What is the 'gamification of terror'? Gaming expert reveals the 'dark' politics of video games

It's probably not something you'd like to admit, or even realise the extent of, but the worlds of gaming and politics are deeply intertwined.

So much so that there are key, harrowing instances of gaming being used to influence people politically, especially with how quickly video games and technology have advanced and continue to do so.

George E. Osborn is the creator and editor of Video Games Industry Memo and the managing director of Half-Space Consulting with more than 15 years' experience in the industry, having also studied at the University of Cambridge.

He's penned Power Play, a new book which focuses on the link between gaming and politics plus the battle for global influence.

Speaking to Indy100, he revealed the three cases of gaming and politics being intrinsically linked that shocked him the most when working on the new book.

"The first one was the polling firm in the US that successfully called the 2024 election for Trump and the precise amount of electoral college votes that Trump was going to receive," said Osborn.

"That was the only polling firm in the US, or at least this is what they reported to me, who was actually polling people within mobile games to try and correct their polling sample because what they had found is that different groups of Trump supporters were not being successfully reached through traditional polling methods."

Indeed, James Johnson, a New York City-based pollster who is the co-founder of polling company JL Partners and was a former adviser to Theresa May, confirmed his company "incentivised poll responses by awarding in-game points as people play games on their phone" and it "is more likely to pick up young, non-white men".

"That showed that 30 per cent of our non-white sample backed Trump, in line with the results," added Johnson.

Osborn said: "Johnson explicitly said video games are an information ecosystem. That really stood out for me."

George E. Osborn is the author of Power Play / Supplied

Another case that stood out for Osborn was Russian military group Wagner, which has since been dismantled, rebranded and absorbed into the Russian state structure, using gaming streams to promote messages of pro-Russia and anti-Western in Africa.

"There's a streamer called Grisha Putin who worked with Wagner to use gaming streams as a way of essentially promoting their messages in Africa - but it has a double effect.

"Yes, he reaches people within gaming communities, but also the Western media can't resist writing and talking about it like we are now.

"What that means is those narratives they're promoting organically get into the wider conversation. I think this is really interesting to look at how media messaging multiplies across digital channels and about how games can be the centre of that."

And the final one is what Osborn describes as the "darkest" example of the three.

He said: "There have been strange moral panics around video games, such as being focused on video games causing you to be violent. They don't. Another was 'video games are addictive in the context of a mental health condition'. They're not, we can see this all from clear evidence.

"Video games do not cause people to be violent but nihilistic violent individuals who do not have a coherent ideology in terms of something like violent extremism are increasingly wrapping things like mass casualty attacks, mass shootings, things like the assassination of Charlie Kirk in video game references to try and essentially appeal to a similarly minded group of young men who are online in extreme spaces and who need a sense of identity.

"In Power Play, I call that the gamification of terror because what's happening within those spaces is that aesthetics of video games are being adopted to essentially provide some sort of unifying force among a group of essentially unhappy, very misogynistic, increasingly violent young men to create what is a kind of football hooliganism for the modern age.

"And the way you solve that is not by saying all video games are bad or having a ban on violent video games.

"You should actually be asking as a society 'what did we do to break things up like football hooliganism and to what extent are we doing those things within global video game communities'."

Power Play is out now in hardback.

Elsewhere from Indy100:

• GTA 6 release date delay 'very disappointing' but 'few surprised' says gaming expert
• Video games expert shares his five top games of all time – do you agree?

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