Social work will soon no longer only be carried out in urban hot spots, but also on the Internet - wherever there are gamer groups. According to social scientist Mick Prinz, five “digital street workers” are to be on the go in future on gaming platforms such as Steam.
Prinz is head of the “Good Gaming - Well Played Democracy” project at the anti-racist Amadeu Antonio Foundation in Berlin, which will soon be entering the practical phase. “The street workers should be the contact persons for people who feel harassed or do not know how to react when they are confronted with hate speech,” says Prinz.
Recently, video games have had bad press because it seemed like there was a connection between an affinity for games and right-wing extremist attitudes. This was suggested by the sexist “Gamergate” campaign, in which women in the video game industry were attacked. On Steam, one also often comes across profiles named after Nazi war criminals. And finally, the assassins from Christchurch and Halle also streamed the attacks they carried out via the Twitch platform and used codes from the gaming scene in their letters of confession.
Fight against "do-gooders"
Nevertheless, Prinz does not believe that right-wing worldviews are particularly widespread there - if only because video games have long ceased to be the obscure hobby of a “scene”, but rather appeal to a cross section of society. "However, it can be observed that hate speech in game chats or on platforms is not as often countered as on Twitter or Facebook," says the social scientist.
Right-wing extremists try to take advantage of this. The latest example: A jump-'n'-run game was recently announced in the Steam Shop in which the player, as an activist of the right-wing extremist “Identitarian Movement”, has to fight her way through a world ruled by Jews, homosexuals and “do-gooders”. Behind the game is the association “One percent for our country”, in which the right-wing extremist publisher Götz Kubitschek, the neo-Nazi journalist Jürgen Elsässer and prominent “identities” are involved.
Pressure on the platforms
In the meantime, the game has been published on the right-hand side, but deleted from Steam - why exactly is unclear, since there is no official notification from the notoriously opaque platform. “In theory, it would even be conceivable that the developers took it down themselves in order to be able to portray themselves as a victim,” says Benjamin Strobel. The psychologist and game researcher is one of the co-founders of the initiative "Keinen Pixel den Faschisten!" and had called with others to report the game on Steam in order to persuade the platform to delete it - knowing full well that the right wing was primarily concerned with attracting attention.
Strobel still records the disappearance of the game as a success for the anti-fascist resistance in gaming. The «Keinen Pixel!» Network has existed since April and aims to provide information and campaign work, among other things; more than eighty individuals, initiatives and websites are involved. The social scientist Prinz also believes that “deplatforming”, i.e. the attempt to displace right-wing extremists from social networks, is an effective strategy: the profiles of the “Identitarians” leadership were deleted from Twitter and Youtube this summer. Since then, they have practically disappeared from the scene.
Nevertheless, more pressure must be put on the gaming platforms, says Strobel: “It is certainly not just that video games would radicalize people. However, right-wing ideologies can spread unhindered in large gaming communities in particular: You meet a lot of people there and the forums are hardly moderated. " With Steam, there are just 26 moderators for every 90 million active users per month, half of whom work on a voluntary basis. This is exactly why you have to create your own networks, says Strobel: “In football, people also get involved in anti-fascist curves. This has never before existed in gaming. "
