A summary of the seminar that took place on 21 OCTOBER 2024.
Vulnerabilities of Online Gaming Ecosystems to Extremist Exploitation
Date: 21 October 2024
Time: 8:30 PM BST
Presenter: Elizabeth Kilmer
Multiplayer online gaming spaces continue to grow in popularity, with millions of players online at any given time. These online ecosystems are excellent places for players to relax, make new friends, and engage in shared activities. The opportunities for low-stakes socialisation, common gaming interests, and relative anonymity also provide opportunities for community-building and recruitment for extremist actors. Further, a history of poor moderation, as well as components of “toxic gaming culture” create embedded cultures of harassment, misogyny, and racism in many gaming spaces that allow extremist actors to more easily go undetected. To effectively engage in gaming spaces and collaborate with the games industry, CVE practitioners and researchers need to understand online gaming spaces from both logistical and cultural perspectives.
This talk will outline key components of online gaming ecosystems, providing information about multiplayer games, gaming-adjacent platforms, and extremist exploitation of these systems necessary for effective CVE efforts in online gaming spaces.
Resources
You can download the PDF summary of the seminar on this page.
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