Colin Redmond explores far-right gaming platforms and their function as a tool of radicalisation.
The far right have been utilising videogames and adjacent social platforms (Discord; Twitch; Steam; Telegram; Rumble etc.) to spread their ideology of white supremacy and fascism and this is especially true since ‘Gamergate: 2014.’ Their focus is on gaming adjacent platforms, where a network of chatrooms is set up in an attempt to normalise, freely exchange and spread extremist ideology, antisemitic conspiracies, misogyny, racism against refugees, anti-socialism and LGBTQ hate.
The production of actual neo-fascist hate games made to deliberately spread a far-right narrative are not that common but they do serve as an important tool in the wider strategy of the far-right’s ‘culture-war’. Once inside the chat room, far-right actors share these fringe games and fascist ideology with like-minded people and aim to reach new and potentially vulnerable recruits. (Prinz, 2024).
The far right see the potential of video games and adjacent platforms for grooming individuals toward hateful and oppressive ideology. The moment a chat room and/or a network of chatrooms have been organised they will target an individual or small group of individuals who they perceive as inferior to them via ‘raiding.’ Here far-right actors will encourage their networks to join in a gamified hate-bomb of online harassment and relentless trolling of others, especially those from minority or LGBTQ communities.
They target these gaming and social media spaces with threats of murder, rape and repeat that they will find them until the target is crushed in humiliation and leaves the gaming platform. A particularly concerning activity which sits at the intersection between violent extremists and gaming is the ability for people to rally for money using these types of platforms. It has been argued that far-right extremists have made considerable amounts of money streaming on Twitch which may be given through donations via digital currency
Ctrl. Alt-Del: The Politics of ‘Gamergate’ Resentment
Gamergate, the 2014 online movement began because one man wanted to punish and publicly ridicule his ex-girlfriend via social media by means of lies and humiliation. This started with him posting nude photos of her online and then falsely insinuated that she – a gamer developer – had received a favourable a review of a new game that she had developed thanks to the sexual relationships that she was having with a journalist who was reviewing the game at the time; this relationship had never happened. The story exploded on 4chan and a harassment campaign developed. Quinn and other female gaming creators were targeted and a gamer-feminist theorist, Brianna Wu, and others were threatened with murder, kidnap and rape. Quinn’s address was posted online, anyone suspected of being a friend was hacked, and Quinn fled their home out of fear for their safety.
The online abusers – the ‘Gamergaters‘ – believed that they were doing this in the name of promoting ethics in gaming, fighting political correctness. They claimed to be pushing back against the feminism that had invaded the space of the white-male orientated gaming world. There was a conspiracy between journalists and gaming developers to create games with social justice narratives and it had to be crushed. It was estimated that up to 10,000 people were either involved or supported the actions of the alt-right inside gamergate. Many of the movement’s leading figures have since moved from rallying around gamergate to becoming part of Trump’s privileged elites namely, Steve Bannon, Elon Musk and Milo Yiannopoulos.
Musk ran his own campaign with his idiom: “DEI Kills Art” lending his support to this alt-right gamer hate-group. The ‘Gamergaters’, saw themselves as running a culture-war against the efforts of gamer diversification and inclusivity and swore to bring down the female game developers who were promoting a communist and cultural-Marxist conspiracy takeover (Mortensen, 2015). They complained that new games were full of left-wing social justice warriors with their ‘DEI hair-cuts.’
The gaming far right does not accept that gaming and gamers are changing. The ‘State of Gaming: 2024’ which is the latest report in gaming culture shows not only is the gaming industry growing and diversifying, but the gaming industry is also now worth almost twice as much as the value of the music and movie industries combined. The gaming industry, in 2024, had a market value of approximately $220 billion. It is supported by a global gamer population of 3.3 billion people worldwide. The gaming world predicted revenue by 2030 has been estimated to be $371 billion with a global gamer population of over 3.8 billion.
Gamers come from all ages, nationalities and backgrounds. Typically, they choose the familiar and the popular as is routinely seen on any top fifty list of cutting-edge games sales. A report also shows that 60% of gamers are female and that the average gamer age is 25-35 years old. (Koigi, 2024)
But it is true that the far right mobilised within this milieu. Gamergate has been said to have been a fundamental catalyst that helped elect Donald Trump as US president in 2016. It assisted the growth of other alt-right and far-right movements, including the ‘Storming of The Capital’ in 2021. It has played a role in the re-electing of Trump again in November 2024. Steve Bannon even went so far as claiming that Gamergate had created a generation and an army that turned to the politics of Donald Trump. Gamergate was a key template for Trump’s MAGA movement and for the far right in other countries.
The online fascists have now learned to use similar techniques of false allegations, co-ordinated harassment, the use of memes to intimidate and harass people, especially transgender youth and adults. The alt-right’s emergence grew from Gamergate trolls: the angry white man trope, victimisation culture, grievance politics and race and gender paranoia. It has been responsible for the massive wave of young people entering into what had been considered the older world of white nationalism.
Far-Right Predatorial Grooming Gangs
The far right have absolutely no issue with targeting minors, even those as young as nine years old, and they are ruining lives. The State will initially treat all minors who have been lured in the web of extremism as terrorists and because they are so young and impressionable, some minors can absorb these extreme views like a sponge. In England a 15-year-old teenager became the youngest girl to be charged with terror offences after being targeted by far-right extremists online. Though the charges were eventually dropped, she took her own life in a Nottinghamshire children’s home in May of 2022 at only 16 years old. When she was 14 years old, she was charged with the possession of instructions on how to make explosives and at the time, had a swastika gouged into her forehead of which she subsequently tried to remove (Murray, 2023).
There are multiple cases of the far right grooming children for extremist ideology. Under 18s now make up 15% of all terrorism-related arrests in the UK. Nineteen out of every twenty children aged under 18 who were arrested in 2021 for terrorism offences were linked to an extreme right-wing ideology. One 15-year-old from Merseyside avoiding custody after threatening to bomb a synagogue in 2021.
Of course, a significant amount of far-right child grooming could be prevented if the owners and CEOs of social media companies and adjacent gaming platforms were forced to take responsibility for enabling fascist predators. These social media platform spaces should no longer allow the far right to project constant hatred, and misinformation under the guise of protecting free speech, expression and association. Younger generations are in danger of becoming more and more attracted to extreme misogyny and racism online and potentially following school shooter fandoms which are currently growing amongst the most vulnerable of teenagers.
In 2018, in Cornwall, a 13-year-old was investigated by the M15 who became leader of the UK arm of a banned Nazi organisation that was set up online through Telegram by another 13-year-old from Estonia. In 2020 in Derby, a new neo-Nazi group led by a 15-year-old boy emerged online with its entire membership consisting of children. The group had discussed how to acquire and modify weapons and had suggested attacking migrants in Dover. Although being children, they can still do damage. They can feed into far-right campaigns, produce propaganda and radicalise other teenagers through the use of online gaming systems. The Anders Breivik 2011 attack in Norway and the 2019 Christchurch attacks in New Zealand are said to have resulted from similar activities (Townsend, 2021).
While the far right are grooming and radicalising children online, Nazi-saluting tech billionaire Elon Musk declares his support for Germany’s far-right AfD party as the only party which can save Germany. Musk has also called for jailed British far-right activist Tommy Robinson to be released from prison.
What the Space Cowboy is not sharing on his platform X however, is Robinson’s associates and methodologies. Robinson has long sought to use the issue of sexual exploitation to push his racist and Islamophobic agenda against the wishes of the victims. He has even acted in ways that have compromised legal proceedings against perpetrators. Since he founded the EDL in 2009, Robinson has made frequent references to “rape jihad”, whilst simultaneously failing to address concerns around child sexual exploitation in his own organisation. For example, his close friend and ally Richard Price was convicted of making four indecent images of children. There have been at least 20 members and supporters of the EDL convicted of child sexual exploitation offences. At least ten of these were active in the organisation while Robinson was leader.
The Forever War of Capitalism
The military industrial complex is melting the space between the gaming world on one hand and the real world of warfare on the other. We know that games can simulate war – soldiers through the use of simulators and gamers can train for war via militarised games. Anyone can learn how to drive tanks, shoot guns, fly war planes and as war-games have their battle-ready narratives of conflict and combat, anybody can be a hero and kill all the enemies, save the girl and violently stand up for national pride.
However, due to the gamification of war, we now live amongst the drone-pilots, who operate warfare from an office, through remote control, thousands of miles from the combat-zone. Almost civil-servant like, they operate drones, zooming in via video link, sitting in the gamer-chair; searching and seeking to destroy; immersed – as if in a video game. The pilot closes in and targets whole villages; watching in high resolution; a magnified theatre of destruction and death. Then at the end of the working day, the drone-pilot clocks out and leaves his office; to blend in with the rest of society, riding the subway home. The pilots return to their civilian roles, without any transitionary period to psychologically decompress between the warzone and the ordinary world. Drone-pilots have no time to reorientate themselves for reintegration into civilian life; they simply return to work like any other civil servant before being ordered to strike; witnessing the aftermath of destruction close up on a gaming-like screen (Hijazi, A., Ferguson, C.J. and Richard Ferraro, F. et al. 2017).
The ’Gamification of Socialism’
Gaming-adjacent spaces may not initially seem like a critical battleground for the left to consider. However, socialists worldwide need to understand the people of this virtual cityscape. The streets of the gaming city have largely been overlooked as part of the working class struggle. There needs to be a left-wing, common defence against this; an online-orientated, gamer’s socialist construct or assemblage. This should be considered essential to have a better understanding of how the gaming world works and to easily navigate the online world of gaming and adjacent platforms. A collective such as this could effectively organise at an online grassroots level to orchestrate a working class pushback especially on gaming adjacent platforms to intentionally fight and disrupt the toxic manosphere of the alt-right. This new gamer’s common defence could also work alongside networks of other more traditional anti-racist organisations to build the fights against ultra-nationalism.
However, we also need ‘socialist-immersive’ games, with a Marxist perspective that exposes the real world barbarisms of capitalism. We need the creation of independent games; hi-res colour palettes that depict multi-worlds of eco-socialism that takes us on journeys of degrowth alternatives: – ‘The Metabolic Rift.’
‘Socialist-Immersive’ games have the potential to unmask the violence of the imperialist ruling classes; exposing how capitalism is a system of exploitation and how it lives off the backs of people. Games have the potential to illustrate a variety of socialist worlds and through ‘gamification of socialism’ opportunities for real and permanent proletariat revolution may begin to appear. The gaming world and its audience is huge and we need to put pressure on this industry to make sure that it becomes a space where independent, left-wing gaming creators can gather to create socialist worlds that will restore and sustain in people a permanent socialist imagination.
REFERENCES:
Hijazi, A., Ferguson, C.J. and Richard Ferraro, F. et al. (2017). ‘Psychological Dimensions of Drone Warfare.’ Curr Psychol 38, 1285–1296 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-017-9684-7 [Accessed 06th January 2025].
Mortensen, T. E. (2016). “Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate”. Games and Culture. 13 (8): 787–806. doi:10.1177/155541201664040. ISSN 1555-4120. S2CID 147383984.
Prinz, M. (2024). ‘Extremist Games and Modifications: The ‘Metapolitics’ of Anti-Democratic Forces.’ In: ‘Gaming and Extremism: The Radicalization of Digital Playgrounds.’ Ed. L. Schlegel and R. Kowert. Routledge, New York.
