Low Level Troll

Goodness Grief!

This is the closest I'm ever going to get to live blogging. As I write, I am being griefed. Yes, right now. This crazy person is wearing a cube that changes texture every few seconds, and literally bouncing around the shop. He's emitting all kinds of strange sounds from pop music to film soundbites and scary Hallowe'en voices. 

And he's just stopped. Maybe that in itself is part of the griefing experience - he took away my right to claim I was live blogging by vanishing the second I tried to make the claim. Boo!

Anyway: when he first appeared, I didn't notice him. I was talking to my friend Iahn, standing around in a shop at the Rockabilly Fair, and all of these grey squares started to fall through the ceiling. I had no idea what was going on - then the music started, and when I asked Iahn what was happening, he said 'it's Violent Noob'. Then the cube-man appeared, and everything started to make sense. I'd never been griefed before.

Then he started shouting in local chat. Apparently, his cube-dancing antics were supposed to kill us, and he got all subversive on us by shouting 'rape' repeatedly. He went on to tell us all to leave his shop, although I'm pretty sure Ducknipple, strange as their store name is, isn't run by one Mr Violent Noob. The grey squares that fell through the ceiling - a kind of picture-rain - were seriously laggy, but honestly, I started to laugh. What else was I supposed to do?

With the help of Gyazo, I managed to add to the live-blogging thing by making a gif of the picture rain. Here it is!

Cloudy with a chance of

For non-SL users, griefers and griefing are basically SL trolls and trolling. They're usually creative types (they rez lots and lots of items) who try generally to be disruptive and/or create so much lag that we all get kicked out of SL, or are forced to log out. Trolls exist everywhere there is the cover, however thin, of anonymity, and I'm not going to attempt to psycho-analyse the phenomenon because it's already been done a million times by people far more qualified to do so than me.

But I have to confess that I was kind of disappointed by this encounter. Although it created some lag, and shouting 'rape' in the face of the wrong person could cause a lot of distress, it seemed like a pretty low-level grief attack. It gets maybe a two out of ten for creativity and planning, and it did very very little to disrupt the Rockabilly Fair, which probably only had about five people in it, myself and the griefer included, when it happened. Really, I think this guy was just bored and figured he'd come and have a little rave. 

I only resisted making tart comments at his expense because who knows what else this guy would be capable of if I drew attention to myself. And I suppose that's the scary thing - I was afraid to confront even this low level troll lest it come back to haunt me later. I kept my mouth shut. 

One of the first videos I ever saw about SL was this one below. The video, and other literature surrounding internet trolls, made me think that griefing in SL was very common, and I expected to be griefed every time I logged in. This just has not been the case, and whilst I found this episode funny, I can't say I'm not pleased that I've managed to go three years without experiencing this.

I think Anshe Chung's griefer scores far better on the griefer scale than our poor joker.