I just find it absurd that someone would say such horrible things over a game. Even if I singled him out, I don't think that deserves that sort of response.

@PillipF - What you did is called "Cyberstalking." You intentionally tracked down and harassed someone online because of a work relationship. While this is very new territory from a legal perspective, what you did could be considered a criminal act in some locales. I think your best option is to keep quiet and hope your coworker didn't realize who you were. If you were my employee, and came to me with this, I'd fire you on the spot and give your coworker a couple extra days off (paid) to get a "handle" on his emotions.

@WesleyLong which locales are you thinking of there?

@WesleyLong No, he did not "intentionally track down" anyone based on the post. The more appropriate phrase would be "You randomly encountered someone online and destroyed their character in a game despite having a workplace relationship with them." Poor judgement certainly, cyberstalking/criminal activity, no, absolutely not.

Sorry, but what do you mean by "stalking" and "destroying fun"? In video games, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. Though I didn't quite understand from the post: did it happen in one day, or was the OP targeting the colleague for a long time? If the second option is true, then this indeed looks like stalking.

@IMil I'm guessing this is some sort of role playing game where it takes a lot of time an energy to build up a character, and it is against culturural practice to go around killing characters. To me this is the only way these responses are making sense to me, if it is just a game that one can quickly exit and enter after winning or losing, the OP's behaviour probably wouldn't be a big deal?

@MHH even if it's a simple multiplayer shooter, being constantly killed shortly after respawn soon gets annoying.

@MHH - "As I am searching for streams to view, I end up finding the most senior member of my team streaming. Of course, being the idiot I am, track his game down and join it. I then proceed to single him out and destroy him in the game since I am a lot better than he is."

@GeoffreyBrent - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberstalking

@WesleyLong OK I can see that you are a gamer and understand this language better than me. There are lots of regular world english interpretations of that sentence. I still read that as I found him randomly while looking for streams and decided to join his public game. Maybe it doesn't mean that, but under that interpretation, it's not "intentionally" tracking him down. Its just entering his public game.

@MHH - As I said, this is very new territory, legally speaking. There is the law, there is what prosecutors make of it, what juries convict by it, and what judges rule on it. I'd rather not be the "test case" while they sort all that out. I'd still fire the OP if he came to my desk with this.

@PillipF : If someone stalked you and harassed you and provoked you long enough, are you absolutely sure you would never say anything which someone would find offensive, or someone would consider to be racist or sexist? I'm sure if someone stalked you long enough, you would slip up at least once and say something which at least someone would deem to be offensive. If someone observed you long enough, they would almost surely catch you doing something illegal. This is why police needs "probable cause" to observe someone, otherwise they could fine anyone if they observed them long enough.

I agree with this answer - it seems like you provoked this reaction from the co-worker, so the company could blame this on you. Besides, it's outside of company time, so HR can easily discard their involvement.

@WesleyLong Thanks, I'm aware of what cyberstalking is, but that link doesn't actually answer my question. The description of US law makes it clear that OP's behaviour would not constitute "cyberstalking" under US law (lacks the required element of a threat of violence) and the sections for other regions are too vague about the laws for me to see whether it would count there. Can you clarify which specific regions you were talking about?

@MHH: Finding the coworker's stream is coincidental. But specifically taking steps to join the coworker's specific game is tracking him down by definition of the word. Further aggravated by then singling him out - which proves malicious intent, which OP also freely admits. SImilarly, if you post on social media that you're going out to Foo's Bar tonight, I can't be faulted for knowing what you broadcasted. However, if I then go to Foo's Bar specifically to ruin your night, I tracked you down. This is stalking to its very core, regardless of whether your location was publically known.

@WesleyLong Actually, what he did is called "stream sniping". You can read more in us.battle.net/forums/en/overwatch/topic/20762066699, in urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=stream%20sniping (yeah, I know ... Urban Dictionary isn't the most reliable source and all.....) and in gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/327100/…. Stream sniping can also cause the player to be banned.

Evidently, spare time is a valuable commodity that people are willing to throw away.

Is really being better than someone at a game "ruining his fun"? Can you only have fun when you win? Is every good sniper on competitive games "ruining my fun"? And in any case, is "getting your fun ruined" justification for sexist/racial slurs?

I might add, the process of continually attempting to provoke a specific person online in the hope of provoking a reaction (angry reactions are inevitable in any game, and with it, cussing and insults), and then using that one cherry picked reaction taken entirely out of context in order to ruin their job, and then destroy their life, is of such an astonishing level of evil I'm not sure what to say. If I saw a work colleague in a game, assuming I was on good terms, I would be inclined to work with them, not destroy them.

@Darkhogg, if a bunch of Division I college football players joined a local flag football league and proceeded to demolish everyone in the league with scores like 50-0, wouldn't that be ruining the fun?

@MHH (and Darkhogg and others) "Stream sniping" means the stalker uses the streamed video to gather information like the server name etc. If the player leaves the game and enters a different one, the stalker would just follow (and a streamer would know this). The way i read the question, there's no doubt OP would have done exactly that. The key difference to somebody just being good at the game is that OP's goal wasn't to have fun themselves, but to ruin the fun for somebody else. (Or that is their idea of fun, which is worse because that makes them a toxic personality.)

@Flater and others. I now understand that based on the information demonstrated by you and others in this thread, I agree. But seriously the question

@Strawberry Time doing something that you enjoy isn't "thrown away". It's valuable decompression time.

@WetlabStudent Wesley is not referring to finding the coworker's stream (live video broadcast). Wesley is referring to deliberately and repeatedly singling the person out in the game to intentionally provoke a reaction. I don't see how any interpretation or gaming terminology is required to understand that. I dunno any relevant laws, but if they're broad and vague, I could certainly see it falling under them. It's incredibly rude and completely uncalled for at best.

As an addition to the other reasons why stream sniping is ruining someone's fun, keep in mind that the OP is literally watching along with his colleague's screen, which means it's trivially easy to find and defeat him; he has such an unfair advantage that there's really nothing his opponent can do, even if they were evenly matched.

@Erik That's ghosting, not stream sniping, but the two often go hand in hand.

For the non-gamers: to join someone else's match take a fair amount of deliberate effort. When you try to join a game, you're typically thrown into a random one. Since OP can watch his coworker playing live though, they can wait until the instant their coworker clicks to join a new game, and only then try to join one themselves. This increases the odds of being put in the same game, and if you still don't get put in the same game you just try again until you do.

There's no way, really, to accidentally do it. And as Erik said, being able to see your opponent's screen gives you an enormous advantage, to the point that it's not fun to play against. If OP knew they were better than the coworker (which they would if they were watching them), then they had to have deliberately taken time and effort to manipulate the game-matching system so they could demolish their coworker

@forest People refer to that as "stream sniping" all the time. On Twitch.tv when people do that, the streamers basically always say "wow is he stream sniping?" not "wow is he ghosting me?". There are a few other definitions of stream sniping such as using a stream to get into the same game as a streamer; but doing it deliberately to kill the streamer can also be called "stream sniping".

@JMac Oh OK. I haven't heard it used in that way (I don't use Twitch for streaming).

@PillipF Dude you are in the wrong, which has been clearly demonstrated your best bet is to hope no one noticed who you were.

So you decided to bully a coworker for no real reason, using your youthful reflexes to take advantage of an older man trying to relax after a day's work - presumably far more stressful than your entry level position.

It sounds like you're looking for drama, and found some - congrats

Saying some one is doing A can implicitly imply they are doing B IE: "I think Mark is running an errand" may imply Mark is using their car in order to get to where they need to go.

The diction for the phrase "stream sniping" in addition doesn't leave much room to be ghosting, since "stream" + "sniping" gives a very heavy context of killing someone on a stream, not cheating via extra information (IE as seen in the phrase "ghosting"). So you'll see people use stream sniping to refer to both but not because stream sniping means both, but because it implies both.

In fairness, there's no evidence the OP was ghosting anyone, that's a conclusion reached with no evidence that I can see.

@CallumBradbury OP said specifically, "Each time, he gets more visibly mad", he left the stream up while playing against his coworker and watched him get angry. It's unreasonable to assume he didn't also use the stream to gain an advantage via ghosting. The colleague was in the wrong to say the alleged things he said, but we also have no information on whether OP said nothing in the wrong. Would be interesting to see the recording of the game that the streamer most likely has on the site.