ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a broad overview of videogames and their player communities with an eye toward those aspects that bear on the patterns of extremist activity we see today. It introduces videogames, their definition and defining elements, the issue of violence, key industry stakeholders in their development, and discusses the centrality of rules and systems to games, on the one hand, and player action, reaction, and interpretation, on the other. It also examines the nature of game communities, including what we know about player demographics, their varying motivations for play, the structural features that game communities have in common, and how extremists exploit them. The chapter then considers games as social platforms, including both online games and online game-adjacent platforms, and compares and contrasts them to other traditional social platforms.
