No longer just an isolated pathology, griefing has developed a full-fledged culture.
#Second life trolls code
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. 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. 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). Their work is complete when the victims log off in a huff. They are corpse campers, noob baiters, kill stealers, ninja looters. It's just that what they most enjoy about those games is making other players not enjoy them.
Not that griefers don't like online games. Broadly speaking, a griefer is an online version of the spoilsport - someone who takes pleasure in shattering the world of play itself. But none, perhaps, deserves our attention as much as the notion of the griefer. 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. 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." "We do it for the lulz," ban says - for laughs. 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. In the popular NorthStar hangout, players located the offending avatars and fired auto-cagers, which wrapped the attackers' heads in big metallic boxes. 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. 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. The same scene, with minor variations, was unfolding simultaneously throughout the virtual geography of Second Life. The incident, it turns out, was not an isolated one.
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 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. * 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. Left to right: William Barnett, Evan Vetere, and Isaiah Houston of the EVE Online GoonSwarm Alliance.
0 kommentar(er)
