Examining Radicalisation Through Socialisation in Online Gaming Spaces
This project investigates the community formation that occurs alongside gameplay and considers whether it has the potential to provide a socialising environment that is conducive to radicalisation to violent extremism.
This project is a consortium effort led by RUSI in partnership with other members of the Extremism and Gaming Research Network. It seeks to better understand, through a gender-based analysis (plus other identity markers (GBA+) model, how radicalisation through socialisation processes is happening in gaming and gaming-adjacent spaces. The project assesses whether communities in these spaces are being formed around specific in-group identities or the othering of out-groups, and how this is impacted by the nature of digital transnational and cross-ideological spaces.
Sponsors
This project is supported by Public Safety Canada
Project team
Dr Jessica White
Senior Research Fellow
Terrorism and Conflict
Petra Regeni
Research and Project Officer, RAN Policy Support
RUSI Europe
Claudia Wallner
Research Fellow
Dr Simon Copeland
Research Fellow
Terrorism and Conflict
Galen Lamphere-Englund
Associate Fellow
External partners
Love Frankie
Dr Rachel Kowert - Take This
Dr Alex Newhouse - Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism, Middlebury College
Dr Ashton Kingdon - University of Southampton)
Dr Linda Schlegal - Modus)
Aims and objectives
The project seeks to provide accessible research analysis, coupled with pragmatic policy recommendations, to contribute to the knowledge base and to increase effectiveness of preventing and countering violent extremism efforts in and through online gaming and gaming-adjacent spaces.
The project team analyses a data set gathered across multiple gaming and gaming-adjacent platforms to investigate if and how the community formation occurring alongside gameplay has the potential to provide a socialising environment conducive to radicalisation to violent extremism. This exploration is conducted using a GBA+ model, with an aim to include analysis of gender and other equity concerns where possible. Ultimately, this project seeks to provide a meta-analysis of multiple popular games, such as Roblox, Minecraft, Fortnite, and Call of Duty, as well as gaming-adjacent platforms such as Discord, Twitch, Reddit, and Steam, to identify whether there is potential for harmful socialisation processes in these spaces and how these are formulated through cultural and communicative understanding.