"They're coming for our games" : A study of far-right social mobilization in the gaming community

Sammanfattning: The aim of this is thesis is to study and understand the development within the gaming community in the latter half of 2014, where a harassment campaign against the female developer Zoe Quinn led to an industry-spanning controversy that divided large sections of the gaming community, and how this fed into a far-right radicalization of certain groups of young male gamers. This thesis focuses on the idea that the controversy in question helped mobilize these games into an online social movement that aimed to “take back our games” from the perceived outside threats of feminism and political correctness, and how they through that process became an easy target for assimilation within large far-right and white supremacist movements. To prove this, data have been collected from two points: from the comment section on YouTube of the pre-controversy 2013 trailer of the video game Wolfenstein: The New Order, and from the YouTube comment section of the post-controversy 2017 trailer of the sequel, Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus. These points have been chosen to interpret the difference in reaction between the two games, and whether or not the controversy had a mobilization and radicalizing influence. To study social movements, Sidney G. Tarrow’s definition of what a social movement is and contentious collective action will be the main theoretical thread of the thesis, but it will be supplemented with theories from W. Lance Bennet and Alexandra Segerberg’s study of online collective action, Cass R. Sunstein’s work on in-group radicalization, along with further theories.