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Ogging is term for a tactic developed for the online multiplayer game Netrek. This game was among the very first multiplayer Internet based games, and was most popular in the 1990s on university Unix systems used for internet access, and is still played today, having been later adapted to Windows and Macintosh computers.

The "ogg" is a kamikaze-style attack, frequently coordinated between multiple ships, with the goal of eliminating a target of high importance, generally with the idea that destroying the target is strategically more valuable than the survival of the attacking ships. It was typically used to destroy enemy ships carrying armies or as a coordinated multi-ship ogg against a starbase.

According to the Jargon File, "ogg" was sometimes also used by extension in the context of other games or in real life.^[1]

Often a player would cloak and make ogging-like movements if injured or in order to buy time until reinforcements arrived; this was known as fake ogging. Fake ogging could also convince a team that their starbase was under attack in order to provide a diversion for a carrier to capture a planet or achieve some other team objective.

In the game, players are designated by two alphanumeric characters, where the first character represents the team and the second letter represents the individual designation of that player. There are four teams, Federation, Klingon, Romulan, and Orion, identified as F, K, R, and O, and 16 player slots, numbered 0-9 and then a-f (hexadecimal numbering). Thus, for example, a player on the Federation team in the 11th of the 16 player slots would be designated "Fb", or a player in the first slot who was playing on the Romulan team would be "R0". There were four "reserved" slots that could only be used by local administrators, identified with g-j (these have since been reallocated for use by observers who wish to watch the game). While the game has four teams, normally only two are used at a time, with the unused team's planets being used as part of the playing field.

During a full game on a Netrek server at CMU during the 1990-91 school year, a member of the Federation team, Steve Racunus, was heading into Romulan space to capture a planet. The server administrator, Terence Chang, came in on the first reserved slot on the otherwise-empty Orion team, thus being designated as "Og". Instead of engaging in a dogfight, Chang charged in suicidally, failing to kill the Federation ship but leaving it badly damaged. When Og re-spawned, and again charged the now-crippled ship, the Fed player shouted to other people in the workstation cluster, "Help, it's oh-gee!", followed by cries of "It's ogg! It's ogg! Help!". The second suicide attack worked, prompting the Fed player to broadcast "Arrrgh, I was Og'ed" on the in-game message system.

1. ^ "ogg" in the Jargon File

• An eyewitness account of events described