Likewise, people using programs to cheat at online games could tell themselves it's not really cheating, or doesn't really matter, or it's just a way to play the game. These cognitions can become habitual, creating a vicious, escalating cycle of dishonesty. But let's keep things in perspective. Dead Space 3 is the most recent console game to embrace cheating so long as it can be monetized by the publisher, selling ammo, upgrade materials, and the possibility of halving the collection time for Isaac’s scavenger droid. These developments in game design reveal the paradox of our attitudes toward cheating. The folks behind EasyAntiCheat, a service that stops people from cheating in video games, deal with one of the messiest issues in the medium.People often feel that anyone caught breaking the rules.

• The Psychology Of Cheating In Video Games Free
• Psychology Today Video Games

A griefer or bad faith player is a player in a multiplayer video game who deliberately irritates and harasses other players within the game (trolling), using aspects of the game in unintended ways.^[1] A griefer derives pleasure primarily or exclusively from the act of annoying other users, and as such is a particular nuisance in online gaming communities. To qualify as griefing, a player must be using aspects of the game in unintended ways to annoy other players—if they are trying to gain a strategic advantage, it is instead called 'cheating'.

History[edit]

The term was applied to online, multiplayer video games by the year 2000 or earlier, as illustrated by postings to the rec.games.computer.ultima.online USENET group.^[2] The player is said to cause 'grief' in the sense of 'giving someone grief'.

The term 'griefing' dates to the late 1990s, when it was used to describe the willfully antisocial behaviors seen in early massively multiplayer online games like Ultima Online and first-person shooters such as Counter-Strike. Even before it had a name, griefer-like behavior was familiar in the virtual worlds of text-based Multi-User Domains (MUDs), where joyriding invaders visited 'virtual rape' and similar offenses on the local populace.^[3] Julian Dibbell's 1993 article A Rape in Cyberspace analyzed the griefing events in a particular MUD, LambdaMOO, and the staff's response.

In the culture of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) in Taiwan, such as Lineage, griefers are known as 'white-eyed'—a metaphor meaning that their eyes have no pupils and so they look without seeing. Behaviors other than griefing that can cause players to be stigmatized as 'white-eyed' include cursing, cheating, stealing, or unreasonable killing.^[4]

Methods[edit]

Methods of griefing differ from game to game. What might be considered griefing in one area of a game may even be an intended function or mechanic in another area. Common methods may include but are not limited to:

• Intentional friendly fire or deliberately performing actions detrimental to other team members' game performance.
  • Wasting or destroying key game elements
  • Colluding with opponents
  • Giving false information
  • Faking extreme incompetence with the intent of hurting teammates or failing an in-game objective
  • Deliberately blocking shots from a player's own team, or blocking a player's view by standing in front of them so they cannot damage the enemy^[5]
  • Trapping teammates in inescapable locations by using physics props, special abilities, or teleportation
• Actions undertaken to waste other players' time.
  • Playing as slowly as possible
  • Hiding from an enemy when there is no tactical benefit in doing so
  • If a game interface element has no time limit, leaving their computer (going 'AFK'), potentially forcing the other players to leave the game (which may incur a penalty for leaving), like Among Us.
  • Constantly pausing the game or lowering its speed as much as possible, in the hopes that their target quit in frustration
• Causing a player disproportionate loss or reversing their progress.
  • Destroying or vandalizing other players' creations without permission in sandbox games like Minecraft and Terraria
  • Driving vehicles backwards around lapped courses in multiplayer racing games, often done with the intent of crashing head-on into whoever is in first place
• Using exploits (taking advantage of bugs in a game).
  • Illegally exiting a map's boundaries to prevent the enemy team from winning
  • In a co-op or multiplayer game, destroying or otherwise denying access to items without which other players cannot finish the game
• Purposeful violation of server rules or guidelines.
  • Impersonation of administrators or other players through similar screen names
  • Written or verbal insults, including false accusations of cheating or griefing
• Spamming a voice or text chat channel to inconvenience, harass or annoy other players.
• Uploading offensive or explicit images to profile pictures, in-game sprays, or game skins.
• Kill stealing, denying another player the satisfaction or gain of killing a target that should have been theirs.
• Camping at a corpse or spawn area to repeatedly kill players as they respawn (when players have no method of recourse to prevent getting killed), preventing them from being able to play. Camping can also refer to continuously waiting in a tactically advantageous position for others to come to them; this is sometimes considered griefing because if all players do it, the game stalls, but this is now more commonly considered a game design issue.
• Acting out-of-character in a role-play setting to disrupt the serious gameplay of others.
• Luring many monsters or a single larger monster to chase the griefer, before moving to where other players are. The line of monsters in pursuit looks like a train, and hence this is sometimes called 'training' or 'aggroing'.^[6]
• Blocking other players so they cannot move to or from a particular area, or access an in-game resource (such as a non-player character); the game Tom Clancy's The Division was found to have a serious problem with this at launch, where griefers could stand in the doorway out of the starting area, trapping players in the spawn room.^[7]
• Intentionally attempting to crash a server through lag or other means (such as spawning large amounts of resource-demanding objects), in order to cause interference among players.
• Smurfing, the process of creating extra accounts and deliberately losing games to enter a lower skill rank than is appropriate, before playing at full skill against lower-ranked opponents, thus defeating them easily.
• High-skill players deliberately losing in matches against low-skill players (usually due to shortage of players), causing the low-skill player's skill rating to artificially rise, so that they will be routinely pitted against opponents they have no chance of winning against in the future.
• Impersonating an enemy to trick someone into attacking the griefer so that a player is flagged as having attacked the griefer. A notable example of this is early on in Ultima Online, where players had a scroll that could change their appearance to that of a monster, with the only way to tell the difference between them and a real monster being to click on them and read their name. Attacking a monster disguised griefer would flag the player as a murderer causing the town guard to kill the player.

The term is sometimes applied more generally^[8] to refer to a person who uses the internet to cause distress to others as a prank,^[9][10] or to intentionally inflict harm, as when it was used to describe an incident in March 2008, when malicious users posted seizure-inducing animations on epilepsy forums.^[11][12][13]

Industry response[edit]

Many subscription-based games actively oppose griefers, since their behavior can drive away business.^[14] It is common for developers to release server-side upgrades and patches to annul griefing methods. Many online games employ gamemasters that reprimand offenders. Some use a crowdsourcing approach, where players can report griefing. Malicious players are then red-flagged, and are then dealt with at a gamemaster's discretion. As many as 25% of customer support calls to companies operating online games deal specifically with griefing.^[15]

Blizzard Entertainment has enacted software components to combat griefing.^[16] To prevent non-consensual attacks between players, some games such as Ultima Online have created separate realms for those who wish to be able to attack anyone at any time, and for those who do not. Others implemented separate servers.

When EverQuest was released, Sony included a PvP switch where people could fight each other only if they had enabled that option. This was done in order to prevent the player-killing that was driving people away from Ultima Online, which at that time had no protection on any of its servers.^[17]

Second Life bans players for harassment (defined as being rude or threatening, making unwelcome sexual advances, or performing activities likely to annoy or alarm somebody) and assault (shooting, pushing, or shoving in a safe area, or creating scripted objects that target another user and hinder their enjoyment of the game) in its community standards.^[18] Sanctions include warnings, suspension from Second Life, or being banned altogether.

Some space simulators, like Eve Online, have incorporated activities typically considered griefing as part of the gameplay mechanism. Corporate spying, theft, scams, gate-camping, and PvP on non-PvP players are all part of their gaming experience.^[19]

Shooters such as Counter Strike: Global Offensive have implemented peer review systems, where if a player is reported too many times, multiple higher ranked players are allowed to review the player and determine if the reports are valid, and apply a temporary ban to the player's account if necessary. The player's name is omitted during the replay, as well as those of the other 9 players in the game. In October 2016, Valve implemented a change that will permanently ban a player if he/she receives two penalties for griefing.

Many Minecraft servers have rules against griefing. In Minecraft freebuild servers, griefing is often the destruction of another player's build, and in other servers the definition ranges, but almost all servers recognize harassment as griefing. Most servers use temporary bans for minor and/or first-time incidents, and indefinite bans from the server for more serious and/or repeat offences.

In recent years, Grand Theft Auto Online has experienced a drastic increase in griefing due in part to the emergence of bugs and better money-making opportunities. Common griefing techniques within the game abuse passive mode and trivially accessible weaponized vehicles.^[20] Developer Rockstar has implemented measures such as a longer cool-down on passive mode, patching invincibility glitches, and removing passive mode from weaponized vehicles in recent updates. In addition, the game also features a reputation system that, in effect, after excessive 'bad sport point' accumulation, will mark players as 'bad sports', allowing them to only play in lobbies with other 'bad sports'. Such points are either accumulated over time or gained within a certain time frame and are acquired by actions such as destroying another player's personal vehicle, or quitting jobs early. This is one of the more controversial features of the game, as some point out flaws such as the game not considering if destruction of a vehicle was self-defense.^{[citation needed]}

Fallout 76 discourages players from griefing by marking them as wanted criminals, which one can get a reward for killing. Wanted players cannot see any other players on the world map and must rely on their normal player view.

Popular culture[edit]

In the South Park episode 'Make Love, Not Warcraft', the children attempt to vanquish a griefer in World of Warcraft.

See also[edit]

References[edit]

1. ^Warner, Dorothy; Raiter, Mike (December 2005). 'Social Context in Massively-Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs): Ethical Questions in Shared Space'(PDF). International Review of Information Ethics. 4.
2. ^'Google Groups: August 14, 2000 rec.games.computer.ultima.online'. Retrieved 16 June 2015.
3. ^Dibbell, Julian (18 January 2008). 'Mutilated Furries, Flying Phalluses: Put the Blame on Griefers, the Sociopaths of the Virtual World'. Wired. WIRED magazine. Archived from the original on 8 May 2011. Retrieved 18 May 2012.
4. ^Holin Lin; Chuen-Tsai Sun (2007), ''White-Eyed' and 'Griefer' Player Culture: Deviance Construction in MMORPGs', Worlds in Play: International Perspectives on Digital Games Research, pp. 106 et seq, ISBN9780820486437
5. ^'Meet the Griefers'. Eurogamer.net. 4 January 2012. Retrieved 16 June 2015.
6. ^'The Griefer Future'. Retrieved 16 June 2015.
7. ^'The Division Trolls Are Blocking Other Players' Progress By Standing In A Doorway'. Kotaku. Retrieved 12 October 2019.
8. ^Dibbell, Julian (2009). 'Mutilated Furries, Flying Phalluses: Put the Blame on Griefers, the Sociopaths of the Virtual World'. In Johnson, Steven (ed.). The Best Technology Writing 2009. Grand Rapids, Michigan: University of Michigan Press. pp. 9–19. ISBN978-0-300-15410-8. Retrieved 10 February 2010.
9. ^Nick Douglas, Internet's Most Wanted: A Rogue's GalleryArchived 2009-07-16 at the Wayback Machine, Jan 25 2007,
10. ^Craigslist Griefer Ordered To Pay Up Over Both Copyright And Privacy Violations (accessed April 26, 2009)
11. ^Kevin Poulsen, March 28, 2008, 'Hackers Assault Epilepsy Patients via Computer', Wired.
12. ^Cory Doctorow, March 31, 2008, 'Griefers deface epilepsy message-board with seizure-inducing animations', Boing Boing.
13. ^See also 'lulz', for griefer slang referring to enjoyment at others' expense.
14. ^Pham, Alex (2 September 2002). 'Online Bullies Give Grief to Gamers'. Main News. Los Angeles Times. p. 1. Archived from the original on 9 October 2007.
15. ^Davies, Martin (15 June 2006). 'Gamers don't want any more grief'. The Guardian.
16. ^'Official forum changes, real life names to be displayed'. Archived from the original on 19 June 2013. Retrieved 2 May 2013.
17. ^Glenn Barnett (1 April 2000). 'Darktide Rising'.
18. ^'Community Standards'. Retrieved 16 June 2015.
19. ^'Griefing'. Evelopedia. Archived from the original on 27 May 2014. Retrieved 26 May 2014. In EVE, 'griefing' refers to various activities, some of which can be argued not to be 'griefing' in the classic sense, but parts of valid gameplay.^{[better source needed]}
20. ^O'Connor, Alice (13 March 2020). 'Watch out: GTA Online's most reviled griefmobile is cheap this week'. Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Retrieved 30 October 2020.

External links[edit]

• Documented incident of griefing during a virtual interview, see also Anshe Chung
• Research paper on griefing. To view this PDF paper, the host website requires a subscription to the digital library.
• 'Feature: The Griefer Within', GamePro.
• Can you grief it? - feature article at VideoGamer.com

Fun is often described as the most important element in video games, which in most cases translates into rule-following against a backdrop of movie lot freedom. Designers put players in an environment where uncertainty has been narrowed to a simple number of problems, careful sequencing of which keeps players from having to wonder where the problems came from or why they need solving. Fun is the relief that comes when open-ended problems are turned into multiple choice questions, or, better still, matters of reflex. It’s the end result of a player bartering away their obedience in exchange for an elaborate charade of advancement through levels and story stages, which makes cheating the most ethical approach to playing games, declining the call to follow rules and instead think of fun as a process of revealing the cheapness of the rewards that come from obedience.

In Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga captured the spirit of cheating as anti-play: “as soon as the rules are transgressed the whole play world collapses.” Cheating threatens to destroy the precious commodity one has just spent a full day’s wage on, the locked progression of experiences contained on the disc. In the early days of console gameplay, cheats like Super Mario Bros.’ hundred extra lives trick were still admired because they were comparatively obscure and required some skill to execute.

Cheating has been a highly generative part of game culture throughout the years, not just in laying out the framework for microtransactions and free-to-play economies, but in widening the scope of gameplay itself. Quake’s rocket jumping, an unplanned exploit of the game’s damage modeling and physics, allowed players to reach new parts of maps, changing the game’s tactical balance. The germ of Grand Theft Auto was the result of players’ exploiting a glitch in Race ‘N’ Chase, a top-down racing game DMA Design was working on. During development, playtesters noticed a bug where the police pathfinding AI lost its orientation and would try and drive directly through the player’s car, creating the chaotic ramming and high speed collisions that proved to be more entertaining than the game’s original concept of racing.

Other cheats have acquired the undignified status of gamebreakers, destabilizing mistakes developers try and patch out to preserve the game’s integrity. Demon’s Souls Stockpile Thomas glitch, for instance, allowed players to replicate an infinite number of items and upgrade materials by going through an elaborate order of actions. Making use of the glitch removes the blanketing despair of being stuck with a +7 weapon and realizing the hours upon hours of farming it will take to get enough chunks and pure stones before you’ll be able to reach maximum level. The obsessive anguish of wanting something collapses into the indifference of having gotten the prize without having suffered through the process of its creation.

Dark Souls contained its own unauthorized warp pipe with a glitch that allows players to skip directly to the end boss area halfway through the game. The cheat lets players jump right into the Kiln of the Last Flame, making 30 minute speedruns possible. It also allows first-time players to skip some of the game’s most imbalanced and exploitative areas including Tomb of Giants and Lost Izalith (and its massive lava-bed filled with Tyrannosaurus Rex creatures).

Making use of this exploit destroys the Dark Souls’ core values, built around the tolerance of suffering. If you haven’t suffered the unfairness of fighting giant skeletons on narrow cliff ledges in the pitch dark, and later having to choose between holding a lantern or a shield, you haven’t suffered enough, you haven’t understood the game, you haven’t gone deep enough into your submission to the logic of its rules. It’s not about winning but the nearness of the game’s hostility to your actions, always a second or two away from outright rejection.

Other games have made the impulse to cheat a central to their moneymaking strategies. Where gold farmers and bots were once the shady class of rulebreakers spoiling a game’s economy, Facebook and mobile games have made cheating the entire point of play. Games like Field Runners 2 will sell you coin doublers and Facebook is always happy to sell you more in-game currency to buy powers and items when you haven’t earned enough from regular gameplay. Dead Space 3 is the most recent console game to embrace cheating so long as it can be monetized by the publisher, selling ammo, upgrade materials, and the possibility of halving the collection time for Isaac’s scavenger droid.

These developments in game design reveal the paradox of our attitudes toward cheating. A behavior that is finally defined not by fairness or unfairness but by who has control over outcomes. When unfair behavior is supported through the authority of the game designer it is an acceptable artistic implement, but when the player engages in imbalanced behavior for their own benefit it’s cheating. This tension is crucial to understanding video games as both experiences and expressions. Once a player begins to see the scope and general values of a game’s systems, it’s possible to interpret them in an artful or emotional way––say realizing just how thorough and demanding Demon’s Souls upgrade stone scarcity is and reading into it an emotional metaphor for the onerous requirements of getting anything even marginally valuable in life.

Yet, interpreting a game’s systems does not lead to hours and hours and hours of subsequent value from carrying out the metaphor to its mechanistic conclusion. The more valuable part of a game is not winning but in the player’s struggle to understand why they want to win in this particular setting and with these particular rule values. Cheating allows players to reject the coerced emotions of the designers––like an audience talking back in a theater. But unlike films, games require players to internalize a worldview and change their behavioral impulses according to it. Because designers seek to directly affect a player’s impulses the need to talk back––to subvert and antagonize a developer’s rules and values––is an ethical imperative, what distinguishes a game from propagandistic anesthesia.

The most worrisome form of cheating comes when the hostility toward a designer’s rules are turned against other players, a way of harassing those adhering to rules someone else has rejected. Huizinga distinguished between a mere cheater, who “pretends to be playing the game and, on the face of it, still acknowledges the magic circle,” and the spoil-sport, who actively seeks to interfere with other people’s experiences and “robs the play of its illusion.” Here the impulse to rebel against the impositions of the developer require harassment of other people, something that is crucially disruptive to the entire concept of making and selling games and so cheating becomes criminalized within the game world.

Developers and platform holders operate an elaborate system of computer surveillance and complaint reporting in order to locate and punish spoil-sports. PC players are given tools like Punk Buster and Valve Anti-Cheat, which scan game files on a player’s computer looking for hacks. Sony and Microsoft have similar mechanisms to detect hacked console hardware and provide tools for players to report problem players in online games. The penalties for being found and labeled by these mechanisms is removal and, in many cases, lifetime bans from a particular game.

The Psychology Of Cheating In Video Games Free

Games match-make for skill and experience, but they do nothing to match people based on interest in play style. There are rarely modes or areas designed for experimental purposes, to give players who have no interest in competition or rules a place to create for themselves. Even in games like Halo 4 and Far Cry 3, which offer powerful level creation tools, there is a narrowness that comes from the modes’ separation from the traditional parts of the game. The story progression cannot be recomposed with player-driven modification, nor can the concept of shooting other players as a form of competition be addressed, criticized, satirized, or expanded upon from within the multiplayer modes that support them.

This structural conflict is not ultimately between cheaters and good players, but one that calls fun itself into question. We have never had a good or consistent definition of fun, and yet it is used as the tautological justification for all game design. Games that are organized and administered in the name of fun antagonize players who don’t share their basic values, defining anything antagonistic to rule-following as cheating, harassing, or playing the spoil-sport. We have made the desire to behave without rule a malady, and creative and efficient obedience the most respected form of behavior in game culture.

Psychology Today Video Games

In The Culture Industry, Adorno described the various amusements of free time as “nothing more than a shadowy continuation of labor.” In pursuing the competitive leisure of sport “people first inflict upon themselves (and celebrate as a triumph of their own freedom) precisely what society inflicts upon them and what they must learn to enjoy.” Our pastimes are dramatic miniatures of our work-a-day selves, lavishing the mundane forms of labor we cannot escape in excess emotional rewards. The parallel with video game culture is powerful, with its scarcity models and derivation of fun from the domination of others. The role of game designer becomes an amalgamation of teacher, boss, and cop: building tutorials, setting productivity goals, and punishing those who try and break the rules with removal from the community.

What’s fun about video games is not the winning and the losing, but the relief that comes with obedience. Cheaters can be considered anyone interested in having an experience not predetermined by a rule or limit, someone intent on antagonizing those whose adherence to artificial rules numb their awareness of possibilities outside those other prescribed by the game’s systems. In this light, cheating is the only ethical action one can take in a game, forcing play to be a consideration of the rules themselves and not an obedient exploration of how to best follow them. Cheaters are not enemies of game culture and good design, but an essential group whose persistence should be embraced, internalized, and allowed to flourish into new ways of playing that even our most celebrated proctors would never have thought up on their own.