Sometimes you hear about something that is so totally rocked out that it makes you want to immediately down a case of PBR and start slam dancing to the Misfits. At least that’s how we felt after reading Julian Dibbell’s Jan 18 Wired article “Mutilated Furries, Flying Phalluses: Put the Blame on Griefers, the Sociopaths of the Virtual World”.
Despite what’s been told, madcap hilarity is not the exclusive province of distressed celebrity starlets. And while the World Wide Weblet has more than its far share of zaniness, “griefers” in and of themselves not being a new phenomenon, Dibbell’s article focusing on the advent of “organized griefing” got me all fired up!
Organized chaos!
Who knew?
PUNK GONE MAD!!
I have snipped some of the more juicy bits for your perusal, but here’s the link if want to surf on over to read the entire article—hilarious, insightful, and well worth the read.
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 p.m. EDT 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, 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, 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.”
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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.
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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.
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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 Net’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 recreation of the burning Twin Towers (tiny falling bodies, oh gosh) 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 - yes - 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.”
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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.
The most exciting thing to me about the organized griefer phenom is that it underscores the growing reliance Web 2.0 companies have on their user base, no longer simply “customers”, but as active collaborators—taking part in the vitality of any Web 2.0 venture.
In this sense, companies structured around social-networking and user interaction are totally at the mercy of their user base. This was recently demonstrated by the latest rumblings coming from the Digg user community this week, which forced a last minute diplomacy effort on the part of Digg’s founder to avert a potential UGC meltdown Wednesday night. Here’s the scoop from another Wired article, this one penned by Betsy Schiffman, Jan 24. (Here’s the link if you want to peep the whole article.
Near-Revolt on Digg Underscores Site’s Dependence on Its Users
Several top contributors to the social news site Digg, including Andrew “MrBabyMan” Sorcini, Muhammad “msaleem” Saleem and Reg “Zaibatsu” Saddler, held an emergency online meeting at around 8:30 PST to discuss their response to a recent change in the algorithm Digg uses to determine which stories appear on the site’s front page. The bone of their contention was that the algorithm penalized veteran users such as themselves: It took longer for their submissions to hit the front page than for newbies’ submissions.
In the end, the appearance of Digg’s founder Kevin Rose and CEO Jay Adelson in the users’ chat room quelled talk of a boycott, but the participating Digg users had made their concerns — and their clout — known. (A couple hundred people listened to the discussion via an online chat room as well as a live audio podcast, Sorcini says.)
“There’s a lot of hypersensitivity to anything Digg does,” Adelson says. “I explained to [the top Diggers] that we change the algorithm all the time, and that the [recent change] was not made to single out individuals. There are 25 million people on the site. These guys represent one component. There’s a much larger component that we want to hear from.”
Last night’s revolt was ultimately more of a customer-service crisis than a revolution, but it points to a larger problem of ownership on sites that rely upon user-generated content.
Although Diggers are using a free service, the service wouldn’t exist without them — and Digg’s management must tread with extreme care when making changes to the site, or risk alienating its most loyal users.
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The most recent drama started a few days ago, culminating with an open letter to Rose and Adelson. When the disgruntled Digg users didn’t get a response to that letter, they held their emergency meeting. Saleem, perhaps the most agitated of the bunch, initially had drastic ideas about how to proceed.
“I proposed that we immediately rally the troops and boycott Digg until our demands (at that point undetermined) were met and our concerns (at that point a work in progress) resolved. At the end, however, (Andrew Sorcini’s) diplomatic nature and good judgment prevailed - at least for a few hours,” Saleem wrote on his blog.
Several hours into the discussion, Rose and Adelson showed up in the chat room, spoke to disgruntled Diggers’ concerns and vowed to keep an open forum and an open line of communication with users. Rose and Adelson assured the Diggers that they weren’t being deliberately (or permanently) penalized. That was enough to satisfy Sorcini and the others.
“When you invest enough time in a social community, you gain a sense of ownership. Not entitlement — that’s an important distinction to make. I don’t feel like I’m entitled to anything, but I do feel that we’re responsible for the community that we’re a part of,” Sorcini says.
*So there you have it, the Digg episode ties into organized griefing phenom in that they both illustrate the underlying principle of Punk Marketing—the consumer is now in the driver seat. This notion increasingly imperative now that companies like Digg rely on users more and more for UGC.
Whether user communities represent the more legitimate “good” griefing sort, as in the Digg example, or the more psychotic variety like Patriotic Nigras of SN infamy, companies would be wise to actively engage these groups of users. As the Digg episode demonstrates, approaching user communities (griefing or otherwise) as active collaborators is the best way to illicit a positive outcome.
But what excites us most of all (what makes us want to jump up and start shouting “Oi! Oi! Oi!”) is that truly inventive and forward thinking companies are going to find exciting ways to collaborate with these groups. In doing so they will have found another means to harness the awesome Punk Marketing power of Web 2.0
We can only imagine what sort of UGC viral marketing cyber-insanity this will unleash.
One piece of promotion: Punk Marketing is having a reading on 2/5 inside Second Life. We are jumping in. Please let us know if you would like a special invitation, like the one your Mom had to give you to come down to dinner!
