StateCraft: Update

Griefing is Good: Freedom of Choice and the Politics of Gameplay

To many players on the receiving end of such seemingly needless virtual violence, this kind of gameplay amounts to little more than griefing - one player making life hard for another, for no other reason than it's possible. Clearly, Hell is other players.

But is there more to what's going on here? Were you ganked last night just because someone decided to be mean? Are those insufferable Alliance players a bit too deep in their roleplaying, too focused on keeping the little orc down? They don't get any honor or experience points for killing you. So, why do it at all?

In fact, what they're doing is much more than just griefing, and has less to do with some perceived battle between one faction and the other, and much more to do with the very real tension that exists between designers and players of almost any game. What the gankers are doing is attempting to define themselves by exercising their freedom of choice in one of the few ways WoW allows its players.

Seen in that light (and to misquote yet another source), griefing is good, it "clarifies, cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit," as Gordon Gecko might say.

Most of us, myself included, wish it would just go away. But I'm willing to grant that griefing is good because it's evidence that an MMOG is more than the sum of its software, and players are trying to use the platform to do more than just play a game. Designers flatter themselves when they claim to have shipped a complete game on the day an MMOG goes live. The truth is, that game will never be complete - not because most MMOG companies release patch after patch of new and/or updated content, but because it's the players who add the most important content to the game.

They do so in the process of defining themselves through the choices they make. It's when MMOG players exercise their freedom of choice in the gray areas that exist between coded gameplay mechanics that the most interesting results come about. They are choices that often take the form of almost overtly political conflicts between factions, or similarly political alliances among groups within the same cohort. At its best, this kind of emergent gameplay transforms the collective power of players' individual choices into a meta-game that has less to do with competition over the resources provided in the software and more to do with questions of control.

There are more constructive examples than can be found in Ganklethorn Vale, of course. The raiding alliances that form between guilds in WoW, for instance - which allow small guilds to band together in order to experience the endgame content that wouldn't normally be open to them - are a simple solution created by players themselves with no recourse whatsoever to coded gameplay mechanics.

It wouldn't be a game without competition, though, and in MMOGs, which only tangentially support direct competition between players, players have found ways to compete over the most important resources of all: choice and control. By going outside the virtual physics of a gaming universe, they can attempt to define not only themselves, but the world.

Depriving Horde players of the opportunity to complete the Green Hills of Stranglethorn quest is only a simple example of how players can compete for control over each other's actions and identities in an MMOG. In EVE Online, player pirates often station themselves in dangerous star systems and attempt to extort a ransom from weaker players in return for granting them safe passage. Ambitious virtual merchants have often attempted to corner the market in various raw materials in any number of MMOGs; they are earning money, yes, but they are doing so by depriving their fellow players of the important choice of who to buy their swiftthistle and raw fowl from.

At its most complex and sophisticated, this kind of "choiceplay" can come down to questions of who controls the world itself. The gameplay mechanics of EVE allow player corporations to band together into alliances that can claim sovereignty over star systems and space stations. But EVE's alliances have built a layer beyond that, claiming control over vast tracts of space by virtue of their military ability rather than any flags set by the software.