[tt] mutilated furries, flying phalluses

[Eugen Leitl]

http://www.wired.com/gaming/virtualworlds/magazine/16-02/mf_goons?currentPage=all

Mutilated Furries, Flying Phalluses: Put the Blame on Griefers, the
Sociopaths of the Virtual World

By Julian Dibbell Email 01.18.08 | 6:00 PM

Left to right: William Barnett, Evan Vetere, and Isaiah Houston of the EVE
Online GoonSwarm Alliance.

Photo: Michael Schmelling

The Albion Park section of Second Life is generally a quiet place, a haven of
whispering fir trees and babbling brooks set aside for those who "need to be
alone to think, or want to chat privately." But shortly after 5 pm Eastern
time on November 16, an avatar appeared in the 3-D-graphical skies above this
online sanctuary and proceeded to unleash a mass of undiluted digital
jackassery. The avatar, whom witnesses would describe as an African-American
male clad head to toe in gleaming red battle armor, detonated a device that
instantly filled the air with 30-foot-wide tumbling blue cubes and gaping
cartoon mouths. For several minutes the freakish objects rained down,
immobilizing nearby players with code that forced them to either log off or
watch their avatars endlessly text-shout Arnold Schwarzenegger's "Get to the
choppaaaaaaa!" tagline from Predator.

The incident, it turns out, was not an isolated one. The same scene, with
minor variations, was unfolding simultaneously throughout the virtual
geography of Second Life. Some cubes were adorned on every side with the
infamous, soul-searing "goatse" image; others were covered with the grinning
face of Bill Cosby proffering a Pudding Pop.

Soon after the attacks began, the governance team at San Francisco-based
Linden Lab, the company that runs Second Life, identified the vandals and
suspended their accounts. In the popular NorthStar hangout, players located
the offending avatars and fired auto-cagers, which wrapped the attackers'
heads in big metallic boxes. And at the Gorean city of Rovere — a Second Life
island given over to a peculiarly hardcore genre of fantasy role-play gaming
— a player named Chixxa Lusch straddled his giant eagle mount and flew up to
confront the invaders avatar-to-avatar as they hovered high above his
lovingly re-created medieval village, blanketing it with bouncing 10-foot
high Super Mario figures.

"Give us a break you fucks," typed Chixxa Lusch, and when it became clear
that they had no such intention, he added their names to the island's list of
banned avatars and watched them disappear.

"Wankers," he added, descending into the mess of Super Marios they'd left
behind for him to clear.

Bans and cages and account blocks could only slow the attackers, not stop
them. The raiders, constantly creating new accounts, moved from one location
to another throughout the night until, by way of a finale, they
simultaneously crashed many of the servers that run Second Life. And by that
time, there was not the slightest mystery in anyone's minds who these
particular wankers were: The Patriotic Nigras had struck again.

The Patriotic Nigras consist of some 150 shadowy individuals who, in the
words of their official slogan, have been "ruining your Second Life since
2006." Before that, many of them were doing their best to ruin Habbo Hotel, a
Finland-based virtual world for teens inhabited by millions of squat avatars
reminiscent of Fisher-Price's Little People toys. That's when the PNs adopted
their signature dark-skinned avatar with outsize Afro and Armani suit.

Though real-life details are difficult to come by, it's clear that few, if
any, PNs are in fact African-American. But their blackface shenanigans, they
say, aren't racist in any heartfelt sense. "Yeah, the thing about the racist
thing," says ^ban^, leader of the Patriotic Nigras, "is ... it's all just a
joke." It's only one element, he insists, in an arsenal of PN techniques
designed to push users past the brink of moral outrage toward that rare
moment — at once humiliating and enlightening — when they find themselves
crying over a computer game. Getting that response is what it's all about,
the Nigras say.

"We do it for the lulz," ^ban^ says — for laughs. Asked how some people can
find their greatest amusement in pissing off others, ^ban^ gives the question
a moment's thought: "Most of us," he says finally, with a wry chuckle, "are
psychotic." In 2006, griefers let loose with a rain of phalluses to interrupt
a CNET interview in Second Life.

Pwnage, zerging, phat lewts — online gaming has birthed a rich lexicon. But
none, perhaps, deserves our attention as much as the notion of the griefer.
Broadly speaking, a griefer is an online version of the spoilsport — someone
who takes pleasure in shattering the world of play itself. Not that griefers
don't like online games. It's just that what they most enjoy about those
games is making other players not enjoy them. They are corpse campers, noob
baiters, kill stealers, ninja looters. Their work is complete when the
victims log off in a huff.

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.

Not all the message boards celebrate the griefers in their midst: Kyanka
finds griefing lame, as do many Goons and /b/tards. Nor do the griefers
themselves all get along. Patriotic Nigras, /b/tards all, look on the
somewhat better-behaved Goon community — in particular the W-Hats, a Second
Life group open only to registered Something Awful members — as a bunch of
uptight sellouts. The W-Hats disavow any affiliation with the "immature" and
"uncreative" Nigras other than to ruefully acknowledge them as "sort of our
retarded children."

If there's one thing, though, that all these factions seem to agree on, it's
the philosophy summed up in a regularly invoked catchphrase: "The Internet is
serious business."

Look it up in the Encyclopedia Dramatica (a wikified lexicon of all things
/b/) and you'll find it defined as: "a phrase used to remind [the reader]
that being mocked on the Internets is, in fact, the end of the world." In
short, "the Internet is serious business" means exactly the opposite of what
it says. It encodes two truths held as self-evident by Goons and /b/tards
alike — that nothing on the Internet is so serious it can't be laughed at,
and that nothing is so laughable as people who think otherwise.

To see the philosophy in action, skim the pages of Something Awful or
Encyclopedia Dramatica, where it seems every pocket of the Web harbors
objects of ridicule. Vampire goths with MySpace pages, white supremacist
bloggers, self-diagnosed Asperger's sufferers coming out to share their
struggles with the online world — all these and many others have been found
guilty of taking themselves seriously and condemned to crude but hilarious
derision.

You might think that the realm of online games would be exempt from the scorn
of Goons and /b/tards. How seriously can anyone take a game, after all? And
yet, if you've ever felt your cheeks flush with anger and humiliation when
some 14-year-old Night Elf in virtual leather tights kicks your ass, then you
know that games are the place where online seriousness and online
ridiculousness converge most intensely. And it's this fact that truly sets
the griefer apart from the mere spoilsport. Amid the complex alchemy of
seriousness and play that makes online games so uniquely compelling, the
griefer is the one player whose fun depends on finding that elusive edge
where online levity starts to take on real-life weight — and the fight
against serious business has finally made it seem as though griefers' fun
might have something like a point.  Second Life entrepreneur Prokofy Neva
(Catherine Fitzpatrick in real life) likens griefer attacks to terrorism.
Photo: Michael Schmelling

History has forgotten the name of the Something Awful Goon who first laid
eyes on Second Life, but his initial reaction was undoubtedly along the lines
of "Bingo."

It was mid-2004, and Goons were already an organized presence in online
games, making a name for themselves as formidable players as well as
flamboyantly creative griefers. The Goon Squad guilds in games like Dark Age
of Camelot and Star Wars: Galaxies had been active for several years. In
World of Warcraft, the legendary Goons of the Mal'ganis server had figured
out a way to slay the revered nonplayer character that rules their in-game
faction — an achievement tantamount to killing your own team mascot.

But Second Life represented a new frontier in troublemaking potential. It was
serious business run amok. Here was an entire population of players that
insisted Second Life was not a game — and a developer that encouraged them to
believe it, facilitating the exchange of in-game Linden dollars for real
money and inviting corporations to market virtual versions of their actual
products.

And better still, here was a game that had somehow become the Internet's top
destination for a specimen of online weirdo the Goons had long ago adopted as
their favorite target: the Furries, with their dedication to role-playing the
lives — and sex lives — of cuddly anthropomorphic woodland creatures.

Thus began the Second Life Goon tradition of jaw-droppingly offensive theme
lands. This has included the re-creation of the burning Twin Towers (tiny
falling bodies included) and a truly icky murdered-hooker crime scene (in
which a hermaphrodite Furry prostitute lay naked, violated, and disemboweled
on a four-poster bed, while an assortment of coded-in options gave the
visitor chances for further violation). But the first and perhaps most
expertly engineered of these provocations was Tacowood — a parody of the
Furry region known as Luskwood. In Tacowood, rainbow-dappled woodlands have
been overrun by the bulldozers and chain saws of a genocidal "defurrestation"
campaign and populated with the corpses of formerly adorable cartoon animal
folk now variously beheaded, mutilated, and nailed to crosses.

As the media hype around Second Life grew, the Goons began to aim at bigger
targets. When a virtual campaign headquarters for presidential candidate John
Edwards was erected, a parody site and scatological vandalism followed. When
SL real estate magnate Anshe Chung announced she had accumulated more than $1
million in virtual assets and got her avatar's picture splashed across the
cover of BusinessWeek, the stage was set for a Second Life goondom's
spotlight moment: the interruption of a CNET interview with Chung by a
procession of floating phalluses that danced out of thin air and across the
stage.

People laughed at those attacks, but for Prokofy Neva, another well-known
Second Life real estate entrepreneur, no amount of humor or creativity can
excuse what she sees as "terrorism." Prokofy (Catherine Fitzpatrick in real
life, a Manhattan resident, mother of two, and Russian translator and
human-rights worker by trade) earns a modest but bankable income renting out
her Second Life properties, and griefing attacks aimed at her, she says, have
rattled some tenants enough to make them cancel their leases. Which is why
her response to those who defend her griefers as anything but glorified
criminals is blunt: "Fuck, this is a denial-of-service attack ... it's
anti-civilization ... it's wrong ... it costs me hundreds of US dollars."

Of course, this attitude delights the terrorists in question, and they've
made Prokofy a favorite target. The 51-year-old Fitzpatrick's avatar is male,
but Goons got ahold of a photo of her, and great sport has been made of it
ever since. One build featured a giant Easter Island head of Fitzpatrick
spitting out screenshots of her blog. Another time, Prokofy teleported into
one of her rental areas and had the "very creepy" experience of seeing her
own face looking straight down from a giant airborne image overhead.

Still, even the fiercest of Prokofy's antagonists recognize her central
point: Once real money is at stake, "serious business" starts to look a lot
like, well, serious business, and messing with it starts to take on
buzz-killing legal implications. Pressed as to the legality of their
griefing, PNs are quick to cite the distinction made in Second Life's own
terms of service between real money and the "fictional currency" that
circulates in-game. As ^ban^ puts it, "This is our razor-thin disclaimer
which protects us in real-life" from what /b/tards refer to as "a ride in the
FBI party van."

Real money isn't always enough to give a griefer pause, however. Sometimes,
in fact, it's just a handy way of measuring exactly how serious the griefers'
game can get.

Consider the case of the Avatar class Titan, flown by the Band of Brothers
Guild in the massively multiplayer deep-space EVE Online. The vessel was far
bigger and far deadlier than any other in the game. Kilometers in length and
well over a million metric tons unloaded, it had never once been destroyed in
combat. Only a handful of player alliances had ever acquired a Titan, and
this one, in particular, had cost the players who bankrolled it in-way that
you win in EVE is you basically make life so miserable for someone else that
they actually quit the game and don't come back."

And the only way to make someone that miserable is to destroy whatever
virtual thing they've sunk the most real time, real money, and, above all,
real emotion into. Find the player who's flying the biggest, baddest
spaceship and paid for it with the proceeds of hundreds of hours mining
asteroids, then blow that spaceship up. "That's his life investment right
there," Houston says.

The Goons, on the other hand, fly cheap little frigates into battle, get
blown up, go grab another ship, and jump back into the fight. Their motto:
"We choke the guns of our enemies with our corpses." Some other players
consider the tactic a less-than-sporting end run around a fair fight, still
others call it an outright technical exploit, designed to lag the server so
the enemy can't move in reinforcements.

Either way, it works, and the success just adds force to GoonFleet's true
secret weapon: morale. "EVE is the only game I can think of in which morale
is an actual quantifiable source of success," Houston says. "It's impossible
to make another person stop playing or quit the game unless their spirit is,
you know, crushed." And what makes the Goons' spirit ultimately uncrushable
is knowing, in the end, that they're actually playing a different game
altogether. As one GoonFleet member's online profile declared, "You may be
playing EVE Online, but be warned: We are playing Something Awful."

The Internet is serious business, all right. And of all the ironies inherent
in that axiom, perhaps the richest is the fate of the arch-Goon himself, Rich
Kyanka. He started Something Awful for laughs in 1999, when he began
regularly spotlighting an "Awful Link of the Day." He depends on revenue from
SA to sustain not just himself but his pregnant wife, their 2-year-old
daughter, two dogs, a cat, and the mortgage on a five-bedroom suburban
mini-manor in Missouri. His foothold in the upper middle class rests entirely
on the enduring comic appeal of goofy Internet crap.

Sitting in his comfortable basement office at the heart of the Something
Awful empire, surrot conjures bits of serious human connection from an
oceanic flow of words, pictures, videoclips, and other weightless shadows of
what's real. The challenge is sorting out the consequential from the
not-so-much. And, if Rich Kyanka's steely equanimity is any example, the
antics of the Goons and /b/tards might actually sharpen our ability to make
that distinction. To those who think the griefers' handiwork is simply
inexcusable: Well, being inexcusable is, after all, the griefers' job. Ours
is to figure out that caring too much only gives them more of the one thing
they crave: the lulz.

Contributing editor Julian Dibbell (julian at dibbell.com) wrote about open
source software in Brazil in issue 12.11.