When I wondered aloud last week if new SL users remember the virtual world's Wild West years of creative anarchy over a decade ago, many old timers replied by more or less sighing, "Those were the days." For instance, reader "Mondy":
I can remember a time when griefing by self-replicating objects was fairly common, and although it was annoying, it was also an event. People would COME to a sim to see sometimes hilarious flying…appendages? Or whatever infantile creations had been brought into being. Sure it was stupid, but it was also a talking point and often amusing. You also got to see the Lindens arrive to clean up the mess if the sim didn't crash and the owner couldn't deal with it themselves.
Or reader "Jackie", who fondly recalls what we might call an ethical, White Hat Griefer:
Knew a guy who did fun griefting such as turning the sky from blue to green a smiley face moon. He loved combat sims and making folks he knew fly three Sims away for kicks. Crashing Sims and hurting others wasn't cool with him.
I remember those days well and miss them too! I'd also distinguish types of griefing:
Above: The infamous avatar replicator from 2006
The anti-social kind, where the damage causes genuine distress on specific people who are clearly not enjoying the pranksterism — versus a pro-social variety, where the "damage" is temporary and consensual on some level, and shows off the creative power of the platform. (I too fondly remember getting frequently flung like a ragdoll across several sims, thanks to the inventiveness of various wiseass scripters.)
Responding to my observation that this kind of hijinx doesn't happen in SL as much as it used to, longtime reader Adeon Writer makes an interesting, poignant point:
I've always said for years that Griefing/Trolling/Botting in a game is proof that it is still alive and relevant.
When that stops, outlook bad.
It falls under the same category of “piracy should be taken as flattery”
You need to be a certain level of good to be worth stealing.
I might phrase it a bit differently and say that the sign a game is still relevant when there's both pro and anti-social varieties of griefing — and when we only see the negative kind, then it's time to be concerned. Along with being a constant community management problem, most anti-social trolling is boring, lazily pressing the standard outrage buttons — rather than do anything creative to inspire surprise and delight. A world without both should worry.
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 
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