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.