Spectacular Interventions of Second Life: Goon Culture, Griefing, and Disruption in Virtual Spaces
Cultures of Virtual Worlds, 2008
University of California, Irvine
The open-source environment of Second Life, a computer-generated world created by Linden Lab, affords one of the most attractive spaces for content creation that elicits performative acts which, ultimately, result in the construction of its world. Second Life provides tools for building, scripting, and creating tools that render the world a more flexible platform. But the same openness also facilitates disruptive behavior and poaching of the environment in negative ways, such as creating offensive builds with objectionable symbolism (i.e. swastikas, penises, etc), slowing down the functionality of certain regions, launching grey goo attacks (which generally take the form of self-replicating penises).
Referred to as griefing, these activities are mostly attributed to certain groups such as W-Hat, Voted 5, and Patriatic Nigras. These groups adopt tropes that attempt to undermine significant cultural icons or events in order to construct an identity counter to what they perceive to be the assumed norm. As such, they use illicit iconography of sexual fetishism (such as paraphernalia of bondage and pornography) in their machinima movies and adopt socially offensive discourse (i.e. AIDS and rape signs, swastikas) to elicit a certain spectacular effect. But they remove this symbolism from its real-life cultural context and use them to embrace the identity of the "cyber-terrorist," a label all-too-willingly bestowed upon them by bloggers. As such, their activities comprise tactics used by spectacular subcultures discussed by Dick Hebdige and involve poaching of the textual space of Second Life.
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