The Internet: SRS BIZ?
January 27, 2008
I just read this article in Wired Magazine, and it is a great piece of journalism. It’s about “griefers,” who are basically internet dorks who spend all their time trying to piss off other internet dorks. Also known as “trolls,” these guys (and they’re just about all dudes) can be found in every forum thread, multiplayer game, and major blog’s comments, doing their best to ruin everyone else’s fun.
And, to be honest? I find myself sympathizing with a lot of these assholes. A lot of people DO take websites and games too seriously, and it might not be so awful that they be reminded that, at heart, most of this stuff just doesn’t matter much. There’s nothing fundamentally new about what’s going on here—wits have used similar tactics to poke fun at and criticize aspects of human nature and pop culture for as long as we’ve HAD human nature and pop culture. And without this irreverence, this willingness to point out the absurdity of human enterprise, I think we would all be in big trouble. Or at least, life would be extremely boring.
Now, that being said, many of the pranks these guys pull are a combination of stupid and unoriginal. It’s hard to explain the difference, but I found the standard race-baiting described in the Wired article to be sophomoric and obnoxious, while I found the attack of the flying penises (also described in the article, along with a couple of memorable photos) to be kind of… delightful.1 Part of the difference is that the person who got penis-pranked was e-famous for being an Internet Big Deal—the phallic punking reminds us all that Second Life is, at its heart, kind of ridiculous. Meanwhile, you get stuff like this (sports-talk radio listeners invading a press-only conference call to say obscene things to a college basketball coach)—completely unclever parroting of racist/sexist/homophobic material meant to do nothing more interesting than offend. I’ve spent enough time on the internet to find that sort of thing tiresome (as opposed to offensive—I don’t think it’s possible to offend me with anything online, anymore).
And there’s a darker side to this, too. While I completely agree that people shouldn’t take internet drama so seriously, the fact of the matter is that there will always be people out there who do. Is it still funny to do things you know may literally drive these people crazy? Is it ethical? When it comes down to it, I’m a great believer in taking responsibility for oneself—if you can’t handle getting abused on a World of Warcraft forum by some anonymous acne-pocked loser in his parents basement, you should probably just get off the computer and make an appointment with a therapist. But I think people have some responsibility for what they say and do to others, even on the internet. It’s a fine line (as most such dilemmas are). I’m totally into doing it “for the lulz”, but there’s no question that some of this stuff goes over that line, wherever it is.
And some of this stuff has real world consequences. The article talks about a woman who makes a living off of “virtual real estate” in Second Life—she’s an e-landlord or whatever. Being the target of griefing is costing her real US dollars. There’s a decent case that this is just the cost of doing business in the anarchy of an internet world (or maybe the cost of doing business anywhere people have freedom of speech). But the stakes are definitely higher than one-on-one ascii abuse, and it’s worth thinking about whether the response ought to be different.
As you can see from my rambling response, this piece really brings up a lot of interesting points. I haven’t even touched on all of them. I can’t recommend the article enough—it’s a really interesting look at this phenomenon (and is filled with hilarious anecdotes).
1
When SL real estate magnate Anshe Chung announced she had accumulated more than $1 million in virtual assets and got her avatar’s picture splashed across the cover of BusinessWeek, the stage was set for a Second Life goondom’s spotlight moment: the interruption of a CNET interview with Chung by a procession of floating phalluses that danced out of thin air and across the stage.And while we’re here, tell me you don’t find this completely awesome:
The Albion Park section of Second Life is generally a quiet place, a haven of whispering fir trees and babbling brooks set aside for those who “need to be alone to think, or want to chat privately.” But shortly after 5 pm Eastern time on November 16, an avatar appeared in the 3-D-graphical skies above this online sanctuary and proceeded to unleash a mass of undiluted digital jackassery. The avatar, whom witnesses would describe as an African-American male clad head to toe in gleaming red battle armor, detonated a device that instantly filled the air with 30-foot-wide tumbling blue cubes and gaping cartoon mouths. For several minutes the freakish objects rained down, immobilizing nearby players with code that forced them to either log off or watch their avatars endlessly text-shout Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Get to the choppaaaaaaa!” tagline from Predator.That is just beautiful. I can’t stop picturing it.
Posted in Economics and Advertising, Internet Hi-Jinx, Writing
Creative Commons
February 1st, 2008 at 7:43 pm
Disclosure first: I play too much World of Warcraft.
It is a great article, by a great writer named Julian Dibbell, who first got me interested in virtual worlds when I found his book in a hostel (he’s also indirectly responsible for getting me started on Warcraft.
But I think in general you’re way off base here on your take on these guys. Yes, I fully encourage pranksterdom in many cases, and in particular targeting public figures and those who avail themselves of these forums to abuse the attention of a larger audience than they would otherwise be able to obtain.
Having said that, the large majority of the griefing that goes on online is the harassment of anonymous strangers, and there’s no wit or wisdom to it—it’s just plain old sociopathic behavior.
Most of it is fair play; if you play EVE there’s a chance that the ship you spent hundreds of hours working to buy will be blown up the second you get it, and you have no one to blame for that but yourself. If you play on a PVP server in WoW, you WILL be corpse camped by someone who has no reason to do so except that he can. The same applies for posting any public forums. You play in dirt, you get dirty.
The bigger concern is when people start to play outside the rules. Whether it is abusing game mechanics, hacking software or simply violating the terms of service, it’s behavior that other users did not “agree” to be exposed to. I wouldn’t call it a “cost of doing business” any more than having theft or arson insurance is a cost of doing business, in that it’s predicated on the reality that people are going to do illegal things. And this behavior doesn’t just cost Anshe Chung money; a portion of my monthly fees go to pay for a mind-bogglingly huge staff at Blizzard that does nothing but hunt violators of their terms of service. The costs are distributed, but they’re still massive.
Finally, and this is where I may lose some people, I disagree with the premise that stuff that happens online “matters” less than RW stuff. First, we’re well past the point where internet happenings affect the real world. Furthermore, lots of people find their livelihood, happiness and reason for being in websites and online games. You can call that sad or wrong if you want, but at this point I don’t think of them much differently than I do people who devote their lives to a religion. I may disagree with their choice, I may find it silly and misled. But I respect their choice because I respect choice, and I don’t think their happiness matters any less because of it.
February 2nd, 2008 at 3:35 pm
I wouldn’t call it a “cost of doing business” any more than having theft or arson insurance is a cost of doing business, in that it’s predicated on the reality that people are going to do illegal things.
Well, I would call theft/arson insurance a “cost of doing business.”
At any rate, I generally agree with you. Mindless, anarchic griefing is boring, rude, and stupid. I imagine that as time goes on and the demographics of online fora approach the demographics of the world in general (fewer nerds with nothing better to do, more generally kind and reasonable people with an interest in an ordered society), things will cool down and it’ll be easier to enjoy some degree of civilization online.
February 26th, 2008 at 10:49 am
I find Dan’s last comment above really inciteful. The internet has become like any public forum. If you go to a pub/bar you don’t expect random strangers to come up to you and start giving abuse, and its the same online.
The problem is the internet is worldwide, and therefore what’s acceptable in one country, socially speaking, is not necessarily acceptable in another. Is a new social order of acceptable behaviour being borne? If so, how will it affect the “real world?”