Holin Lin and Chuen-Tsai Sun, "'White-Eyed' and 'Griefer' Player Culture: Deviance Construction in MMORPGs"

(In Worlds in Play)

- "White-eyed player" = Taiwanese griefer
- Deviancy in gaming societies
- Move beyond individual conception of grief play -> collective recognition/reaction
- Power in social interactions
- Technopower (code); administrative power (GMs); normative power (explored here)
- "Social control mechanisms"
- Labelling as an othering process
- Uncertain age/gender distinctions in online play
- Grief/white-eyed play associated with imagined youngage
- Players can have separate avatars for normative and deviant play (explorative?), transfer benefits (items, etc.) from one to the other
- Stigmatizer/other griefers in order to define/secure normative identity
- "Griefer roles as collective player reactions to a yet-to-be-normalized environment"
- Explicit (identifiable, deviant, self-aware) vs implicit (occasional, fluid, accidental) griefers
- Definition of griefer is ambiguous, changing, subjective
- Blame motivation/experience level; RW identity/characteristics
- Percieved helplessness against griefers (better to ignore, "don't feed a troll")
- Self-aware griefers "professionalize" grief play (clans, notoriety, etc.), while unconcsious, occasional griefers stigmatize along with everyone else, rationalize as mistakes (us/them, cannot be both a griefer and "normal")
- Anxieties about cross-age play enabled on a large scale by MMOs -> griefers are young, kids, immature
- MUDs: gender anxiety, MMOs: age anxiety
- Calling griefers kids is an attempt to define the "right" age to be playing (reject stigma that games are childish by othering percieved "childish" play)