Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDs is a journal article written in 1996 by Richard A. Bartle, which describes the play styles of users of MUDs (multi-user dungeons, the predecessors to today’s MMOs such as EVE Online and World of Warcraft). He finds four main motivations for play: achievement within the game context, exploration of the game, socialising with others and imposition on others.

So, labelling the four player types abstracted, we get: achievers, explorers, socialisers and killers. An easy way to remember these is to consider suits in a conventional pack of cards: achievers are Diamonds (they’re always seeking treasure); explorers are Spades (they dig around for information); socialisers are Hearts (they empathise with other players); killers are Clubs (they hit people with them).

Those killers sound awfully familiar… yep, they’re griefers by another name.

I’ve read half a dozen articles proposing a similar taxonomy of play styles, but this one is interesting as a historical record. It shows that griefers were around since the earliest days of online games, and that right from the start some people recognised that the base motivations of players were not all the same.

Read on for a closer look at each of the four types, and the sorts of things you might hear them say.
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Undoubtedly, a lot went wrong with our documentary, but we were fortunate in some respects.

• Halo 3 is an excellent tool for making machinima. Bungie didn’t have to build in features to craft and create virtual theatre with their game – it was going to sell by the shipload either way – but they did, and it’s a blessing. Ok, so they left out some key features; notably, there’s no way to save the recorded game data as an actual video file without exporting it to external equipment or filming your television, but everything else is a dream to work with.

• The 1960s theme worked really well. Although the 1960s public service announcement is a much-parodied form, we had never seen it done for machinima before, and we thought it simultaneously contrasted nicely with the modern format of video games and was suitable for the old-fashioned theories of delinquency we were alluding to, which made the elements of theory blend in with the theme instead of seeming heavy-handed and awkward. It also gave our video a unique stylistic hook to catch the punters’ attention.

• There was a wealth of resources available online. From DigitalPh33r’s comprehensive guide to making machinima (albeit overlooking the NTSC/PAL issues, but he is American), to stylistic references for the pseudo-1960s look such as promo clips
for Fallout and parody educational videos, to the cornucopia of content published with perfect timing by The Escapist magazine and its columnists on griefing and many others.

• We were able to craft the filming separately from the acting. I wrote about this small epiphany earlier, and it’s still an interesting point. In making a machinima, at least with Halo 3, you can act out the scene, save the game data and then revisit it as the camera operator – as many times as you like. Although machinima works more like live-action film than animation, it has an advantage over both of them in that you can be acting, directing and operating potentially infinite cameras and audio recorders of the same scene all at the same (virtual) time. Just act, save, review, shoot, rewind, re-shoot, repeat.

• The music we needed was in the public domain. Harry discovered a gold mine in the podcast series BoomerByte – The Soundtrack of a Generation, which compiles old non-copyright music from the 1940s-60s.

• The video game community is full of awesome people. This is an aspect of the documentary I would really like to emphasise, although I’m not sure where to put it. Although we avoided making a big deal about the video game “community”, because it’s a questionable concept in such an anonymous space (maybe there’s a video game “society”, although makes it sound a bit Illuminati-esque), we found the internet to be full of people offering the fruits of their time and effort for free. We’re particularly grateful to the kind folk who submitted creations to garrysmod.org and Flickr for others to re-use, and the people who volunteered advice indirectly or directly.

• Some of our best shots came about by accident. Although most of the shots that ended up in the video were scripted, there were a few great ones that we couldn’t have planned – like the blue player landing on its teammate, looking down at it for a second and then shooting a full clip into its face before being blown straight up into the air by a rocket and falling to a kneel against the stairs. This is the sort of stuff that just happens when you get people together to play a video game.

• Harry’s reaction shots were hilarious. There’s nothing funnier than to see someone whose two buddies were just run over by a truck spinning in confused circles, looking at the sky. (To us, anyway.)

• The theory was present in the video, but invisible to the naked mind. I hesitated about whether to include this in the “successes” post, because I suppose we won’t know how well we pulled it off. But I’m happy with it. To me, it works like an optical illusion: if you look at our documentary expecting to see a funny video, that’s all you see, but if you look at it with an eye for the criminological theories of Travis Hirschi, Walter Reckless and co. you see a subtext to everything. To me, each scene of the script relates to something we read about the definition, causes, consequences or ways to combat delinquency. Fingers crossed that’s visible to others.

[Image by pbo31 under a Creative Commons license.]

Here are some of the things that went wrong with our documentary. Just the highlights!

• We overestimated our skills. As Harry wrote in the first complete draft of our documentary contract we scoffed at the idea of not being up to the task (emphasis added):

Aside from years of academic specialisation in the writing, editing and study of integrated media, Fraser and I have both more specifically had experience in constructing websites and producing machinima. What remaining peripheral skills will be required (e.g. image editing, audio editing) will be rudimentary at most, and either/or of us are more than qualified to handle what arises in that vicinity also.

That wasn’t strictly true. We had experience playing video games and making videos, so we figured it was as easy as combining A with B. To be honest, even as we submitted this I felt like it was a case of Famous Last Words, but I was swayed by optimism.
EDIT: Harry points out that we have both, in fact, made a machinima each – in Second Life. Oh, Second Life, I find you so forgettable.

• We backed the wrong horse. Although we considered using Halo 3 to create our video from the start, because we knew it was easy to use and had a dedicated Theatre mode, we opted for the greater customisability and variability of Garry’s Mod. After some chaotic experimentation, we came to the conclusion that Gmod was simply not built for what we wanted to do, and more suitable for making still images – or just messing about and attaching rockets to people’s limbs to make them zoom around the room like a demented Astro Boy. We needed something that had

• We lacked focus. We had all these great ideas, from message boards to full character vocal lip-synching and presenting the video in comic-book frames. Any of these could have been a good addition to the project, but the number of bells and whistles started to obscure the central pillar of the work, until we streamlined it.

• We didn’t make a series. I can’t point to one specific reason for this – it was a combination of factors, particularly the crunch that came with technical delays and general postponery. I still think a regular series of short machinima videos would be cool, but the fact is we promised a series and delivered a feature film. To be fair, we’re not the first gamers to fail at episodic content – where is Episode 3, Valve?!?

• We had innumerable technical problems. Here are some of the problems we encountered and solved (or avoided) in the course of making this project: 1. Online game of Garry’s Mod wouldn’t connect. 2. Imported objects for Garry’s Mod wouldn’t appear in a spawn list. 3. There was no way to set up an after-the-fact camera for Garry’s Mod. 4. The glitch to make characters in Halo 3 drop their weapon wouldn’t work. 5. Halo 3’s amazing machinima creation tools turned out to not include the ability to save or download videos as actual video files, just recorded gameplay data. 6. The TV wouldn’t output video and audio to the DV deck. 7. The Xbox would send audio but not video to the DV deck. 8. The DV deck would accept video only in 50Hz format; Halo 3 would only run in 60Hz format. 9. All the technical advice we had consulted that made capturing machinima with Halo 3 look easy turned out to be for NTSC format equipment, whereas all our equipment was in PAL. 10. The video camera was tricky to set up to frame the TV properly (not a technical problem, per se, but difficult, especially since the camera’s viewfinder didn’t show the edges of the picture.) 11. The video camera wouldn’t capture audio. 12. The video camera’s white balance and focus settings disagreed with the television picture. 13. The computer wouldn’t recognise that the camera was connected. 14. My external hard drive stopped working at random intervals. 15. The Ken Burns effect produced a weirdly interlaced picture, that a simple deinterlace filter would not remove. 16. Final Cut Pro’s exporting options sometimes did the opposite of what you’d expect. Not to mention having to deal with the blogs failing for over a week at the height of all this. There were other problems on top of these, but you’ve already skipped to the next point.

• We didn’t get a professional voice actor. No, although Harry and I knew our documentary would live or die by the presentation of its constant voice-over, we gave the role to the very best voice actor who was, er, one of the two of us. (And after the first three limp attempts at it, I doubted we’d even done that. Harry was laughing too hard to volunteer, though.) To be fair, on the day when we first talked about the voice-over style, I was effortlessly busting out a damn good imitation of the classic 60s voice-over guy – but I just couldn’t recapture that when it came time to record.

[Image by OldOnliner under a Creative Commons license.]

This is the original script for the machinima documentary. Writing it was one of the easiest parts of the process: once we had our rough draft of the scenes we would film, I got it all out in one sitting. As you can see, it didn’t change much between the first draft and the finished product. A few lines went on too long and were cut, and one section was too far removed from the structure of the rest of the video to comfortably include it, but on the whole it worked pretty well. I’m not enormously proud of it – I’m not planning to start a career in film scriptwriting just yet – but I think it would be quite good if delivered by a suitable, experienced voice actor.

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The Board of Transient Spaces presents:

> At Machinima.com

> At GameVideos

This public service message was brought to you by Fraser Allison and Harry Milonas.

If you would like to know more, please consult the documentary contract.

Worlds collide: the remix-friendly Slap Chop infomercial has been done over once again, this time as a mashup with lines from the online shooter game Team Fortress 2. TF2’s character of the Scout does an uncanny impersonation of fast-talking tele-salesman Vince Offer, and the customer testimonials have cameo appearances by TF2’s Heavy Weapons Guy, Solder and Sinister Voice-Over Lady.

Inspired by this effort, another YouTuber re-dubbed an infomercial starring Billy Mays with dialogue from TF2’s Heavy Weapons Guy, selling a cleaning product appropriately named Kaboom. Your mileage may vary on this one – although if you can manage to make out what he’s saying, the lines he uses are actually quite clever.

Several people have remarked that the documentary footage we filmed off the TV screen doesn’t look as bad as they (or I) expected. I admit, despite my earlier grumpiness, we managed to get it looking perfectly good for publishing on the web. So how did we manage it? Well, it wasn’t easy. It took a lot of hours of informed trial and error, painstaking adjustments of the camera’s positioning and adjusting settings on both the camera and the television.

Tips

> Use a flat-screen television, preferable large. The image will be curved slightly by the camera lens as it is, so any curvature of the screen will be magnified into a pronounced fish-eye effect. It will also make it harder to avoid reflections and picture distortion. Also, curved-screen TVs are usually CRTs, which are prone to the familiar “flicker” you get when a TV appears on a home movie; LCD and plasma screens are not as prone to this.

> Don’t record the audio coming out of the TV’s speakers with your camera’s microphone. It will sound horrible. If you can’t import the sound directly from the TV to the camera with a cable (as we couldn’t), then remove the in-game audio entirely and add your own from scratch.

> Don’t rely on the camera’s viewfinder screen to frame your shot. The viewfinder might not show right to the edges of the video, and you’ll be left with the TV frame boxing in the picture you’re trying to record. Attach a computer to your video camera with a Firewire or USB cable and open a program that can directly import the video, such as iMovie, to check the framing of the shot.

> Frame the TV screen carefully. If the camera is slightly tilted, skewed or off-centre, it will be obvious in the footage. This can be a very slow and frustrating process, but it’s necessary.

> Seal the room from outside light. If you have a window in the room, draw the curtains fully across and try to seal up any gaps. Even a thin line at the edge of a curtain can interrupt your footage badly.

> Turn off the lights. We found that one dim light in the background was ok, but too much light washed out the TV picture.

> Adjust the settings on your TV screen. Try a few things. Very low contrast and somewhat high brightness worked for us.

> Set the white balance. Make sure the TV is showing some representative image of what you want to film while you do this, or the white balance will be set for the wrong type of image.

> Check that auto-focus is turned OFF! That goes for any other auto-adjusting settings too. The camera will shift its settings as the picture changes during recording, attempting to get the best picture, which will make your footage unusable. We accidentally left automatic white balancing on during one recording session, and the resulting footage morphed from overexposed to underexposed; the camera couldn’t properly process what it was seeing.

> Check your footage. There is a lot that can go wrong without you noticing, so make sure everything captured correctly and looks good before you pack up the camera!

We had our belated showing of the documentary rough cut today. There are a few points of feedback from the esteemed audience, which we’ve added to our post-production tasks list.

To Do:

From rough cut feedback

> Tone down the music in places.

> Vary the music. Try some more “ominous” music in parts. (We’ll give this a go, but keep in mind the tone and constancy of the music is intended to contrast with the violent subject matter of the video game.)

> Review the introduction. It may not be clear that the documentary is primarily about online video games, as opposed to online communities in general. (I’m not convinced this is a significant problem, because there are several cues in the introduction, for those who don’t already know that “griefing” is a game term: the voice-over says “computerised internet video game”; there is a game console above the television; there is a game controller on the bed, which the boy reaches for at one point; and the images themselves are created with a game engine. If these seem too subtle, we may add a more overt cue by Photoshopping a still frame of game footage onto the television screen.)

Already on the list

> Fix the image corruption caused by the Ken Burns effect (if possible).

> Add sound effects (after a test to make sure they add to the film, rather than detract from it).

> Add images of teacher, mailman, policeman and garbage collector.

> Improve the title cards to be more consistent with the 1960s theme.

> Apply an old-film effect to the voice-over.

> Apply an old-film video filter.

> Add credits.

> Upload to Machinima.com and GameTrailers.com.

[Image by Rakka under a Creative Commons license.]

[This was published on May 20. The original post was lost when the blog was corrupted over the past week. Luckily I had a copy on an old syndicated feed set up for LiveJournal thanks to Emily (and thanks to Harry for the idea of checking it - he hasn't been so lucky).]

A cautionary tale about globalisation, trust and journalism:

An undergraduate sociology student in Dublin named Shane Fitzgerald had an idea for an experiment in “social science’s current fad – globalisation”. When he spotted a breaking news report of the death of composer Maurice Jarre late one night at the end of March this year, he quickly logged on to Wikipedia and added to Jarre’s page a fabricated quote, designed specifically to appeal to journalists writing obituaries.

One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack. Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head, that only I can hear.

He wanted to see which news outlets would pick up the quote without checking it. He added the quote several times, and although each time it was removed within hours or minutes, it made the leap from Wikipedia to news desks around the world.

While I expected online blogs and maybe some smaller papers to use the quote, I did not think it would have a major impact. I was wrong. Quality newspapers in England, India, America and as far away as Australia had my words in their reports of Jarre’s death. I was shocked that highly respected newspapers would use material from Wikipedia without first sourcing and referencing it properly.

Not only was the quote widely reported, it also went unquestioned for weeks until Mr Fitzgerald sent emails to those that had published the quote in articles. Some of the offending news outlets removed the quote; others ignored it, at least at first. According to news reports, The Guardian was the only newspaper that initially printed a retraction of the quote.

The Irish Times published Mr Fitzgerald’s own thoughts on his experiment.

[Image by quartermane under a Creative Commons license.]

We filmed the TV.

It looks like we filmed the TV.

Here’s a sample.

The six most heartbreaking words in the machinima creator’s language: “You could try filming your TV.”

How did it come to this? How were we reduced to the very bottom layer of the video-capture dungheap: pointing a camcorder at a TV screen? This project will have picture quality the equal of any 25c pirated DVD movie shot from the back row of a cinema.

Over the past month, Harry, I and all four of the techs made a valiant effort to solve the problem of capturing machinima from a game console to a computer. We tried many different cables, two televisions, two computers, hundreds of settings changes and dozens of console-deck-TV combinations. Finally, though, we ran out of other options. (Well, nearly all. Lachlan grimly offered to excavate an arcane video magic box with a German-sounding name out of storage and setting it up for the new computers – a process that was implied would take hours – but the harrowed look on the face of David B. clearly said this was a last resort. With no guarantee it would work, I decided to save them the pain.)

David and Lachlan have assured me that since we’ll be playing the video on an LCD flat screen and taking care with our framing and lighting, the recorded image quality should not be too bad. Unlike the far too common I-filmed-my-TV look for amateur machinima, as seen in the video above.

[Video created by iTzxSkillv2 under Microsoft’s “Game Content Usage Rules” using assets from Halo 3, © Microsoft Corporation.]

Halo 3 can only be played in PAL 60Hz format. The DV deck can only receive video in PAL 50Hz format. Attempting to capture the former with the latter results in a video that looks like the picture above.

The techs don’t know how to fix this, though they’ve promised to have a look. But if we can’t capture the video today, I don’t have enough free time to try again until Thursday, the day before the rough cut is due.

[Image by the author.]

This is an educational video on relationship manners for Facebook (”the electric friendship generator”) made in the style of a 1950s public service announcement. Our documentary uses a similar style for the introduction and voice-over, linking in with the old-fashioned thinking of Travis Hirschi’s original theory of delinquency.

EDIT: Woah, turns out Harry had linked this video in a previous post.

[Video by YourTango, via Gizmodo.]

We have solved or found workarounds for all our technical issues – so far – and got a good chunk of our production done today. Most of the “acting” for our videos is done, but not the “filming”. We noted that there’s no equivalent to this stage in live action film-making, where acting and filming are considered inseparable interlocking parts of the same process: without filming the acting isn’t recorded, and without acting the filming is empty. In machinima, the acting can be performed and saved prior to its recording; in fact, in Halo 3, it nearly has to be.

A drawback to this is that it strings out the process, but an advantage is that you only have to worry about one thing at a time. You might need a few takes to get the acting right and a few takes to get the recording right, separately, but you don’t have to re-perform a well-acted scene because the camera operator stuffed up. It also allows you to find the best angle after the action is set in stone, so there’s no guesswork, and to shoot the same scene multiple times from different angles or with different effects.

I’m enjoying this. I’d like to make another machinima once the semester is over, without having to solve all the obscure technical puzzles from scratch.

The Escapist magazine has yet another contemplation of griefing, Griefmonkeys in Shamus Young’s Experienced Points column. Young points out that there are many contradictory definitions of griefing and gives his own definition, which I agree with: to be a griefer, a player must not be simply playing to win, no matter how unfairly; they must be trying to prevent other people from enjoying the game.

If two junior football teams are wildly mismatched, it’s not griefing. Playing poorly because of lack of skill or experience is not griefing. Hurting your teammates or playing in such a way as to make your team lose on purpose is griefing. Bad sportsmanship is not griefing. Even cheating is not necessarily griefing, assuming the cheater is simply breaking the rules in order to win.

No, the griefing I’m talking about is when one person stops trying to play the game and starts trying to stop other people from having fun, by any means necessary. Their goal is not to win the game, but to make other people miserable. This is my definition of griefer.

In real life, we just call them bullies.

Young points out a phenomenon I’ve noticed too: that griefers often blame the victims for their griefing, saying that they wouldn’t need to grief if their opponents weren’t so bad at the game, or on the flip side, if they didn’t take the game so seriously. Sometimes they present this as a lesson: they claim their griefing is motivated by a desire to teach the victim how to play better, or alternatively how to lighten up and realise that it’s just a game. Young has an interesting alternative.

The in-game griefer usually points the finger of blame at the victim for “sucking so bad,” but that defense makes about as much sense as a rapist who says he’s innocent because his victim wasn’t any good at fighting back. More reasonable people might point the finger of blame at the griefer, but I think they’re both wrong. In an online game, the guilty party is the one who allowed the griefing to happen in the first place. If you want to be mad at someone, be mad at the developer.

Young argues that it is the developer’s responsibility to expect some of their players to misbehave and adjust the game to prevent this. He even advocates going as far as to refund the griefer’s money and permanently ban them from the game rather than allow them to continue to turn other customers’ fun into frustration.

This is stance is somewhat analogous to the harm minimisation approach to criminology: rather than punish individual offenders retrospectively, look at the big picture and try to reduce the negative results by the most effective means, even if that means “justice” is not served against the perpetrators.

[Image by sillydog under a Creative Commons license.]

I’m watching a video series, DigitalPh33r’s Guide to Making Halo 3 Machinima. So far it’s an excellent, no-bullshit guide with plenty of funny interludes to keep it interesting. I’ll take notes of some key points while I watch.

Part One

> Halo 3, with its Theatre mode, is the only console game with enough flexibility to make a decent machinima. On PC, Half-Life 2 is the best, but you have to learn how to use the developer’s scripting tools. (If only I’d watched this video a month ago, we could have saved so much time…)

> If the machinima looks too much like regular gameplay, it’s boring to watch. To make a good machinima, you have to forget the principles of gameplay and think about the principles of cinema. (The dull video of griefers bombing a funeral in World of Warcraft is proof of that.)

> Microsoft’s Game Content Usage Rules:

Microsoft grants you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable license to use and display Game Content and to create derivative works based upon Game Content, strictly for noncommercial and personal use. We can revoke this limited use license at any time and for any reason.

If you share your Items with your friends or post them on your web site, then we’d also like you to include the following notice about the Game Content. You can put it in a README file, or on the web page from where it’s downloaded, or anywhere else that makes sense so long as anyone who sees your Item will also find this notice.

[The title of your Item] was created under Microsoft’s “Game Content Usage Rules” using assets from GAMENAME, © Microsoft Corporation.

> He covers audio copyright issues, but points out that thousands of videos and flash animations have been published on the web using unlicensed music and nobody seems to mind as long as it’s not for profit. (Harry and I will be using a mix of audio from Halo 3 itself, covered under Microsoft’s allowed usage rules, and audio in the public domain, as part of our Public Service Announcement theme.)
(more…)

Harry and I are in dangerous territory with our machinima documentary. Jenny is reminding us we should be in post-production, but we’re only up to production.

First, we ran into a series of technological brick walls in capturing our footage. We underestimated the challenge and overestimated our competency as machinima creators; we were like actors who thought we knew how to shoot a film because we’d “worked in movies”. We finally think we have a workable process now, at the end of week nine. Touch wood.

Second, in the week that we had planned to get the majority of our shooting done, I caught a bad case of flu and couldn’t get myself together enough to write a script, let alone shoot a collaborative video series.

We’re hard at work, but there’s little time left. It might be time to think about asking for an extension… Certainly the scope of our ambition has narrowed a bit.

In the Escapist issue on griefing that Harry and I mentioned the other day, there’s an article that poses a counterpoint to the traditional style of aggravated griefing: War and Peace by James McGrath. McGrath writes about griefers who don’t go in for the team-killing, kill-stealing and spawn-camping that is the bread and butter of traditional griefers, but instead go into online war games and stage peace protests.

Some of these peaceful acts of griefing involve simply preventing people from killing each other. In an online shooter match, for example, throwing flashbang grenades between two combatants to blind them, or spending the entire match hiding in an obscure spot and telling all your opponents that you’ve decided to become a pacifist.

Other protests are overtly political, harking back to real anti-war protests: getting a large group of players to stand in the shape of a heart, for example, in a low-lying area where they can be seen from above, or putting anti-war images (“sprays”) up on the walls of the combat zone.

WIRED magazine also has an article about peaceful griefing from way back in 2002: Make Love, Not War Games.

[Image copyleft Anne-Marie Schleiner.]

How should we conclude our documentary series? Does it need an overt conclusion, as in Passive Aggressive Email Boxing?

I’m inclined to think we don’t need a formal conclusion. The subject matter speaks for itself, and wouldn’t be well served by a Jerry Springer-style Final Thought. It would be a little farcical to try to give a neatly packaged wrap-up of griefers: besides the difficulty of summarising such a widespread and diverse “community”, there’s the fact that griefers are inherently anarchic and contrary by nature, not appreciative of attempts to categorise and explain them. Plus they’d laugh at us.

However, we will need a finishing note for each episode. Thirty Minutes To Move is a good example: closure is subtly provided by the family walking out of the house and getting in the car.

UPDATE: Of course! Our videos will be bracketed by Public Service Announcement-style clips. So the introduction and conclusion are taken care of. I can’t believe I didn’t think about it like this.

[Image by CURSIVEBUILDINGS under a Creative Commons license.]

The Escapist magazine just published its 200th issue, on griefing.

It includes a video on people’s experiences with griefing, whether as the perpetrators or the victims. The video is shot as a series of “talking heads” interviews, with a good mix of perspectives from plaintive victims to cynical aggressors, on questions like “Why grief?” and “Can griefers be stopped?”

Particularly interesting is the segment on why people grief, beginning around the six minute mark. The theories are surprisingly wide and cover a lot of the hypotheses we’ve encountered while researching our documentary, from “exploration” to a feeling of superiority to schadenfreude to pure selfish gain to “maybe they’re just bad at the game”.

The primary griefer interviewee describes griefing as an almost benevolent act, a way to “teach” inexperienced players like a big brother “teaches” a younger brother by beating up on them. (Don’t ask me, this is his twisted logic.)

To compare it to the documentary examples Jenny gave last week, it’s most similar to One Inch Punch, relying on interesting and articulate comments from its interviewees to be engaging, with little else besides some stylised background graphics.

From my perspective as someone interested in the topic, the documentary works well in general. There are a few minutes, between the two and five minute marks, where it falls flat. It tries to give some “human interest” stories about the horrors of griefing, but these just aren’t as engaging as the rest of the video, partly because the interviewees speak too quietly. This is a problem with interview-driven documentaries: they can only be as good as the people who speak in them. (The section also flounders a bit because the consequences for the victims of griefing just don’t seem that big a deal. Although I had to feel for the guy who got swindled out of all the in-game money he’d built up over two and a half years…)

In the same issue, there’s an interesting article by Tom Endo comparing griefers with folk heroes like Jesse James, Bonnie and Clyde, the Mafia and Ned Kelly: they’re often glamourised and given a romantic gloss in the retelling of their exploits, but the everyday reality of their actions is selfish, vicious and toxic to the game community.

Final thought, from Jon Hayter:

“Do I think griefing can be eradicated? Sure, with enough nuclear weapons, I’m pretty sure it can.”