griefers
Griefing, as a term, dates to the late 1990s, when it was used to describe the willfully antisocial behaviors seen in early massively multiplayer games like Ultima Online and first-person shooters like Counter-Strike (fragging your own teammates, for instance, or repeatedly killing a player many levels below you). But even before it had a name, grieferlike behavior was familiar in prehistoric text-based virtual worlds like LambdaMOO, where joyriding invaders visited “virtual rape” and similar offenses on the local populace.
While ^ban^ and his pals stand squarely in this tradition, they also stand for something new: the rise of organized griefing, grounded in online message-board communities and thick with in-jokes, code words, taboos, and an increasingly articulate sense of purpose. No longer just an isolated pathology, griefing has developed a full-fledged culture.
This particular culture’s roots can be traced to a semi-mythic place of origin: the members-only message forums of Something Awful, an online humor site dedicated to a brand of scorching irreverence and gross-out wit that, in its eight years of existence, has attracted a fanatical and almost all-male following. Strictly governed by its founder, Rich “Lowtax” Kyanka, the site boasts more than 100,000 registered Goons (as members proudly call themselves) and has spawned a small diaspora of spinoff sites. Most noticeable is the anime fan community 4chan, with its notorious /b/ forum and communities of “/b/tards.” Flowing from this vast ecosystem are some of the Web’s most infectious memes and catchphrases (“all your base are belong to us” was popularized by Something Awful, for example; 4chan gave us lolcats) and online gaming’s most exasperating wiseasses.
[Julian Dibbell in Wired]
