Popular culture has been a battleground in the culture wars for more than a decade. The increasingly large sector of videogames and gaming appears to be particularly fertile ground for the far-right to gather and recruit.
Helen argues that games, gaming platforms, and gaming culture must be considered as a complex ecosystem in order to understand how and why they enable radicalisation to white far-right extremism. It explores how ludic, narrative, and cultural and social elements of mainstream Western videogaming create conditions which can facilitate radicalisation to far-right violent extremism. It takes Bioware’s medievalist game franchise Dragon Age as an illustrative example of broader issues. The paper draws on Hafez and Mullins’ (2015) concept of radicalisation as a process of socialization into “an extremist worldview … that deems legitimate the use of violence as a method to effect societal or political change.” It is particularly concerned with radicalisation to cognitive and emotional extremism, taking these as necessary although not inevitable precursors to violent extremist acts, such as the ‘lone actor’ mass-murders perpetrated in Oslo and Christchurch by white men whose manifestoes and weapons were marked by medievalist references.
Bio
Dr Helen Young is a Lecturer in the School of Communication and Creative Arts, Deakin University. After completing a PhD in medieval literature at the University of Sydney she worked in education, communications, and nursing research before returning to that institution for a DECRA Fellowship. Her current research is in critical whiteness studies, popular culture and histories of race. Helen is a Fellow of the Deakin.Motion Lab and a member of the AVERT network. She has recently published in the Journal of LGBT Youth, Continuum, and postmedieval and her latest monograph is Race and Popular Fantasy Literature: Habits of Whiteness (Routledge, 2016).