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 SchmellingHistory 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-game resources worth more than $10,000.

So, naturally, Commander Sesfan Qu'lah, chief executive of the GoonFleet Corporation and leader of the greater GoonSwarm Alliance — better known outside EVE as Isaiah Houston, senior and medieval-history major at Penn State University — led a Something Awful invasion force to attack and destroy it.

"EVE was designed to be a cold, hard, unforgiving world," explains EVE producer Sígurlina Ingvarsdóttir. It's this attitude that has made EVE uniquely congenial for Goons.

"The ability to inflict that huge amount of actual, real-life damage on someone is amazingly satisfying" says Houston. "The 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, surrounded by more monitors than the job could possibly require and a growing collection of arch pop-surrealist paintings, Kyanka recounts some of the more memorable moments. Among them: numerous cease-and-desist letters from targets of SA's ridicule, threats of impending bodily harm from a growing community of rage-aholics permabanned from the SA forums, and actual bodily harm from B-movie director Uwe Boll. A onetime amateur boxer, Boll publicly challenged his online critics to a day of one-on-one real-world fights and then pummeled all who showed up, Kyanka among them. (See "Raging Boll," issue 14.12.)

Given that track record, you might think that a family man and sole breadwinner like Kyanka would be looking into another line of work by now. But he's still at it, proudly. "My whole mindset is, there are terrible things on the Internet: Can I write about them and transform them into something humorous?"

But ultimately, Kyanka's persistence is a testament to just how seriously he refuses to take the Internet seriously. Consider: When comments on the Web site of popular tech blogger Kathy Sierra escalated from anonymous vitriol to anonymous death threats last March, it sparked a story that inspired weeks of soul-searching and calls for uniform standards of behavior among bloggers and their communities. In response, Kyanka wrote a Something Awful column, which began with the question: "Can somebody please explain to me how is this news?"

Kyanka went on to review the long and bloodless history of death threats among Internet commenters, then revealed his own impressive credentials as a target: "I've been getting death threats for years now. I'm the king of online dying," he wrote. "Furries hate me, Juggalos hate me, script kiddies hate me, people banned from our forums hate me, people not banned from our forums hate me, people who hate people banned from our forums hate me ... everybody hates me."

So far, so flip. But almost as an afterthought, Kyanka appended the text of a death threat sent from a banned ex-Goon, aimed not at him but at his infant daughter: "Collateral damage. Remember those words when I kick in your door, duct tape Lauren Seoul's mouth, fuck her in the ass, and toss her over a bridge."

Next to that text, Kyanka posted a photo of himself holding the smiling little girl. His evident confidence in his own safety, and that of the child in his arms, was strangely moving — in an unnerving sort of way.

Moving, and maybe even illuminating. In the end, no matter what they say, life on the Internet really is a serious business. It matters. But the tricky thing is that it matters above all because it mostly doesn't — because it 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@dibbell.com) wrote about open source software in Brazil in issue 12.11.