griefing

Griefing is deliberately ruining the game for other players in ways the game was never meant to be played. The person doing it is a griefer, and their goal isn’t to win. It’s to annoy you.

What griefing looks like

• Blowing up or stealing from someone’s build in Minecraft
• Killing your own teammates, or blocking doorways so they can’t move
• Camping a spawn point so new players die instantly
• Stealing loot or kills on purpose
• Trapping, trolling or following one player around the map to ruin their session

Most griefing is within the technical rules of the game, which is what makes it hard to police. Many Minecraft servers ban it outright. A few, like the anarchy server 2b2t, allow it, and that’s the whole point of playing there. In October 2016, Valve began permanently banning Counter-Strike: Global Offensive players from official matchmaking after a second griefing conviction.

Examples

• “Someone griefed our base overnight. Two weeks of building, gone.”
• “He’s not even trying to win, he’s just griefing.”
• “Report him for griefing. He keeps team-killing.”

Where it came from

The word comes from causing someone grief. Wikipedia dates it to the late 1990s and early online role-playing games like Ultima Online, and the earliest dated example both Wikipedia and Know Your Meme give is a Usenet post from August 2000 in an Ultima Online newsgroup. The behavior is older still: players in text-based online worlds were dealing with it years earlier.

Griefing vs. trolling vs. toxic

Trolling is the broader idea of provoking people for a reaction, online or anywhere. Griefing is trolling done through gameplay. Toxic is the umbrella word for hostile behavior in games, and some sources treat griefing as a mild form of it.

Related terms

• toxic: hostile, unsportsmanlike behavior
• camping: waiting in one spot to ambush players
• smurf: a skilled player on a new account
• rage quit: what griefing often causes
• AFK: away from keyboard

See more terms like this in our gaming slang dictionary.