Griefers: Harbingers of “In-World” Torts?
By Erik Schmidt on 1.28.08
By now pretty much everyone in America has heard about Second Life. Unless you live in a cave, you probably know about World of Warcraft. Even if you don’t participate in virtual worlds, you probably know someone who does. Maybe it’s the woman who does your taxes, one of your clients, or your brother’s pesky kid.
You may think it’s a bit silly, but it’s also big business. Blizzard Entertainment recently announced that World of Warcraft now has over 10 million active players across the globe. The game costs about $20, expansion packs go for about $30, and monthly subscriptions cost between $13 and $24 per month. WoW isn’t the only game in town, either. People who spend their time and money in online worlds are like football fans, die-hard 24 watchers, or golfers. When they’re engaged in their passion, they don’t like to be disrupted.
Enter the griefers. Just as there are people who enjoy disrupting conversations in discussion boards and chat rooms, there are people who like to do the same thing in online worlds. They’re organized. They like disrupting online events, creating mayhem, and generally annoying other participants. In short, they derive enjoyment from making these online worlds unenjoyable for other participants. The companies that run online worlds do what they can to thwart griefers, but they’re difficult to stop. Terminate a griefer’s account, and he’ll just create a new one.
Online worlds are becoming more mainstream as technology progresses and their social acceptance moves beyond early adopters. People use them for entertainment, commerce, information gathering, social interaction, complex simulations, and more. For now, griefers are primarily causing grief for companies that run online worlds. But it won’t be long before they’re annoying a lot more people. Will technological solutions to griefing emerge, or will we start seeing “in-world” torts akin to the “virtual property” claims we’re already seeing in Second Life? How will already confused courts deal with such claims?
[Second Life personality Hiro Pendragon (shown above) is not run by a griefer. In fact, I’d bet he wears those katanas to scare ‘em off. The image is under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license and can be found in Pathfinder Linden’s photostream here.]
1.28.08 • Internet Policy/Net Law
3 responses to Griefers: Harbingers of “In-World” Torts?
1.28.08 • Benjamin Duranske
Best argument I see (and it is important to note this only really applies to extreme cases, due to the nature of the claim) is for application the oft-neglected tort of Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress.
Though not exactly about “griefing,” the article I wrote about this in the context of a 13-year-old MySpace user being driven to suicide by parents of a “friend,” here, provides some additional thoughts:
http://virtuallyblind.com/2007/11/21/myspace-suicide-tort/
In a nutshell, there are some forms of griefing that could, arguably, be deemed sufficiently “shocking” and persistent to be actionable, at least to the degree they have a real-life impact on the victim.
There could also be economic torts (interference with business relationship, etc.) implicated in social virtual worlds with real cash economies.
That all said, I also think it would be easy to go overboard here. The vast majority of what gets classified as “griefing” is just annoying, and falls well short of the requirements for a civil claim.
2.6.08 • Prokofy Neva
The acts that griefers do in virtual worlds would be defined as “criminal mischief” or other kinds of crimes if they were done in real life. And even if you don’t want to reason by analogy, when real money is involved, if griefers perpetrate a denial-of-service attack and prevent you from using a simulator because they litter it or deface it or crash it, that is a real-life crime, too.
A real problem we have in gaining serious attention to the issue of griefing is the eagerness of IT guys and lawyers like Benjamin Duranske to diminish these crimes in meaning or interpretation so that they can maximize the freedom of intellectual property of game and world companies and those who use their tools. It’s disturbing to see Duranske repeatedly step up to downgrade the very real criminal actions that take place in Second Life that definitely go beyond a vague notion of “emotional distress” — e.g. loss of business, destruction of property, harassment, stalking. These worlds are immersive and interactive, and are far more than Internet pages.
Julian Dibbell, writing in Wired, ended up taking the side of the griefers, saying that we can “learn something” from these miscreants’ violations of the TOS, and that’s not to take ourselves so seriously. Sorry, but there is nothing *wrong* with taking worlds as more than games, and conducting serious business, education, etc. in them. That is freedom; these griefers are merely the latest form of barbarians and vandals who wish to take away civilization, and remove freedom, not gain it.
2.6.08 • Prokofy Neva
>That all said, I also think it would be easy to go overboard here. The vast majority of what gets classified as “griefing” is just annoying, and falls well short of the requirements for a civil claim.
And no, the vast majority of incidents of the PNs, for example, involve in fact the torts that Duranske concedes in theory, but won’t call in practice when it occurs. He would find something like the destructive attack last year on Anshe Chung as a “nuisance” when it should have been a lawsuit.