From 4chan to the White House, 01/05/2025
www.videogamesindustrymemo.com
James Ball explains how failing to take games seriously has fed the populist right

Big question: Why have alienated young men, especially in America, found their home in the populist political right? Part of the answer is that the populist right takes video games seriously.

Mind the gap: Games have typically been treated as a bit of a joke by wider society. Long-held stereotypes about games being worthless, provoking violence or turning players into addicts has created a gap between the experience of the millions who play games and the perception of the medium in wider society.

The art of persuasion: For most of us who love games, our way of dealing with this problem has been to try to change minds. We’ve talked about games as an economic powerhouse. We’ve argued that games have cultural power. And we’ve sought to support research that’s provided a level-headed perspective on whether games make people aggressive (they don’t) or if they negatively affect mental health (again, a pretty firm nope).

Tunnelling down: But others reacted differently. A small number of ‘always online’ ‘transgressive’ young men, especially in America, have seen the rejection of games in liberal democratic culture as part of a wider betrayal of their personal and political identity.

Worrying development: And according to James Ball, Political Editor at The New European and author of The Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World, those disaffected people have successfully been courted by the populist right and authoritarian governments - fuelling their causes with activism and energy that is helping dismantle the liberal order.

  • t3rmit3@beehaw.org
    3·
    17 hours ago

    I think you’ve mixed up the timeline in my comment.

    • Pre-gamergate era (2010-2014): channer-esque misogynists like JonTron are heavily popular on YT, but there is no political pipeline established. They are just voicing their own shitty thoughts, and their audience is almost exclusively young white males.
    • Gamergate (2015): Right-wing politicians and shock pundits like Shapiro take notice of the large amount of misogynistic content that a lot of gaming YTers are spouting as GG gets national attentions, and think, “hey, those sound like people I can capture”.
    • Early Alt-right pipeline (2015-2019): figures like Shapiro and Yiannopoulos start making content intended to target gamers, usually ‘shock’ videos with gamer-derived terms like “own” (the libs), and/or are interviewing right-wing-aligned gamer influencers, and the gamer->conservative voter pipeline is developing.
    • Late Alt-right pipeline (2020-onwards): there are tons of right wing YTers, streamers, and talk-shows that target young white males, especially gamers, telling them that everything they dislike is due to ‘wokeism’, ‘DEI’, etc… you know the rest.

    Even before that, there was this whole corporate wokeness marketing trope that really drove the concept into the ground

    You’re using ‘woke’ unironically, in the way that the Right does. Neither of those things you posted are Woke, they’re just pandering. Woke means aware of the systemic biases in our social institutions. Your examples aren’t “wokeness”, they’re Feminist Capitalism (and Rainbow Capitalism also gets called ‘woke’ by the Right).

    It’s like kids all running with this popular meme, only for parents to sudden adopt it and it’s not cool any more. So, right-wing spheres to pick it off of the ground, dust it off, and just carry that energy forward, which is unfortunately what they are good at.

    No, that was never what wokeness was (and none of those companies ever called themselves that), it’s just that right-wingers started calling anything they didn’t like “woke”, despite their examples having nothing to do with wokeness.

    Leftists are shit at messaging. Like, really really shit at messaging.

    Leftists have great messaging. If you think messaging is a Leftist problem, I think you’ve confused Liberal, Progressive, and Leftist.