| Can video games create violent extremists? As Cecilia D'Anastasio writes this week on Backchannel, it's complicated. To tease out the nuances, she followed a small group of young men who started dabbling in the online role-playing game Roblox more than a decade ago. One, who goes by the nom-de-game Ferguson, was a middle schooler looking for acceptance and community. Another, Malcolm, was a would-be authoritarian who dominated his fellow gamers and, eventually, organized them into a cadre of quasi-fascist Roman legionnaires. (They started out pretending to be Nazis before transitioning to the Roman motif.) But does all this lead to violent alt-right activity in the real world? Maybe. "These things do seem to make a cocktail that would be prime for people to recruit to extreme causes," says Rachel Kowert, the director of research at Take This, a nonprofit that supports the mental health of game developers and players. "But whether it does or not is a totally different question. Because nobody knows." Today's researchers—like those of past generations who worried about comic books, violent films, and video games like Grand Theft Auto—don't agree about the long term effects on players. Ferguson, for one, has renounced his association with fascist role play and these days teaches young people how to infiltrate extremist online groups, especially on Roblox. They report the groups and take them over. He leads a group called The Cult, which stresses kindness. At the moment, he's living on a farm and growing arugula. Mark Robinson | Features Editor, WIRED |
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