In today's Chicago Tribune, writer Alex Pham writes a remarkably balanced account of people that make life difficult in online multiplayer games.

When Kurt Frerichs comes home from a long day of fixing computers, he likes to eat dinner with his family, tuck his 2-year-old daughter into bed and settle in front of his PC with a steaming cup of black coffee to inflict non-stop misery on his fellow man.

The 25-year-old technology consultant relishes the indiscriminate slaughter of other players in online games, heaping scorn on his victims and exploiting programming bugs to his advantage.

Frerichs is what the online world calls a griefer--someone who plays to make others cry. They stalk, hurl insults, extort, form gangs, kill and loot. Although a tiny percentage of the millions who play online games, griefers are prolific in sowing distress and driving away thousands of paying customers.

A study of the motivations, methods, mannerisms, and community response to malicious online play: "`Griefers' bedevil online gamers." Chicago Tribune free registration required - in case you don't want to bother, there's some select quotes below:

Motivation:

For a griefer, it's not the killing that is fun, because combat is inherent in many of these games. It's the misery it causes other players.

"Griefers feed on the negative reactions of the people they kill," said Frerichs, who savors his evil online persona and saves every nasty e-mail he gets from the people he has antagonized. "There's nothing sweeter than when you kill someone, and they spout insults at you for hours. That's when you know you got him. It sounds really cruel, but it's fun."

Business concerns:

Gamemakers fear that virtual saboteurs will jeopardize the rise of online games by scaring away customers willing to spend $10 to $14 a month, and they are devoting significant resources to finding ways to stop the online mayhem.

Methods:

Lately, "ninja stealing" has become especially rampant. A griefer waits around while another player slays a monster. Once the monster drops dead, it often gives up weapons, coins or other desirable items. Before the player can pick up the spoils, the griefer snatches the items and runs away.

Another common tactic is to lure a batch of monsters toward unsuspecting players. Monsters, which are run by computer programs, are generally instructed to kill the nearest players they see. By brushing past other players, the griefer can essentially trick the monsters into attacking someone else.

Griefers also can form a virtual mafia, blocking access to desirable areas of the game and demanding bribes. Or they run cartels by hoarding game components, such as eye of newt, and charging inflated prices.

Often, though, simple mischief is at the root of grief play.

"We once had this roving band of thugs who were all craftsmen," said Richard Garriott, who created "Ultima Online" two decades ago and is now creative director for game developer NCSoft Corp. in Austin, Texas. "They would run up to a player with a supply of lumber, rapidly build large pieces of furniture and drop them all around the player. All these objects prevented them from moving. So it was a sort of trap behavior."

Sobriety, Counter-point:

...online games also are mirrors, however distorted, of the real world, where evil coexists with good, and every classroom has its bullies. In that sense, griefers are part of an inevitable part of the virtual ecosystem, Garriott said.

There is even a school of thought that griefers play a vital role, sniffing out technical bugs in the game and lending a sense of flesh-and-blood tension.