Brenton Tarrant’s live streaming of the Christchurch attack in 2019 was noted as mirroring the style of a first-person shooter game. The Christchurch attack reinvigorated researchers’ interest in the intersections between video gaming and violent extremism. The Halle synagogue and El Paso shootings, together with the Buffalo supermarket shooting in 2022, appear to have further cemented this focus. In particular, new thinking has centred on how extreme far-right radicalisation intersects with gaming aesthetics and communication approaches, including how gaming influencers work to attract followers to their beliefs.
This new-found interest, however, seems to have overshadowed some of the earlier research into the exploitation of gaming by jihadist actors conducted over twenty years ago beginning with an interest in jihadist-specific gaming research in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. For example, the United States Government 9/11 Commission pointed out how flight simulators and video games were used to increase familiarity with aeroplane models and functions, as well as highlighting security gaps through in-game dynamics. Yet, most of that research corpus is outdated as it focused solely on games themselves and not gamification, recent gaming-adjacent platforms, or gaming aesthetics and gamer types.
Read more at the Global Network on Extremism & Technology
