Alt-right’s radicalisation of youth and adults has moved beyond online chat forums and grassroots demonstrations to video games’ virtual reality, particularly in the western world, through avenues such as Roblox. If remained uncontained, these threats can blur the lines between radicalisation and terrorism over time. However, despite this phenomenon’s widespread chokehold, effective government-enforced sanctions and policies are predominantly absent from the public domain. This is so because efforts to dismantle a skewed sense of solidarity and kinship nurtured between gamers have still not been put into play by counter-terrorism experts and officials. (…) For example, reports of a video game titled Ethnic Cleansing centred around a neo-Nazi skinhead hunting down and shooting targets belonging to minority communities – Jews, Mexicans, and Africans – in an apparent race war emerged. National Alliance, a neo-Nazi organisation created the game in 2002. The virulent rhetoric promoted by its music division’s advertisement barely scrapes the layer of hatred and violent indoctrination that teenagers, particularly Americans, became subjected to over the years – “In this game, the Race War has already begun. Your character, Will, runs through a ghetto blasting away at various blacks and spics to attempt to gain entrance to the subway system … where the jews [sic] have hidden to avoid the carnage. Then you get to blow away jews as they scream ‘Oy Vey!’ on your way to the command center.” (…) In November 2017, Angry Goy II, a video game released by a white supremacist, Christopher Cantwell, incorporated a mission where users could break inside LGBTQ+ Agenda HQ, a gay club, and massacre everyone present. Unsurprisingly, the virulent narrative spanning these video games is directed against women, Jews, and Muslims. These are the three categories of individuals whom the alt-right have relegated to positions of second-class citizens, only worthy of serving the “superior” race through absolute submission and erosion of their individualistic identities. Notably, most of those arrested belong to families part of mainstream society. Moreover, forums such as Roblox and Minecraft have provided means for like-minded radicalised individuals to connect with fellow gamers and embrace the solidarity offered to lone-wolves, via interactive Nazi concentration camps-based games. The brotherhood cultivated by alt-right leaders under these circumstances provides disgruntled and isolated individuals avenues for expressing their shared grievances against a particular community or perhaps the state establishment perceived to be unjustly supporting the non-members by taking on racially-driven characters and through chat rooms. Although having been taken down a few years ago, specific profiles on Roblox flagged by a concerned mother were proactively engaged in disseminating anti-Semitic and white supremacist propaganda. One of the users had even developed an avatar of Gavin McInnes, the founder of Proud Boys – a misogynist, neo-fascist, and a politically violent American organisation, whose members participated in the Capitol Hill riots.
via modern diplomacy: Video games: The alt-right’s radicalisation toolkit in the West