The Best Griefing of All Time: A Field Guide to the PKer

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Best Griefing of All Time: A Field Guide to the PKer

The Fires Series — Episode 81

Every game with more than one player is a small society, and every small society grows its own predators. The industry calls them griefers, as if the defining feature were the sadness they cause rather than the ingenuity it takes to cause it. That framing loses the plot. Griefing is trolling with a physics engine — provocation staged inside a world with rules, aimed at the seam where the rules stop covering the situation. The best of it is genuinely brilliant. Some of it is genuinely vile. Telling those apart is the whole game, so let us start with the record and then name the animals.

The Greatest Hits

The first one has a citation. In 1993, inside a text world called LambdaMOO, a user running the character Mr. Bungle used a “voodoo doll” subprogram to seize other players’ characters and force them into degrading acts in a crowded virtual room. Julian Dibbell wrote it up for The Village Voice as “A Rape in Cyberspace,” and the community — which had no laws because no one had imagined needing any — invented governance on the spot to delete him. That is the founding document of griefing and of virtual community moderation, which turn out to be the same document read from two directions.

The assassination of a god. In 1997, Lord British — the in-game avatar of Ultima Online creator Richard Garriott, supposedly invulnerable — was killed at a public event when a player exploited a spell during a server reset. The developer’s own character, dead on the floor, in front of everyone. It remains the purest demonstration of the griefer’s core faith: there is no such thing as a rule that cannot be read more carefully than the person who wrote it.

The bard who could not be killed. On EverQuest’s brutal Sullon Zek PvP server in 2001, a low-level bard named Fansy discovered that below level six a character was effectively immune to attack, and used the window to train zone-clearing monsters onto an entire population of higher-level players for three days. It was folk-hero griefing — no real victim, just a whole server humiliated by a man who read the mechanics harder than the developers did.

The accidental epidemic. In 2005, World of Warcraft shipped a boss whose “Corrupted Blood” debuff leaked out of its intended zone and became a genuine plague — players spreading it deliberately into cities, whole servers rendered uninhabitable. Epidemiologists later published on it as a model of human behavior under contagion. Griefing as unintentional science.

Leeroy, and the funeral. The same year gave us Leeroy Jenkins charging into a raid plan screaming his own name — comedy disruption, later admitted to be staged, and immortal anyway. A year after that, a guild raided a real in-game funeral being held for a player who had died in real life, slaughtering the mourners. The “Serenity Now” funeral raid is where the field stops being uniformly funny and you have to start deciding what you actually think.

And then there is EVE. EVE Online is the game that made scamming a sanctioned art form, because its developers decided betrayal was a feature. The Guiding Hand Social Club spent nearly a year infiltrating a corporation purely to assassinate its CEO and loot everything (2005). An insider deleted the entire Band of Brothers alliance from the inside (2009). “Cally” ran the EVE Investment Bank as a straight Ponzi scheme and walked with hundreds of billions of ISK (2006); Phaser Inc. later broke a trillion and got a Guinness listing for the largest virtual theft. Presiding over much of the culture was The Mittani, who built griefing into an actual government with a foreign service and a press — and who also, once, drunk on a convention stage, pointed the mob at a real depressed player and learned in real time where the magic circle ends.

The rest of the canon fills a shelf: the RuneScape Falador Massacre (2006), where a bug let a house-party host slaughter guests; Habbo Hotel’s “Pool’s Closed” raids; Second Life’s self-replicating “grey goo” attacks and the collapse of its unregulated Ginko bank; Minecraft’s 2b2t, the anarchy server that is nothing but fourteen years of accumulated griefing geology.

A Field Guide to the PKer

Griefers are not one animal. If you are going to survive in the wild — or the comment section, which is the same wild with worse graphics — you need to tell them apart. A basic taxonomy:

The Corpse-Camper. Kills you, then waits at your respawn to do it again. Pure attrition; no wit, only patience. The in-game Ferrous Cranus. Wants you to log off, and counts it a win when you do.
The Ninja Looter. Cooperates just long enough to betray at the payout. A trust exploit, not a combat one. The ancestor of every “we’re a community here” pitch that ends with your wallet lighter.
The Scammer. Never fires a shot. Weaponizes the interface and your greed — the trade window, the fake escrow, the too-good lottery. EVE’s native aristocracy. The only griefer who can retire.
The Suicide-Ganker. Trades his own ship to destroy a bigger one, gleefully unprofitable. Griefing as gift economy, the cost is the point. See: Burn Jita.
The Exploiter. Reads the mechanics harder than the developers wrote them. Rarely malicious, frequently a folk hero, occasionally the reason a patch exists. Fansy’s clade.
The Infiltrator. Plays the long con — months undercover to detonate a corporation from inside. The Guiding Hand. Requires real patience and a genuinely cold read of other people.
The Statesman. Organizes the others into a polity. Griefing stops being an act and becomes a foreign policy. There is exactly one weight class above this, and it is the one where you forget the other players are people.
The Content Creator. Griefs for the audience, not the target — the clip is the product. Where the old griefer wanted your reaction and the new one wants the view count. The most modern, and the most honest about it.

Every one of these maps to a Flame Warrior you already know from the forums. The medium changed; the bestiary did not.

What It’s For

There is a line, and the good griefers know exactly where it is because they spend their lives standing on it. Inside the magic circle — the consented space of the game, where everyone at the table knows the knife is part of the game — griefing is emergent theater, and some of it is the most creative provocation human beings have ever staged. Cross that circle, aim the same tools at a person’s real grief or real despair, and it curdles into the thing the industry always assumed it was.

That is the same distinction the FAQ in the glossary draws for trolling generally, because griefing is trolling — it just happens to have a leaderboard. The griefer is the troll who found a world with rules and decided the rules were the most interesting thing to break. Judge the target, not the technique. And lurk more before you step into the arena: everyone else in there is at least as dangerous as you are, and the one laughing has probably read the manual closer than you have.

Source URLs

Julian Dibbell, “A Rape in Cyberspace,” The Village Voice (1993): http://www.juliandibbell.com/articles/a-rape-in-cyberspace/
“Mr. Bungle” / LambdaMOO — Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LambdaMOO
Lord British assassination — Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_British
The Game Archaeologist, “The Ballad of Fansy the Famous Bard,” Massively OP (2021): https://massivelyop.com/2021/04/03/the-game-archaeologist-the-ballad-of-fansy-the-famous-bard/
“Corrupted Blood incident” — Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident
Guiding Hand Social Club / EVE heists — PC Gamer: https://www.pcgamer.com/the-greatest-eve-online-heists-and-scams/
The Mittani / “suicide-gate” — Engadget (2012): https://www.engadget.com/2012-03-28-the-mittani-gets-hit-with-ban-and-resigns-in-wake-of-eve-online.html
RuneScape Falador Massacre — Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falador_Massacre
Second Life Ginko Financial collapse — Reuters/Second Life reporting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ginko_Financial

The Fires Series — Everquest

The Best Griefing of All Time: A Field Guide to the PKer

The Best Griefing of All Time: A Field Guide to the PKer

The Greatest Hits

A Field Guide to the PKer

What It’s For

Source URLs