Say you’re one of the six people left on Earth who are playing World of Warcraft for the first time. The actual gameplay is a little grindy but eerily compelling, so you push through the starting area and decide to PUG Deadmines. You trot through Westfall wheat, dismantle harvesters, and you’re generally minding your own business when you suddenly keel over dead. Annoyed that you must have lost track of your health at a critical moment, you make a quick corpsesprint back to your body. You flop down to munch on Westfall stew and POW! You’re dead again. This time, when you resurrect you see that someone said “kek” in your chat log. Wikipedia tells you what it means and you curse rogues for the first time.

Wouldn’t it be nice if it was also the last?

Ok, so Westfall isn’t contested territory, but you get the idea. The real problem is that there’s no good way to stop griefing. Griefers gank you for the fun of it, and no one ever made money betting against sufficiently bored young men. If only there were some way to suck the fun out of griefing. Ideally it’d be some model in the very same game so we could keep everything parsimonious.

Oh wait, how about kill X of Y quests? Nobody likes those. It’s not because fighting is inherently dull, there’s a whole genre of games where that’s all you do. People actually pay money for the privilege. it’s not some fatal flaw in the Warcraft mechanics either. Remember how much fun the game was when you picked it up? So why don’t you see anyone out just killing boars for kicks?

The answer is probably in the quest reward. Actually, boredom from overexposure probably plays a role, but let’s try to focus on the plan that doesn’t depend on the griefers tuckering themselves out. There’s a phenomenon called cognitive dissonance that I previously mentioned to link price with value in the app store. More generally, cognitive dissonance is the unpleasant feeling you get when your motivations don’t match your actions. It’s a lot easier to revise your attitudes than change the world, so you tell yourself some harmless lies to keep your mind tidy. If you’re a fox who can’t reach some grapes, you need to reconcile a lot of effort with no grapes to show for it. So you decide that they’re sour and not worth your trouble. Unfortunately, it works in the opposite direction for quest rewards. When a quest NPC pays you to kill three zombies, you have to reconcile the payment with the leisure activity. So something you would otherwise volunteer for slowly becomes a job.

Cognitive dissonance may seem counterintuitive, but it’s built on honest to goodness science. Psychologists named Festinger & Carlsmith (1959) paid unlucky college kids to twist round pegs a quarter turn. Repeatedly. For an hour. At the end, some of them got twenty dollars, and the rest got one ($1). Even though the task was boring, the students who got stiffed reported liking the task more than the group that got $20. They’re the fox: they adjust their attitudes to reconcile with their actions.

Years later, Carlsmith teamed up with another scientist, Aronson, to show that cognitive dissonance can influence your behavior. They gave children several toys to play with, but warned the kids not to play with the nicest toy. They threatened half the children with severe punishment and the rest with a mild punishment. Later they returned to lift the ban and watch what the children would do. The ones who had been threatened with severe punishment were much more likely to play with the newly-available toy than their weakly-threatened counterparts. These are the questslaves: the attitudes they adopt during guided behavior stick with them when they’re free.

If you take this idea and apply it to griefing, the solution should become clear. If you create griefing quests with level-appropriate rewards, you’ll erode the joy of griefing. Sooner or later, griefers will be queued in line to do their dailies just like everyone else: complaining they can’t find any lowbies to harass. If we’re really lucky, maybe they’ll even ragequit and go flirt with some other MMO.

Of course, human behavior is too complex to boil down to a single motivation, so this might not work at all. There could be some third factor I haven’t considered that works at cross-purposes and completely undermines the idea. However, in the worst case scenario, we’d at least be able to tick it off the list. It certainly beats Blizzard’s griefing countermeasures, which have so far included wishing on a star and closing their eyes and chanting, “LA LA LA LA” as loudly as they can.

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