These Insights are written by EGRN members in partnership with the Global Network on Extremism & Technology (GNET). You can find a full listing of EGRN-GNET Insights below and on our partner’s website.
Radicalisation, Extremism, and Digital Games Over the last few years, the topics of extremism and radicalisation have reached the forefront of concern in gaming communities.
The potential nexus between gaming and extremism is an increasingly important concern for researchers, tech companies, policymakers, and practitioners working in preventing and countering (violent)
Video games and gamification have become key tools of extremist actors’ recruitment arsenal and have taken a central role in their modus operandi. Analyses have pointed out how terrorists employ gaming elements in staging their attacks, or how violent extremists create full-blown video games fraught with hateful narratives and include opportunities to annihilate various social and ethnic groups.
Using empirical data taken from the Christchurch attack in New Zealand in March 2019, w provide a summary of how the attack was gamified in nature and how the data is laden with overt and more subtle overlaps with video games more generally.
In 2021, we developed a report at Love Frankie (LF) for our community of practice at the Extremism and Gaming Research Network (EGRN) to understand the state of research into linkages between video games, gaming communities, and extremism. In the State of Play: Reviewing the Literature on Gaming & Extremism, we provide an overview of existing available literature on research and publications on the use of gaming platforms, video games, and related online fora.