It comes to that point in everyone’s Second Life that the subject of griefing and harassment rears its malformed head, sticks out its tongue at you and then does something so infantile that you fear not only for the sanity of the griefer, but also for the contents of their diaper.

After a couple of full-on sim-sinker attacks on the region where I used to run a club and now gracelessly live out my retirement, I’ve become a bit bored with the attention whores and even the low level discontent from imbeciles who prowl around using ancient viewers to spy on people from distant sims and issue their non-specific threats and truncated non-sequiturs to anyone who is waits in vain for their intrigue to amount to anything at all.

They wait in vain because the griefers live in the shadows. Not some noir-ish interesting ’dark place’ but a shadow in the sense of an absence of illumination, because that’s all they are, a patch of darkness coalesced around a victimhood, itself formed from gossamer threads of spite that string their over-arching vacuity together. They are not just malcontents, but anti-content, an absence of matter as well as light and it’s time the Lab did something about them.

People come on the grid for a variety of reasons - to listen to music, to simulate sex with one another, to fulfil an impossible meatworld fantasy, to write a narrative, to make cubes, experiment with 3-D. When they are here they might spend money and help the wheels turn for the Lab. Hardly anyone ever sees any of that money except the Lab so they are the ultimate financial beneficiaries of the whole thing. We don’t mind if we’re paying to have a bit of fun; SL is basically a cheap hobby for thousands of people all over the grid.

We build things, the griefers try to ruin them. We create environments and sometimes ambience, the griefers try to ruin them. Nihilists to the core, the griefers only like to swagger around pretending to be important, farting portentous guff from their mouths, so they knuckle at everything that isn’t all about them, anything they are not.

All this comes in the shape of harassment and hounding,attacks designed to crash our GPU, scripting and hackery with the deliberate purpose of bringing sims to their knees

s crash and handing over cash to a company that counts it while it looks the other way. It’s Abuse Reporting system is a one-way mirror, a deep pit of despair where we seem to throw our complaints in purely for catharsis. No feedback is ever given whether a complaint is even upheld and there is a suspicion that most griefing attacks are lightly punished by a minor suspension at best.

Governance Lindens will come and clear up the mess but won’t speak to anyone about the incident or canvass for information. I was recently the subject of a prolonged attack against the entire sim I happened to be on because I wouldn’t engage the griefer in conversation. The G Linden who attended on three occasions in all (the greifer came back as 2 alts to reprise exactly the same attack as soon as the Linden left) refused to communicate in local or IM with me
Somewhere along the line, Linden Lab stopped listening to its customers and let the griefers call the shots