Inflicting pain on 'griefers'

(continued from previous page)

clean and fun falls to fellow players. "EverQuest" players usually join "guilds," in-game communities where failure to play nice will get you booted out.

"With 'EverQuest,' you have six-year span where the player base has built up a community," Scotto said. "Players know each other and watch out for each other. The guilds have a good neighborhood-watch effect."

"If one player can't harm another player in a game, you can't really have griefing."

--Jack Emmert, "City of Heroes" designer

"Star Wars Galaxies," which recently marked its one-year anniversary, has been more of a challenge, Scotto said, with Sony having to do more to educate players about the best way to have the kind of game experience they want.

"When 'Galaxies' launched, we had a lot of people who were new to MMOGs (massively multiplayer online games) and didn't really understand how they worked, so there was a learning curve," he said. "We try to teach players how to work out issues on their own. We have to encourage our players to do that. Our worlds are so big; we can't be everywhere all the time."

Game developer Cryptic Studios took a more hard-line approach to troublemakers in designing the hit online superhero game "City of Heroes," which pulled in nearly 200,000 subscribers in its first fourth months on the market. The game had to be accessible to casual players and newcomers to online games, said Jack Emmert, lead designer for the game. That meant limiting interactions between players solely to chat. An upcoming expansion will include an online arena for player-vs.-player battles, but the outcomes won't affect character development or assets.

"The entire game design is about getting somebody who isn't an insider into the MMOG genre and having fun as quickly as possible, and griefing would just ruin that," Emmert said. "We just eliminated that possibility. If one player can't harm another player in a game, you can't really have griefing."

Behave or get the boot
The advent of online capabilities for video game consoles has opened new frontiers in griefing. While online PC games have a preponderance of complex fantasy role-playing games such as "EverQuest," online games for the Xbox and PlayStation 2 are dominated by shooters and sports titles, including the smash football franchise "Madden NFL."

Most Madden players want a clean, realistic game of football, said Danny "Coach Dee" Palmieri, founder of the New York Ballers Club, a "Madden" fan club. Conflicts happen when straight-up players encounter punks who will exploit any glitch to squeeze out a victory.

"There are glitches in the game, so that if you position guys in certain ways, it's almost impossible to get the ball off," Palmieri said. "Most guys want to play real-life football, like they see every Sunday, so they're not going to use those glitches. Other people just manipulate it any way they can to get the win."

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