A friend of mine in high school remarked to me that my dislike of griefers on Minecraft, essentially glorified virtual vandals for the uninitiated, was far stronger than that of my peers on our server. He said that most people saw them merely as child bullies kicking down sandcastles, but I regarded them as violators of my own little sanctum. I come from a household that was psychologically abusive; Minecraft was one of my refuges from the crushing pressure of academia and parental expectations.

Writing, and alternate history, was another. It took me three years from joining the alternate history community in 2011 to writing in 2013 that this portion of my creative mind began producing something concrete (digitally anyway), and I have continued writing, if sporadically, ever since. Creating entirely new worlds was another form of escape.

And my third method of escape was music; I was a band kid in high school, but never good enough to be in the marching band or in the top concert ensemble rather being one of the rare few who stayed in the lower level band for four years. I was an alto saxophonist. It could be long and dreary at times but hearing a well-performed crescendo in concert made it all worth it.

These all gave me a sort of artist’s mentality, one I haven’t really thought about until recently. I always clap for performers, be they actors or musicians or what have you, and am always tremendously irritated when someone talks during a play or a film or a concert, with an aggressive ‘shhh!’ to follow. It is also wanting to appreciate if only for a bit, the effort of whoever put a piece of art together. I know what it’s like to work on what you feel your magnum opus is, and so I know the hand-wringing and second-guessing that goes into anything, really.

Wikipedia once defined ‘art’ as an "expression of human creativity and emotion." That was years ago, and the page has been edited, but I still think it’s a good descriptor. Art, be it film or architecture, digital or concrete, is an expression of something that brings humanity from being merely apes with tools to something more. We can think in the abstract, and we can find beauty and profundity in that which would mean nothing to animals. There’s something amazing in that, in and of itself.

It’s why I view those who vandalize works of art with such utter contempt. The ‘griefers’ on my Minecraft server, for example, who TNTed our creations without any forewarning. These people fundamentally have no respect for that which sets us aside from apes.

To them, art is just scenery, just another part of the environment to be burned or dynamited as they please. To the trolls who vandalize alternate history forums (which being a moderator I have had to deal with before), our speculation is just background to eliciting a reaction with the vilest of things, which I have no intention of recounting.

These are people without a sense of beauty or profundity, to whom the creations of their fellow human are just scenery. They are in some ways the antithesis of the artist, those who see creativity and emotion as unworthy of expression.