"Griefing" refers to deliberately irritating and tormenting other players in an online multiplayer game. Wherever there's a large group of people playing an online game together, there's a smaller group that just wants to make everyone else miserable.
This list has gathered some of the most moments in griefing history from some of the top games on the market as well as some great historical moments. While there are special things that can be done in almost any game, there are a few standard griefing moves in almost every multiplayer game. These consist of exit blocking (when a person stands in the way of the only exit from the spawn room), team killing (dispatching your own teammates) or just plain being annoying over the coms. These irksome players, at times, even resort to crude language and terms to get your goat.
Sun Tzu said the best way to beat your enemy, is to know your enemy. These guys really used this in the best way possible. The person involved in this strategy really got into the enemy's head. Let's think through their logic.
Who am I playing against? Mostly dudes. What do dudes stereotypically like? Babes. What is the best way to distract dudes? Put pictures of hot babes everywhere and knife them in the back when they aren't paying attention.
Brilliant. (A special mention has to go out to poor individuals that fell for this cheap trick.)
This was brought to public attention by the fine folks over at Kotaku. While the video isn't any sort of griefing in the traditional sense, it did show people how to exploit a part of the game that allowed players to level up extremely fast... which is where the griefing began.
The guy who made the video came back with a response later, expressing his sorrow at giving away such a cheap, horrible trick. To make amends, he is now going around to different game servers, finding people using the cheat, and systematically destroying them.
Second Life is a popular massively multiplayer online world. Not really a game, but a place where people go and, well, live a second life. Since people spend so much time (re: most of it) in this virtual world, it becomes ripe for the griefing. Whenever something actually starts mattering to anyone, enter the griefers.
From "hand of god" attacks (where a person runs a tool that repeats a word or phrase over and over in a person's conversation screen forcing them to reboot) to changing a person's home to look like a playland for offenders, it seems that there are just some people that can't be happy without making others miserable.
The incident that happened in the video above occurred in 2006 during an interview by CNET. Right before the interview with the person took place, a flock of flying 3D members took out the whole thing. What's even wilder is that in 2008, someone took the concept and made it happen in real life using remote-controlled planes and pleasure toys.
Team Fortress 2 is a colorful send up to all the first person shooter multiplayer games out there. Instead of dealing with gritty surroundings and dull camo, you get to be in ultra-fun bright colors, playing as cartoon versions of FPS characters. All the classes are represented. You have the Spy, the Heavy, the Engineer, the Sniper, the Medic, and the Pyro. You can even choose to have balloons come out of your remains instead of blood.
All fun aside, this is still a serious team game. People spend days on the servers trying to defend their intel and bases. Of course, anytime that people start taking a game seriously, that's when it is a ripe time for griefers.
Team Roomba is what one would consider a "professional," or sponsored, griefing team. They go around TF2 and record themselves causing havoc. Their specialty seems to be creating amazing teleport traps that force opponents into automatic ends. Frustratingly brilliant.
Gary's Mod is a game that is made using the Half-Life 2 engine. Not a "game" per se, but it allows players to just fool around with the engine and make some amazing environments to play in. Once anything is accessible to everyone on such a wide scale, though, some annoying interactions start happening almost instantly.
The only way to negate an extremely vocal 9-year-old? Use any means necessary to box him in.
When the Kinect came out, it was being touted as the next generation of family entertainment. What they should have said was that it would be a new way to torment your younger brother. For those of you that have not had the opportunity to play with a Kinect, here's the run down. The way the sensor works is that it bathes the room in infra-red dots that the camera on the machine picks up and uses to create an in-game model of yourself.
If it's a two player game, each player has to stand shoulder length apart or else it will mold you together and get really confused. So when the Weasley family here all gather behind little Ron, it causes the game to go haywire.
Granted, the view of them griefing their little brother is probably more entertaining than seeing what is actually happening in the game, but that can be said about most games on the Kinect in general.
