Since its initial release in 2009, the sandbox survival hit Minecraft has built up an enormous popularity, which unfortunately also leads to frequent appearances of griefers in multiplayer mode. Instead of surviving together with up to 98 other pixel characters in the procedurally generated block world, exploring caves, mining resources, and constructing powerful buildings, griefers want to prevent exactly that.
To do so, they deliberately dismantle blocks, for example, therefore destroying constructed buildings, steal everything that was laboriously produced and deposited in crates, kill laboriously captured and tamed animals, or attack players directly as well as indirectly - for example, by attracting creepers.
Furthermore, griefing is also identified in players who try to block the movements and actions of other players, intentionally obstruct paths by placing blocks or other obstructions. Roughly speaking, griefing is anything that borders on vandalism and is not in the spirit of the community.
A special case is the so-called server griefing. In this case, the griefers do not only aim at taking away the fun of the game from the other players, but also have the goal to either overload the whole server or even crash it. It is true that a server grief can occur in all games that use dedicated, hosted servers. However, this special form of griefing is closely associated with Minecraft.