Wow, I guess I still hadn't grasped how big fortnight was, not having much to do with children and all... I guess minecraft either attracted a younger audience or the lack of competition removed aspects of bullying?
I think TF2[0] might have been the first on the scene with hats in 2009, and other games followed suit once they saw the success... But many of the games I can think of (Counter Strike for one) were aimed at a somewhat older demographic.
https://www.engadget.com/2019/01/26/fortnite-pve-eliminates-...
Gaming's funding model is SUPER broken. I don't know where or when it went so far off the rails, but at some point people shifted from making massive bets on passion projects to doing a little more marketing/advertising/manipulation to make projects more likely to succeed to full on profit-maximization with little regard for the effects. Ethics hasn't kept up, parenting handbooks haven't, and regulation never stood a chance of keeping up.
Whether it's some of us or all of us to blame, the problem is the same. I'm not hopeful enough to count on some sort of moralistic shift in how things are done across the whole human race or even at the country level but something should probably be done about this. For the same reason people generally agree we shouldn't allow children to do some things before a certain age (where they are likely to have developed enough both physically and mentally to process the ramifications and make a choice), we should probably be preventing manipulation of kids at this level. Look at how Juul swept through high schools (and their marketing campaigns, etc). Things are kind of fucked.
[0]: https://www.epicgames.com/fortnite/en-US/news/loot-unboxing
If Hollywood could have turned movies into pretty skinner-boxes they would have done that a decade ago
Griefing is purposefully doing things to ruin someone else's fun, such as blowing up their Minecraft house with explosives or killing them every time they enter a PvP area in WoW. Or quickly killing the enemy that someone needs to complete a quest, over and over before they can. It's not really personal. The "griefer" doesn't have a specific target in mind when they start their run. They just pick someone and do it.
Bullying is more personal. This is someone that has decided they're going to pick on a particular person for some reason. This might be someone they know, or it might be someone doing something they want to stop, like joining a team without knowing what they're doing. Bullying "defaults" is because they don't think the person will know what they're doing and they would rather a teammate that knows the game better. In other games, that might be by player rank/level, attack power, or other means instead of physical appearance.
These 2 things are kind of a hot button for me, obviously.
Faxanadu merch for sure..