"I'm not touching you!"; or, Griefing in the Margins

The thread title pretty much sums it up, but for those of you who enjoy reading overlong posts:

There have been a rash of complaints in the past few weeks about the types of eyesores that people build on their land.

"They're trying to extort me into buying their land"

"They're trying to strongarm me out of the sim"

"They're trying to ruin the community"


Basically, the complaint seems to be that these people should be punished for deliberately trying to ruin the enjoyment of Second Life for others. Or, the rules should be changed to disallow these actions in the future, make them actionable/punishable. This would create an ever-smaller margin in which they may grief the other residents of the world, but also reduce the margin in which all of us may own land, create on it, inhabit it, and sell it. The somewhat uneven hand of Linden Justice also raises some concerns over how punishable these builds would be, depending on who creates them, who complains, and how many complain.

I think of these types of people as Margin-Griefers; people who will deliberately try to negatively affect the SecondLives of others while not quite doing things that are specifically against the "law", the TOS/CS.

I used to margin-grief my sister. On the livingroom couch watching TV, or most especially on long car trips, I used to poke her, because I knew how much it annoyed her. My parents dealt with this by spanking me, and making a "no touching" rule when we shared the back seat of the car together. I proceeded not to touch her, for as long as I could, keeping my index finger a scant inch from her arm, from her face, from her legs. She'd yell out to Mom or Dad, to which I'd reply, "But I'm not touching you!". Another spanking, and then the rule became No Almost-Touching. I was quite fine with that, because I figured that if I put my hand down on the seat of the car, not quite not-quite touching her, I could "claim" that part of the seat. If she shifted over, suddenly SHE was touching me, and I could complain loudly and within-the-rules about it. This lasted long enough for my parents to wise up, spank me again, and change the rules to "keep your hands on your own side of the car." I responded to this by willingly obeying the rules, sometimes, after all who's to say exactly were the borderline was, and by the time little sis cried out "MOM! it's happening again!", I could pull my hand back, and to all appearances it was on my side of the car-seat. Eventually I was even able to set her off without so much as approaching the car-seat-border, by simply pointing at her with my hand on my lap, or by staring bug-eyed at her from my side of the seat.

This was all higly amusing to me when I was 10 years of age, but fortunately I've outgrown this, mostly. The point of the story is that, no matter what rules were put into place, I was still able to find the margins that the rules didn't cover, and exploit them to my own advantage. I have a feeling that the situation in SL is similiar. There will always, ALWAYS be a segment of the population that will attempt to reduce others' enjoyment of SL, and many of these will be clever enough to restrict their activities to the margins of the rules.

One solution to this is to constantly revise, and then enforce rules about what we may or may not build on land that we own in SL. This will not only reduce the margins of griefing, it will also reduce the margins of creativity in our world, and require a constant level of involvement from the Lindens, AND have to have their in-world involvements scale up on a level equal to the size of the land. I seriously doubt that these actions will ever eliminate the ability of Margin-Griefers to deliberately provoke us and reduce our enjoyment of SecondLife however. They will always find another margin to act in, and continue to let us know that "They're not touching us" from just on the other side of our parcel border.


There are other solutions out there, too. Ones that would allow us to designate our own destinies in SecondLife, to take action when we are being griefed, and which do NOT require us to constantly involve the Lindens in our petty disputes.

For example, "Turn off rendering by parcel/by avatar"

For example, finding ways to make it easier for groups(instead of individuals) to buy an entire sim and co-habitate in it.


For what it's worth, I don't grief my neighbors with my builds, nor do I intend to. If, however, the Lindens decide to change the rules to restrict how high I may build, or what I may build, or how much I may sell my land for, or tell me that a poorly built house might be OK while a rotating tower isn't, then I will regretfully sell off my land, and tier down to a basic account as soon as my annual one ends, and continue to play for as long as I'm able on a one-time fee of $9.95.

Thanks for sharing your perspective, 'Gienix ... I've come to call some of this "passive griefing". It's somewhat tongue-in-cheek but it seems apt.

Amen.

-Ghoti

Your post is very insightful. All it says however is that griefers behave like 10 year olds. And this is nothing new.

Yes, this is exactly how I feel. but have never been able to express so coherently. Thank you, Unhygienix! I agree 100%.

And while I do understand how super annoying certain behavior can be, I don't want LL to start setting policies aimed at making it impossible, because that leads to a never ending round of rules that will ultimately curb our creativity but do nothing to prevent the griefer from finding new ways to be annoying.

TON OF BRICKS! w3rd 2 B37 Mu$3.

Wow Unhygienix, you said a mouthful. The "margin griefer" is an entity I had on the tip if my tongue in a previous thread debate, but I hadn't articulated it as well as you.

The previous debate was about Linden clairfication of rules. As it stands now the TOS/CS is a deliberately fuzzy document that is left to the interpretation of the Lindens on a case-by-case basis. This is the absolute BANE of your margin griefer since having an intelligent entity make an informed judgement call about behavior and malicious intent makes it far more difficult for them to engage in bad-but-legal action.

You can always recognize their arguements because they take judgements against them to the apocalyptic extreme:

"OH! if you ban me for orbiting someone then why bother having pushing as a script feature? What about people that just accidentally bump into each other? Are you going to ban THEM? You are JUST going to have to ban EVERYBODY!!!!!"

The plea here is "Please stop judging malicious intent, just enforce a highly specific set of rules so I can game the system". Fortunately I have found their moaning exists only in the forums and whoever they can drag into the debate. The Lindens continue to keep the TOS/CS open to the interpretation of the Linden that investigates abuses, and intent IS factored in.

Bel Muse invented orbiting. I blame her. <--- KIDDING

Repeat offenders make things apparent.

Bravo! Great post. I would add that in my opinion 9 out of 10 times someone assumes that the intent behind a build they find an eyesore was to grief, they're wrong. I'd rather put up with a few eyesores (and I've lived next to a few) than to encourage that kind of overwrought sense of entitlement. Assuming you (the figurative you) can divine someone's intent based on the way they put prims together is its own form of margin griefing more often than not.

Ugh Jinx, I couldn't disagree more.

"One solution to this is to constantly revise, and then enforce rules about what we may or may not build on land that we own in SL.".

Alleged passive griefing and violation of the TOS based on never ending reinterpretation is the new knee jerk for disgruntled residents. Many a witch hunt as of late has been iniitiated under this new philosophy of general community taste compliance.

The day anybody can tell me that I can't build a given structure on MY land, as long as it is within my boundaries and not overlapping anothers, and is not an obvious violation of the TOS, is the day I quit SL and write it off as failing in its vision. Where does it begin and end? Impossible to define. As I have said before, I have been accused by long time players, popular in fact, of attempting to empty out Natoma because of my mountain. It's not true, they can't prove it is, I will deny any demand to alter it, and the day I'm forced to, will fight it with everything I've got.

Yeah right, me. It's been there TWO YEARS. I'm passively griefing. What a joke.

SL = Stepford Life?

Very seldom do I see people piping up for individual rights apart from overall community opinion in this forum. Every single time I see a resident suggest that doing what they want with their land is their business and nobody elses and that they owe nobody any explanation for it as long as they are not violating the TOS, they get attacked with all kinds of childish name calling and off the cuff categorization.

You can buy land for any reason. Nobody owes anybody any explanation if the land is for sale and you bought it legally.

How about you attack the person that abandoned the land and left it to the new tenant, or outright sold it to them? After all, if they had really cared, they would have made sure it didn't go up for public sale. They would have sold it to you. You didn't want to buy it? You waive your right to control it. Didn't buy up the whole waterfront? Don't complain when somebody puts in a big wooden box to live in within your view. Such is ownership.

Back in the day, we welcomed this sort of stuff, which is why it wasn't effective. Ya'll are just gettin' played by all this.

LOL, Torley, I didn't invent it..just helped a term come into common SL usage I believe Casval Epoch's Thunder Seal actually gave the first orbital tours of SL. My device just gave a gentle lift (imagine a warm summer breeze lifting you on invisible wings) allowing the avatar a brief view of SL's troposphere. But the tropositer didn't sounds as good

And push scripts I guess are a classic example of a feature some people use for fun, but when abused by a griefer generate calls for a nerf.

Despite the possibility of misuse, I'd rather keep the ability to do something creative with the feature than have a whole area of development cut off because of some griefers.

Bel . . .

HENCE WHY I AM... KIDDING!!!



see my earlier post, you tawdry vixen! *grins*

THIS IS HOW FLAME WARS GET STARTED!!!!!! LOL.

^also kidding

In all seriousness, I haven't seen Cas's Thunder Seal yet. Another amazing relic (and I mean that in the best of ways) I'll have to check out.

I think Jinx is against that as much as you and I are, Tcoz. I completely agree with the rest of your post.

OMG! Torley, you are so asking for a TON OF BRICKS, you tawdry tawdry vixen, you! Stop making me hijack this thread. It makes a great point about how in dealing with griefer-kin we risk doing more grief to ourselves as a community than the griefer was ever capable of.

No matter what tricks, you try, missy, I will keep..this..thread...on...track! Griefer Bad. No Be Griefer. My Land. You kids, stay the hell of my lawn. Ton of bricks. Peace!

Hey Tcoz,

Chip's right, I'm against the idea of zoning, or telling people things like "Well, it wouldn't be griefing, except you're trying to sell your plot WHILE you're building that ugly tower, so your build is against the rules. Take it down or face a suspension".

The reason I put in the "solution" of more rules, more restrictions, more zoning, is because I recognize that it's what people seem to be asking for. And it would be a solution, one of many possible ones. Unfortunately, it would not have the intended effect. While it may suddenly be disallowed to have a structure that rotates at more than X times per min, or has more than X percent turned to "Light", or emits more than X particles per sec, it wouldn't stop the margin griefers. They'd simply find a new margin to grief from, one that hasn't been stomped down on yet. And it would also decrease the margins in which we create, build and innovate in SL.

I'm going to put in a Star Trek metaphor here, because, really, when ISN'T there a situation that a Star Trek episode would provide context for? There was one episode, where the Enterprise crew was trying to solve the dilemma of a moon which had changed orbit, and was slowly tearing apart its mother planet with gravitational fluctuations, and coincidentally Q was left on the Enterprise in human form, stripped of all his omnipotent abilities. He was tasked to the engineering section in an attempt to find some way to correct the moon's orbit, and he suggested testily that they just change the gravitational constant of the universe. Of course the crew had no means to do this, because they had to work with the realities and abilities they had at hand...........

Second Life Has No Gravitational Constant. Or, perhaps more specifically, it does not have the same constants that RL has. Reality in SL is a series of Ones and Zeroes, and these can be manipulated and shuffled in many many different ways. When we seek solutions to disputes in SL, I put forward that we not always look to RL for the answers on how to resolve them. Grief > Offended > Complain > Intervene > Punish. Why this path, when we have in our UI the ability to cut off many of the Griefs in the beginning, by choosing not to render them?

I recapped some alternate solutions to the proposed zoning in Hiro's new thread.

in the long term this kind of solution doesn't work.

first, because it makes the body of law impossible to navigate.

second, because the margin problem is like the knowledge problem - the more you know, the more you realize you don't know.