ON Aug 28, police station Banr in Swat came under a militant attack in which one policeman lost his life and two others were wounded. Investigations revealed that a tech-savvy group of young militants had used an online video game ‘Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds’, popularly known as PUBG, for this attack. The chat room of this gaming platform was adopted to dodge electronic surveillance and communicate with accomplices both in Pakistan and Afghanistan. In January 2022, militants had carried out a blast in Anarkali, Lahore, killing three persons and injuring dozens. One of the militants, involved in the blast, disclosed during investigations the use of PUBG for recruitment and coordination.

Today, more than three billion people play video games around the world and the global gaming industry is annually generating $200bn in revenues. At the same time, the gamification of violence, where extremists use gaming to encourage violence in non-gaming contexts, is becoming more prevalent in digital playgrounds. For extremist actors, gamification is a gateway for recruitment, propaganda, radicalisation, fundraising and nexus formation. This weaponisation of gaming spaces has become an important concern for multiple reasons.

Firstly, due to a huge global audience, especially children, video games provide an excellent hunting arena for indoctrination. For example, the gaming platform Roblox alone hosts daily more than 26 million children under 13 years. Secondly, the ecosystem of gaming platforms offers complete anonymity, encryption and privacy. Thirdly, these platforms are operating below the surveillance radar of law-enforcement agencies as compared to conventional communication systems.

Fourthly, criminals and extremists use coded language to evade algorithms of technologies used for moderation. Fifthly, live-streaming used for instant broadcast to a wider audience is difficult to detect and discontinue. Sixthly, extremists have developed electronic marketplaces for generating funds. Finally, current online gaming is becoming a forerunner of 3D fully immersive futuristic ‘metaverse’ which will be an attractive virtual battlefield for extremists.

Gaming spaces are amenable to misuse by malign actors.

Popular video gaming platforms like Steam, DLive, Twitch and Discord have historically remained a strong forte of white supremacists. Here, they share right-wing propaganda like, ‘Your skin is your uniform in this battle for the survival’. Features of gaming platforms are exploited in mass shootings too. Anders Breivik, the Norwegian mass shooter who killed more than 77 people in 2011, used World of Warcraftand Call of Duty for training purposes. In 2019, an Australian gym trainer killed more than 50 people in a crowded mosque of Christchurch, New Zealand. He used the video game Fortnite for training and got inspired by the video game Spyro.

In 2018, the British white supremacist David Parnham shared a gamified online reward system for violent acts against Muslims. For example, 25 points were to be awarded for pulling the head-scarf off a Muslim woman; 50 points for throwing acid and 1,000 points for burning a mosque. These online video games are exploited by other militant groups. In 2014, IS released custom-made military simulators (MILSIMs) known as Arma 3 so that gamers could play as virtual insurgents and shoot Westerners. It also introduced the Huroofapp used for teaching alphabets with militaristic vocabulary and illustrations of guns, bullets and rockets.

Although radicalisation is creeping into the digital playgrou­nds, counter-measu­r­­es are still in their in­­fancy due to the huge volume of players in­­volved and under-re­sourced law-enforcement agencies. The lat­­ter deficit is both financial and technological. Not surprisingly, gaming spaces are under-governed. The way forward includes introducing more filters and moderation of gaming spaces to detect prohibited content and implement enforcement measures. Advanced AI technologies need to intercept violent inappropriate live-streaming. Capacity building of law enforcement in cyber-awareness training is warranted to identify malicious actors and detox the cyber-arena from extremist content. Furthermore, empirical studies are needed to understand the nature and magnitude of extremism in gaming sites.

Video-gaming platforms traditionally of­­­­­­­­­fer avenues for two ‘E’s: Entertainment and Education. However, the third ‘E’ of Extremism is encroaching into the digital gaming sphere. This requires more intellectual investment and financial resources to demystify and detoxify this domain. No­netheless, securitising the gaming spaces in not advisable. Rather necessary steps are required to make these less amenable to manipulation by malicious actors.

The writer is a security analyst and academic.

Published in Dawn, November 4th, 2024