Power Play interview: George Osborn on young men and video games

But if there’s one place where young American men are likely to congregate, regardless of race or political beliefs, it’s the world of video games. According to a 2017 Pew study, 72 percent of men under 30 say they play video games often or sometimes. The gaming world is a place they feel safe — which means it is full of untapped potential for building community, says video game expert George E. Osborn.

Osborn is the founder of Half-Space Consulting, which advises governments and NGOs on the social impact of video games. In his new book Power Play: Video Games, Politics, and the Battle for Global Influence, Osborn shows that anti-democratic powers and violent actors have been exploiting the video games space for decades.

Most visibly in the US, a large community of gamers rallied together in 2014 to harass prominent female game developers and gaming journalists. They forced multiple women into hiding while claiming that they were fighting for ethics in gaming journalism. The campaign, which became known as Gamergate, made so much noise that it attracted the attention of Steve Bannon, who organized supportive coverage on Breitbart and treated it as a recruiting ground for the racist, misogynistic, and anti-democratic alt-right movement. As Osborn documents in Power Play, the communities that sprang up to organize Gamergate became pipelines to the communities that organized the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017.

“Bannon’s intuitive understanding of the power of toxic gamer communities created the digital-activist base, the tactical playbook and the strategic approach necessary for ‘mainstreaming’ populist far-right ideas within the online media ecosystem,” Osborn writes in Power Play.

Yet Osborn also writes that there is a vast potential for good within gaming communities. He shows that gaming can help people understand pandemics and autocracies and climate change; that it can connect people to one another and make people less lonely.

I wanted to understand what those possibilities meant for the young men who are so invested in video games and are in so much trouble, so I called Osborn up to discuss. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You write in the book that there’s always been a wide audience for video games across demographics. But when people talk about gaming’s traditional audience, they’re mostly talking about young men. How does that happen?

In the 1980s and the 1990s, video games were not sold on the basis of who wants to play. They were sold on the basis of who buys technology. There were two primary audiences: families with kids, and young men buying tech.

Then a couple of things all happen at the same time: The introduction of the smartphone in about 2007; the emergence of digital storefronts like Steam and The App Store; the financial crash. Video games companies start to think, “We have done very well in a small number of markets. What happens if we start reaching a wider base?”

The number of people around the world playing video games goes from hundreds of millions to about the 3.6 billion that we see today. When you look at the gender split of players, roughly speaking, the gender split in the US is now nearly 50/50, and the average age of a player is much closer to late 30s, early 40s. It creates this space where that traditional audience of younger men start to feel left behind, like the industry is moving away from them.

What’s really interesting, when you look at this in the context of the research that I’ve done, is that it creates a grievance culture amongst some of those younger men. That ultimately opens up the opportunity for someone to begin taking advantage of it.

In the book, you talk about how there are a few different things that make gamers an attractive group for political actors to try to target. One of them was this idea that gamers are highly likely to act on their beliefs. What does that mean in this context?

The nature of play — I think it was actually the writer Naomi Alderman who talked about this — is that it encourages agency. If you compare it to other creative mediums, even the most linear of video games, a player [moves] through it in their own way. They don’t have exactly the same experience as everybody else.

It encourages people to really believe in themselves as participants in the medium. They are not solely consumers of the culture, and therefore they feel that they have a greater say over what happens.

Then it [also] creates a strong community tie between the people who are involved in play. The sheer breadth of choices available to you brings the community together to talk about how to play, and ultimately the way it makes them feel. [That’s] part of the reason why these information spaces are so powerful.

Along those lines, you document Steve Bannon getting interested in Gamergate and leveraging that phenomenon to help create the alt-right of the 2010s. A lot of the political groups you discuss who try to intervene with gamers use top-down propaganda, but it seems like Bannon’s really interested in them as a specific community, right? He’s not making didactic games about why they should support Trump. He’s talking about how they’re heroes fighting for ethics in gaming journalism. What’s the effect of that choice?

It creates a sense of power within those communities they may not have otherwise felt. If you compare it to the last US election, Kamala Harris’s campaign created an officially branded Fortnite experience. It promised players a chance to engage with the campaign’s key pillars. Which is exactly the kind of top-down, non-inclusive communication where you are going into someone else’s arena and putting something in there that would never emerge from that space organically.

Obviously the message doesn’t work. It ends up reeking of elitism.

I think what Bannon realized is this group had its own things that it felt were important. Particularly within Gamergate — I think that they were talking about things that were toxic, lies, untrue. But it coalesced to create an identity around that group. Bannon realized that ultimately, if you promoted it upwards, then they would feel part of this wider community.

A lot of the most visible political activity associated with gamers in the US has been pretty dark and even quite violent. I’m thinking of not just Gamergate, but the Charlottesville riots and the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Is it possible to harness the energy of this community toward more constructive ends?

I just came back from Games for Change in New York. It’s a big festival in the US every year. There’s satellite events around the world. It looks at the way that these dynamics can be used for various social goods, provided that you are actually leaning into them.

The UN’s Playing for the Planet Alliance reached hundreds of millions of people by asking game makers to create content on their behalf [about climate change]. It wasn’t a case of saying, “We need you to create games that do this specific thing.” It was much more, “Here is a theme. Create something that works for your community.”

When more elite institutions chose to engage with games communities on their terms, they tended to achieve much bigger reach, at a much lower cost, and with much more positive outcomes than any of the hostile uses that I talk about in the book. And frankly, because these communities have often felt pushed to the side, they also feel particularly validated when someone comes into their space and says, “Actually, we do recognize your power. We would love to work with you to make the most of it.”

How do you know that the effects are so much bigger than something like Gamergate? Are there numbers you can cite?

One of the best examples was in 2022, when Epic Games did fundraisers for the Red Cross through things like Fortnite. Their game store raised more money for the charity and its work in places like Ukraine than were donated to it by the countries of France or Italy.

You’re talking about this potentially massive effect, but thus far it’s tended to be sporadic. When you compare it with a lot of the examples that I look at in the book, especially Saudi Arabia’s attempt to use video games within its soft power strategy, there’s clearly much more strategic thinking [from the Saudis] about the way to influence these communities.

That’s one of the missing pieces of the puzzle in a lot of democracies. We have the ingredients for this to work really effectively, but at the moment it feels like we’ve not got anyone cooking.

I came away from this book with this sense that for a lot of young men, video game communities are a precious space where they feel seen in a way that they don’t in a lot of the rest of society right now. What makes this world so special to these men?

Video games have always been social. With young men in particular, because the medium has been so closely attuned to them, [many of them] are going to find their groups and communities within these worlds.

This is me speaking more from British experience, of thinking what it’s like to be a man growing up in the UK. We’ve seen significant cutbacks in local investment into things like community groups, clubs, youth spaces. Online communities and online game communities have helped replace a lot of things taken out of civil society.

The loss of investment in third spaces, especially for teens, is definitely something we’re seeing in the US as well.

You write about campaigning to combat the loneliness epidemic in the UK through gaming outreach. How did that initiative come together?

I was contacted by the government around April 2020, during the pandemic. I was working at the time as the head of campaigns and communications at Ukie, the video games trade association.

Quite early into my job, I realized all of the different games companies that formed Ukie had very different cultures. You couldn’t tell them what to do, because frankly, it wouldn’t work.

So I went in and said, “Okay, we’ve got an ask. We want you to encourage your communities to find one hour to sit down in their favorite online game with a friend, family member, or co-worker, and ask them how they’re doing.”

Different companies took part in the campaign. But they went out to their communities with different messages. Some of them were going out with streams from their community managers. Some of them were just replicating the messaging that we had. Some of them were doing more dedicated messages to players via games.

It’s not particularly scientific, so take it with a pinch of salt. But afterwards, the polling firm Ipsos MORI found that across Europe, players in the UK were roughly 10 percentage points more likely to say that video games made them feel less lonely than other parts of the continent.

Looking back on that, I can see that a lot of the ideas I’ve had, about how games can be an information ecosystem and about how you effectively communicate to it, can be found in that campaign.

It’s about decentralizing the message. It’s allowing people to take it and run with it. That’s when it becomes really effective.