did it cursed him. Bullying is prohibited by law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-bullying_legislation And you should also make it part of your game. Otherwise, this game will end up having problems, legal issues if causing damages.

    1. the problem with what you said is that if your child was on a minecraft server then it would be the responsibility of the server administrators to deal with it and many servers won’t have many admins as they may have to go to school or work during the day. just don’t let him play on the server if you don’t think it’s safe for him because taking it or not letting him play the game because of someone else is just a stupid thing to do and it won’t fix the problem

  2. Bullying is a problem in the online gaming world. A lot of kids know the people they are playing with and gaming has become a way for bullies to harass and threaten kids online. Make sure that you know who your kids are playing games with online and keep them safe.

  3. Personalty when playing on a server where griefing is a possibility I welcome it. I love the feeling of a rival, and all the tricks and traps that it always eventually leads to. People just need to be careful where they choose to start a large build.

  4. Griefing is online bullying due to going around, I have personally been griefed and it doesn’t make the games as fun if you want to unwind after a day and spend almost 3 hours in a square box due to someone deciding they like your spot better on ARK. Personally, this gives a massive turn-off to what was once a fun game, but at least they allow individuals to report players and tribes that are continuously doing this to other members and tribes just because they can. Player versus environment should not be a hassle to deal with players that try to steal territory and move other players into places that we can’t get out of because we cannot just delete peoples’ creations to continue playing a game.

  5. Its kinda simple. If you don’t want to risk getting griefed don’t play on a server. Its completely impossible to get griefed on a private game unless they physically come and use your console.

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