Griefers = Assholes
Posted on March 30th, 2008 in posts |
In my old age, I’ve noticed I hardly ever curse or swear anymore. I don’t even say asshole all that much, but I don’t think there’s a better word for what these assholes did on a public forum for epilepsy sufferers.
Internet griefers descended on an epilepsy support message board last weekend and used JavaScript code and flashing computer animation to trigger migraine headaches and seizures in some users.
Yes, a group of technically savvy people actually conspired to flood a message board with flashing lights and images that were specifically calculated to produce seizures and migraine headaches in their intended victims. I can’t even think of a way to rationalize that sort of attack, although understanding griefer mentality might yield a few clues.
Before today, I’d never heard the term. According to Wikipedia the word has its genesis in online gaming:
Griefers differ from typical players in that they do not play the game in order to achieve objectives defined by the game world. Instead, they seek to harass other players, causing grief. In particular, they may use tools such as stalking, hurling insults, and exploiting unintended game mechanics. Griefing as a gaming play style is not simply any action that may be considered morally incorrect. Though the staff of each online game defines griefing in a manner that best fits their game, certain criteria must be met for an action to be considered griefing. An act of griefing involves the following three types of actions to be considered grief play:[1]
- The unfair use or abuse of a game mechanic that was not intended by the game’s developers.
- The inability of the victim to exact some means of retribution beyond utilizing similar unintended game mechanics.
- The intended purpose of an act of griefing must be to negatively impact the game play of another person.
An act of griefing usually meets all these types of criteria as well as any game specific criteria set by the developers of the game.
See? They’re assholes. But if you found the dudes who vandalized the Epilepsy board, they’d probably laugh off any insults or criticism. Another, seminal article on griefing in Wired does a fine job summing up the rationale offered by griefers for their obnoxious behavior.
“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.
Basically, messageboards and online gaming worlds have spawned a group of “seriousness” police who see themselves as enemies of those who would impose real-world value systems and mores on a virtual world. What’s liberating about the Internet is its lawlessness; its ability to raise anonymous irreverence into an art form. And for sure, I’ve laughed at this sort of thing before. Take for example the World of Warcraft virtual funeral following the real world death of a player: players in the Serenity Now guild massacred the avatars who had queued up to pay their respects. The following video does a fine job telling the story.
And yet, with the epilepsy stunt, the griefers crossed a line into committing a potentially criminal act; their virtual world prank provoked a very real physical response. In fact, it was designed to provoke a physical reaction in the victims. That was the whole point:
The incident, possibly the first computer attack to inflict physical harm on the victims, began Saturday, March 22, when attackers used a script to post hundreds of messages embedded with flashing animated gifs.
The attackers turned to a more effective tactic on Sunday, injecting JavaScript into some posts that redirected users’ browsers to a page with a more complex image designed to trigger seizures in both photosensitive and pattern-sensitive epileptics.
Take a look at Section 211.1 of the Model Penal Code (upon which many states, including Texas, base their criminal codes):
Simple assault. A person in guilty of assault if he:
(1) Attempts to cause or purposely, knowingly or recklessly causes bodily injury to another; or
(2) Negligently causes bodily injury to another with a deadly weapon; or
(3) Attempts by physical menace to put another in fear of imminent serious bodily harm.
Seems like (1) above pretty fairly includes what these griefers did to the epilepsy sufferers visiting the forum.
Criminals and assholes.
