Griefing - videogame social harassment

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Then I think you have to let it go. Assume it was not personal, just someone with a bad sense of humor thinking it was funny, and move on with eyes open. You'll go nuts analyzing the same interactions over and over and, honestly, most of the time (at least in my experience) it is not a big loss to have let a slight gloss right by you. I honestly couldn't care a less if someone thinks I'm naive; life seems to be happier naive than cynical.

Based on what I have seen of MMPGs:

If you just want to do your own thing and not deal with a lot of childishness, player vs. environment is the best way to play. I don't play socially for that reason. I have very limited personal experience with this and so this is based on my limited observations.

Based on what I have seen just from the chat channel being on, the interaction is just as complicated and mean as in real life. If your son is having issues with certain kids IRL, like it or not this gets WORSE on these games because they are not supervised and they feel freer to misbehave online. I understand that your son wants to interact and be social but he needs to understand the costs of this type of interaction.

I know you aren't dealing with strangers b/c you have a white list, but that won't help you with frenemies. (Do they use this term for boys?)

I do not know how MineCraft works, specifically but if it is possible within the same account without costing extra, maybe he could have a player vs environment thing where he can build "protected" structures and then will get less upset about what goes on on his player vs player set-up. The more he gets upset, the more blood is in the water so to speak, and the more crap he will get because those kinds of kids thrive on that and it encourages them. At least that was how the psychology worked when I was young.

My son plays this game. I just asked him to read over this thread and tell me what he thinks, because I didn't really want to put what I think. He said that's how those games are played. If you do something that messes somebody else up, or if you do something that makes something more difficult for somebody else, they will come and mess your stuff up on purpose. It isn't mean, it's just part of the game.

He and I both agree (and he knows that your son is on the spectrum, I told him that) that you should probably step way back from the video game stuff. You should step back from it, not your son. Let your son play the game, do his thing with it and stay away from it unless he asks you for help with it or tells you there is a problem.

To be honest, looking at most actions as some form of bullying, discrimination, danger, harrassment, exclusion, etc, is going to do nothing more than teach your son that everybody is not only out to get him but he needs to spend every waking moment monitoring everyones words and actions to detect whether or not he needs to lodge a complaint/file a lawsuit/call the police/cut them off forever, etc. In other words, it's just a video game and it's just video game drama that all kids have to deal with when they play video games.

You have two choices here. You can either let him learn to deal with it, even though he will have some negative experiences and negative feelings from time to time which are associated with playing the game, which is all a part of learning. Or you can get rid of all the video games and don't let him hang out with kids who do play video games because they might comment about the fact that he doesn't, and that way you can protect him from a slightly annoying experience during a game.

My son (17) is reading this as I type and he said that when he was 12 (and some of the guys who come over and play games and hang out with his group are 12 and 13 even now) if he was playing a game with another kid and the kids mother was all up in his stuff about the game and hovering in the room, he would just go home and not come back. He said that while your son may have some problems (and my son is ADHD, deaf in one ear, and I think he's mild AS as well) that he's never going to learn how to deal with them if you don't let him go through the negative stuff and if you make any kind of a big deal out of it at all. He said you should tell your son something like "Don't worry about what they do, play the game. I'm not playing it for you, go figure it out." and leave him alone with it.

Again, I do not want to come across mean, but this isn't something to worry about. It's a video game. You cannot prevent your child from ever feeling any frustration, negative emotion, sadness, etc and if you try to do that by fixing the minutae of every little thing then you just basically cripple them emotionally. And no I don't have a child on the spectrum (for sure - I think my son is though) but I have AS and I grew up with a mother who tried to prevent all kinds of things for me and it took me years and years and lots and lots of therapy to get over it.

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I'm giving it another shot. We will see.
My forum is still there and everyone is welcome to come join as well. There is a private women only subforum there if anyone is interested. Also, there is no CAPTCHA.

The link to the forum is http://www.rightplanet.proboards.com

I can relate. My son was playing with a friend who is a little older than him one day and after his friend left they had made plans to play Minecraft online together.
Half an hour later I heard my son screaming and crying. Apparently his friend had logged on and kept killing my son's avatar. My son's expectation of playing the game together was to explore and build things together, but his friend had a different idea of how to play.

Unfortunately difference in interests and expectations as well as the lack of communication can lead to hurt feelings.
Sorry this happened. Sadly, we can't prevent our children from being singled out and picked on for being a little different in many situations, but we can prepare them and hope that they can learn to not take it too personally. That's my hope anyway.

My son's therapist says he has to learn how much he can take and have the courage to do what is good for him. IRL he has to decide when playing is no longer fun, and leave before it gets bad. This is so difficult that he avoids the other kids for months before he'll risk again. In computer games, he can't play certain games when he is tired or stressed - he knows what happens.

Even good kids with good parents are going to be jerks now and then. Other kids have no supervision, and are jerks all the time. It's up to the other kids, aspie or not, to figure out the right balance of what is good for themselves. These are painful but important lessons for our aspies to learn. If love and support isn't enough to help them handle it, maybe they need to find other entertainment for a while.

Same for my husband. I used to say, can't you find another hobby? when he'd get so upset about a foodball game. Up to him to handle his emotions when being "entertained".

If the child is harrassing your child IRL in other situations, that's another problem.

momsparky, I play minecraft and it can be calm but that is in single player but when you are in multiplayer over the web that is a whole new ball game and the experience can differ with each server, alot of the gamers on the web can be punks and will abuse the younger players and hide behind a computer screen, There is ALOT of youtube videos with that sort of thing in them from almost every game those people are no matter what trolls

I know with a youtube person I watch actually put together an extra computer to use it for a Private Minecraft server were his kids and there friends can connect to it.

That is actually a really smart idea, markitzero! My son plays on the Xbox, so we reset the privacy settings (which is possible there) but he would prefer to play on a computer because (at the moment) he wants an ocelot.

I like the idea of a private server to restrict access - I will have to find a way to put it together.

That is for the server itself http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Server/Requirements "but higher is better if possible"

This makes running the server easy http://www.mcserversoft.com/

If you are going to have it just on you Local network and not go out to the web that setup is easy but if you are going to connect it to the web for like other family can connect to it that is another thing, because I will warn you if you have a Internet provider that has an download/upload caps you can't have it setup to were family can connect. If you don't have bandwidth caps then read below

If you are going to put this on the web to were his friends, cousins, etc. to connect you will need to do something called Port Forwarding or use Hamachi. Also another thing in the server called a whitelist turned on to were the only ones on that whitelist can connect to the minecraft server

if anything is unclear you can eaither post in this topic or private message me.

Thank you very much for the information, markitzero! We are not in a position to do this right now, but I am bookmarking this page and will PM you if we have any questions when we do set this up.

I am glad to help and I will keep an eye on the inbox when I do come on, also personally I think he is not ready for the public servers on the web because being an aspie myself I know around 6th grade I would not have been ready multiplayer. I didn't start doing multiplayer over the web until I was in high school.