All the things that make video games great, like immersion, connectivity and identity-building, also make them prime real estate for bad actors.
The United Nations is taking this challenge head-on in an attempt to fight terrorist and violent extremist organizations, like ISIS and Boko Haram, that have for years used games to spread propaganda, recruit members and form communities. In collaboration with member governments in Japan and Australia, the games industry and Northeastern University, the U.N.-backed effort is looking to fight fire with fire, using video games to combat violent extremism.
“They leverage these elements, the fundamental trust, the connection, but we were thinking the exact same elements can be used by us,” said Odhran McCarthy, New York liaison for the U.N. Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute, or UNICRI.
The effort, which UNICRI and the U.N. Office of Counter-Terrorism launched in 2022, recently resulted in the publication of a landmark report focused on the convergence of gaming and extremism in Africa. Moving forward, it hopes to partner with local game developers to create games that help communities develop a resistance to insurgent bad actors.
Many modern games are more like virtual social spaces than experiences with win conditions. The rise of games as platforms, most notably with “Roblox,” “Minecraft” and “Fortnite,” has seen the industry shift toward evolving virtual experiences that developers and gamers spend years with.
“When we think about the gaming space at this point, it is another social space and everything that is present in any social space is present here,” said Cansu Canca, director of Northeastern’s Responsible AI Practice and an academic partner in the U.N. initiative.
These games, where players spend dozens or even hundreds of hours, have only made their capacity for connection and emotional engagement more intense. It’s little wonder games have become incredible recruitment, outreach and propaganda tools for terrorist organizations and violent extremists, said Lucas Almeida, who received his Ph.D. from Northeastern’s Network Science Institute and has since become a threat intelligence scientist involved in the U.N. initiative.
“You live and die 100 times in one hour,” Almeida said. “You go through all of that in a very short time span, and our brains have a tough time separating fiction from reality often. So, if you repeat something a lot, it triggers the pleasure centers and all of that dopamine of a real achievement [goes] into that game. The possibility of reinforcing those connections is what attracted groups.”
As early as 2014, the Da’esh, a jihadist militant group based in Iraq and Syria and commonly known as Islamic State, was creating modified content in “Grand Theft Auto V.” These “mods” allowed players to re-enact terrorist attacks and, by extension, fostered communities around such acts. According to Almeida, similar tactics have been used by far-right extremists around events like the 1999 school mass shooting in Columbine, Colorado.
One of the threats highlighted in the Africa report is the prevalence of web and gaming cafes across the continent. Members of Boko Haram, a Nigerian-based jihadist militant organization, will go to these cafes, where they can hang out with young people and gradually gain their trust by playing games with them. After enough trust has been built, they try to recruit young people into their organization.
The U.N. is focusing its efforts on Africa and Southeast Asia, burgeoning gaming markets and hotbeds for extremist activity, McCarthy noted. These are also areas of the world that have been largely ignored by researchers and the games industry in favor of North America, Europe and Japan.
Understanding the landscape of gaming and extremism in these regions is a starting point, which is where regional reports play a role. But actually combating malicious actors in gaming requires an all-hands-on-deck approach.
Part of the solution must come from the design choices made by game developers themselves, Canca said. That includes what kind of behavior is tolerated, allowed or promoted within the game and its community. Online competitive games require coordination and team building. But if a game encourages loud, aggressive and dominant team leadership or communication, those elements take on a different meaning, she noted.
“If that’s the design of the game, then I don’t think we should be surprised when some people abuse precisely such social dynamics for inserting political opinions, violent behavior, extremist propaganda,” Canca.
But the best strategy, McCarthy said, is to use the strengths of gaming against bad actors.
In addition to releasing a report focused on Southeast Asia, the next phase of the initiative involves building games that are designed to prevent violent extremism. The U.N. will put out a call for pitches from local developers in Southeast Asia for games that focus on telling “local stories” that resonate with communities and gamers in the area, McCarthy explained. The U.N. will then play matchmaker, getting these developers in front of major game publishers like Sony and Microsoft to pitch their ideas and get industry support.
According to McCarthy, several U.N. member states have already expressed interest in deploying these games in their countries.
“[These organizations] are telling the harmful narrative. How can we tell the positive narrative?” McCarthy said. “How can we leverage the trust that [gamers] would place in us to build games that reinforce the positive messages that we want, this resilience to violent extremism?”