How extremists use gaming culture to manipulate young people into violence

The internet has made it easier for people to connect with one another to foster common interests or share pastimes like video games without necessarily sharing the same physical space.

Unlike physical sports, some online games, which allow users to flex their creative muscles, also have a cultural presence that makes them pervasive even when the game is off — such as through enthusiast websites, chat and socialization apps, or message boards.

It is in this vein that researchers studying violent extremism are examining popular games and game-related apps as a way to track how acts of violence can be fostered online.

Games as creative spaces for indoctrination

Some online games have creative modes where users can create virtual worlds they can populate with people they deem to be enemies.

For games like Roblox and Minecraft, it’s this creative mode that doubles as the means to build something that can also allow users to recreate violent attacks that have already occurred, such as shootings or terror attacks.

As the Anti-Defamation League cited in April 2025, there are people who make money and gain notoriety by building maps for Roblox or other games that mimic the conditions of tragic mass shootings such as the Columbine mass shooting of 1999.

Roblox is commonly cited as a potential vector for spreading extremism because of its large userbase of mostly teen or underaged users.

It is a playground not just for actual play, but also for bad actors to breed new extremists just by making them feel welcome into a social group.

Must Read

‘I will burn down my school’: Extremist indoctrination via Roblox manifests in PH – report

While the Roblox game and its game development platform have about 380 million monthly active users worldwide, according to the development company’s annual reports as indexed on Backlinko, some 56% of its userbase is below the age of 16. Meanwhile, a little over 20% are younger than 9 years old, while only 19% of users are above the age of 25.

The Global Network on Extremism & Technology said in a report in October 2025 that while Roblox is making efforts to curb extremism on its platforms, it does not shield the young from exposure to identity-based hatred or to extremist ideas on it.

While the presence of such things doesn’t always translate into a young gamer becoming a radical terrorist-in-the-making, it can provide a starting point by which some users can be impacted negatively, such as by turning a video game into the starting point for being indoctrinated into becoming violent.

Nihilistic violence as a parallel threat

There’s a parallel threat that exists alongside that of ideological extremism, and it’s termed by GNET researchers as the nihilistic violence subculture.

A February 2026 GNET report outlined this subculture as being distinct from ideological extremism. The subculture wants to promote violence and uses acts of violence “to fulfill a fundamentally misanthropic end or to gain status within a community.”

By this, GNET said the subculture advocated for committing heinous acts “for their own sake,” and not to fulfill some objective based on personal ideology or sense of morality. Instead, it is rooted in the idea of hating the world and of doing evil things, or of wanting to destroy without discrimination.

While extremist networks want to indoctrinate people to follow an ideology, this subculture, which also uses games as creative spaces and some game-adjacent applications to communicate, has a community that is gated and where access to more sensitive topics and discussions requires demonstrations of loyalty — usually by engaging in heinous violence or cruelty.

If one person gets in trouble for engaging in heinous acts, the community itself has backup methods by which they can continue communicating, whether it be a separate app or service.

Aside from committing mass violence, this subculture also has a variety of ways in which this loyalty can be manifested, such as by engaging in other types of violence like animal cruelty or self-harm, collecting or spreading terrorist materials, or sexual offenses like spreading child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) or committing “sextortion,” among other acts.

TAXONOMY OF HARMS. A taxonomy of harms associated with subcultures of nihilistic violence. Adapted from Global Network on Extremism & Technology report.

What can be done?

Gaming and social media platforms tend to have instituted policies and regulations to address extremism or terror- and hate-based groups.

These policies, however, do not directly address nihilistic violence as the subculture itself is a loose structure, and because it is anchored on a broad view of misanthropy rather than on an ideology, and also because it doesn’t target any one group in particular.

As a result, while games and social media platforms and services can moderate to lessen the harms and risks of extremism, it’ll take a different approach to handling a subculture of nihilistic violence, which can also help in curbing extremist actors.

GNET’s research said it would be better if there were initiatives that would help people — and not just the young — identify when they’re being groomed or manipulated, so they can become more knowledgeable and develop what researchers called “resilience to a range of ideological and non-ideological threats.”

The researchers also advocated learning from actions done to counter violent extremism and tailoring the response to further disrupt nihilistic or misanthropic subculture. This means getting down to the level of the audience of these bad actors and engaging with them by outmaneuvering the bad actors.

The researchers said, “Such approaches might involve out‑competing, out‑mocking, or out‑memeing nihilistic communities.”

Further, it was recommended that platforms work together rather than against each other to consistently update users of the risks posed by bad actors, while moderators — both community volunteers and paid moderators on various social media and communications platforms — work to police their communities and prevent both types of bad actors from festering inside their networks.

It takes a (global) village

There is no perfect platform or game that will prevent bad actors from making a mockery of the rules and guidelines meant to keep everyone safe and enjoying games.

In some cases, it’s the social media platforms incentivizing emotional responses that may even get influencers riled up and the ball rolling on indoctrinating kids into nihilism or hatred, but it’s not the only way technology like games and social media can be used.

It’ll take an entire global community — from parents actively engaging with their kids and being present in their lives, to law enforcement doing the dirty job of finding and stopping extremists and exposing violent subcultures, to social media managers and game community heads performing the thankless task of gatekeeping communities to keep them safe from predatory chatters — to help make games and gaming culture a safe space for the young to play in. – Rappler.com