Why Anyone woud waste there time with Petty acts of Vandalism when a whole world of experience awaits them is beyond my understanding. Only a sad lack of Imagination could account for someone clinging to Infantile attempts to Impress themselves with their cleverness, when there is a small, rapidly evolving world waiting to entertain and enlighten them.

“All My Children” and “General Hospital” have Nothing on us for daytime Drama. Lol.
Put the Spraycans down and join the REAL party.

Maria LaVeaux.

Dyer, I was going to ask what you were doing here on this thread with your anti-BDSM rant? Rest, before you drive yourself crazy. People are just tired of it appearing all over the place, your name and your rant, not BDSM. Relax, talk to somebody.

Back to topic now…

I find the sims to be a fascinating place to come and watch human behaviour. Everything seems to be concentrated and intensified in the sim world, including time. Three or fouth months as a sim couple is a pretty good record, but few sim relationships last longterm, and here longterm is anything more than 6 months. Relationshsips end, people cheat on each other, create new sims, are revealed… etc. etc. Who needs TV? lol. Throw in BDSM, and I am hooked. I admit it, but I don’t want to be cured.

What a lovely escape, totally engrossing. Friendships are real, and be careful with your sim heart because it is attached to your own.

Psychological advice? Let me save you a few hundred dollars. The question you must ask yourself is this. “Is the game causing me problems in real life, and if so, what if anything do I want to do about it?” Work on that question, and you will be able to formulate your own answer.

For me, no problems. And no, I don’t want to be cured, either or TSO or BDSM.

Griefers? I am used to them. And that is a sad statement. I pretty much leave people alone, stick to myself in my community and rarely step out of it, do not impress my morality on anyone else, try to watch out for the kids, comfort broken hearts, and try to have some fun. I think it is a sad day when someone like myself can be harassed this way. And no Dyer, you are not the first and you will not be the last.

I agree with the strategy above. Here is how I deal with taggers. First, know that it can’t hurt you, especially if you already have a lot of friends. You won’t lose any interactions. If you are a new sim, you might. Don’t be upset by the tag. Choose another way to look at it. I saw one of mine as a badge of loyalty in defending a friend, and the other as something to make me a more scary Domme. >:)If you are upset then the tagger has his satisfaction. Do not IM the tagger. Just ignore him, and he will move on to tastier and more easily provoked prey. They quickly forget you, or if not, it takes them some time to get back to you again. You are simply no fun to them.

If we get back to topic, this might help some newbies coming into the game. Advice to newbies, don’t be afraid of anyone bugging you for money or anything else. They really can’t do what they threaten to do. Know that they are powerless, put them on ignore, and go happily about enjoying the game. Hackers? Most of them wannabes, no real threat. Only a very small percentage of hackers would have the ability to hack into Maxis and get your account or personal information. The odds are you have encountered someone who would say anything to try to upset you.. hence the term griefer.

I shall continue to enjoy the human parade moving before me, everything moving at a faster pace, more intense than real life at times. And that is the true addiction I think. One tends not to delay gratification here. Anonymity allows us to free our inhibitions.

It was only a matter of time before social scientists would turn their attention to this little microcosm of society, moving at an accelerated social rate. Fascinating

2. BDSM is *fantasy* play, can you wrap your tiny little brains around that? “Assault” and “enslavement” are acted out, yes. And many non-BDSM couples do similar roleplay, such as “cop and woman wanting to get out of a speeding ticket”…should the man then be arrested for impersonating a police officer?

Goddamn, get some lives you pathetic losers!

When I say “spice up” let me give you two examples, because the Stratics boards won’t let us discuss this. Some kid has set himself up as president of Alphaville, with a CIA, prosecutor general, etc. I think he has the number one slot now in either “welcome” or “coffee” — it’s called Alphaville Capitol. I came to his lot and pointed out that their government was unelected, irrelevant, and kinda heavy on the power ministries and light on things like a state legislature and maybe a complaints bureau. Anyway…all the goons on the lot gloved me, they wrote things like “This Sim is a scammer who stole $300,000 of mine!” etc. because they can’t believe anyone could criticize their beloved presidet, and are the products of a liberal democracy without ever having massed its fine points in their heavily-fortified high schools or Marxist colleges.

I’ve never held $300,000 in my life in the game, of course, and no one is going to believe that a year-old Sim with no reputation as a scammer or griefer has suddenly robbed a kid of $300,000. We kept chatting, they were role-playing their government shtick, I was role-playing my Lightsavers Partisan Liberation Movement shtick, I managed to talk my way in to the Chief Executive’s office and light his fireplace, etc. A good time was had by all. The red link was later removed. All, good clean fun. If these idiots continue to chase me with their silly government, I will continue to fight back, and hopefully both they and I will make the game interesting for each other, until we don’t, in which case we’ll both press “ignore and ban” buttons and move on. But meanwhile, some girl is squealing she has been red-tagged falsely and screams for the red-tags to be removed from the game. Hasn’t she ever played paintball or laser tag???

OK but let’s look at another example, probably a reincarnation of Evangeline or someone like her/him. This is Miss-Crumplebottom. She started a lot for “Special Sims like it is a workshop for retarded persons, it is in offbeat with a name like “Special Sims” or something I forget. Well, it’s faintly annoying and stereotypical but…whatever. I noticed that in her balloons, she had recreated, or had befriended, more likely they’re all one person, Sophie the Janitor, Annie, a Beatle, whatever. I thought, hmmm, a glimmer of intelligence and wit in this game, so infrequently found. I IM’d “I need remedial work” to get Miss C to open her locked lot so I could gnome. She starts a barrage of griefing and/or paranoid idiocy, showing intellect, but lots of mispelling, and then like the Red Queen, says the term “common-sense” has a hyphen in it even when it appears as a noun. She concludes that I am Evangeline, and that I am locked out of other lots for cause, although I assure you I am not Evangeline, and the only lots I’m locked out of are those of neuralgic BDSM queens.

So I stop writing to Miss-C, seeing she is a griefing personality, not an interesting RPer as I thought, and she begins to IM me, and then have all the people in her balloons IM me, but IMing and quickly putting me on ignore so I can’t answer. I get another Sim to talk to them, but then quickly that Sim is accused of being not only Dyerbrook, but Evangeline, etc. etc. Clever, a bad speller, quick as a whip, but malicious and willing to keep stalking. I begin to get a sense of deja-vu all-over-again because I suspect that one of the things Evangeline has take up to annoy people is accuse other people of being Evangeline. OR…also likely…the horrorifying magnification of Evangeline in the distorting lens of TSO has made even bright,normal non-griefing players become so paranoid that they can’t even trust another good-willed Sim to RP with them for a bit in their short-bus workshop. You see?

OK, I played two hours last night, one hour with the silly AV Gov, and another with this nest of Evangeline look-alikes, and the boards at Ye Old Boot and Board just flew by in the meantime. So…will I waste two hours like that again? Possibly not. Will those adolescents continue to attack me for sport? Probably, but if I want to just chill at the Flamingo with friends, I will lock my lot. So what’s the big deal? All that is required to get rid of Evangeline is to boot, ban, ignore, drain the traffic away from her lot,and isolate her. Remember 1947, the Year of Containment. That’s the ticket. It will be a cold war, but one in which the arts could flourish in the 1950s….If Miss-C turns out to be the new sinkhole for the unsuspecting, well, be warned…

I can’t understand how, Coco, as a hostess of a game lot always filled on a schedule with panel games, where you can boot anyone not in fact really there to play your games, and keep your stake in the ground, that you would have to worry about these annoying flies…but you’re not looking up above your lot to the map to see 30 out of 100 romance lots are taken over by men and women who have made mainly women unequal to them…

The key to freedom from griefers and would-be “governments” is to enlarge your personal space and your neighborhood in the game. I believe that only clear and present dangers like like especially radical Gorean BDSM which have enlarged beyond the capacity of others to either contain them or provide safe alernatives require some action by the game company.

coco

Maria.

In their infinite wisdom, the Maxis designers put those pin/lot ban/etc. tools into the hands of every Sim instead of letting “wizards” (bleccth) take those powers from us. Imagine, I was even yammering awhile back here about having in-game presence from Maxis Ring Ding eaters — what WAS I thinking??? And there should be even more of this democratization. Self-governing structures are boring and who wants to bother when they are engaging in a leisure activity, but if they are the underpinnings that secure us a world free of all this medieval crap that game designers usually foist on us with their dungeons and dragons and wizards and monsters — and the abhorrent social systems that go with them — bring it on. I just want a game where I can just go to the toilet — or pee myself.

A person from the BD/SM community, entering a lot that is open to all is not griefing. If the owner of the home finds something objectionable in the persons description, or attire and wishes to address the issue, that is their right, along with moderating what they perceive as offensive language or behaviour. If on the other hand the owner finds nothing objectionable, then there is no problem. We in the BD/SM community have similar rules, and we respect the rules of others as we ourselves wish to be respected. If we are on a Vanilla site where our presence has been accepted by owner, room mates and sundry guests, and someone comes in and starts bad mouthing us over our lifestyle, it is they, and not the BD/SM person who is the griefer.
We welcome just about anyone into our community, We love having guests. but coming to our homes, and demanding we change the whole focus of our lots to suit an outside opinion IS griefing. (I beleive that the relevant sections in the article would be “Revolutionary”).
If some one from our community comes to a vanilla home and acts like a jerk, then by all means, deal with him/her As an indevidual case. you should also be aware that it is distinctly possible that, at some time in the past, We, inside our community have also had to take steps do deal with them. Not everyone who professes to be part of our community is a member in good standing.

Thank you Professor Suler for a most enlightening article.
Maria LaVeaux.