Exploring Extreme Language in Gaming Communities

There is ongoing speculation that extremism might be prevalent in video game communities, or that these communities are especially vulnerable to extremism. In a previous article for GNET, we outlined the current state of the literature on extremism and video games. While there is disagreement among many, there is an overarching concern that video game communities have a latent hostility to feminism and minorities, and this makes them vulnerable to reactionary and far-right ideologies. This concern is reflected by counter-terrorism police in the United Kingdom, and the United Nations Office of Counter-Terrorism. However, the evidence base for this is small, and the diversity of gaming communities draws into question whether we can consider gaming communities as a whole to be vulnerable. To contribute to this conversation, this Insight uses a dataset of 300,000 comments from three video game forums (subreddits) on Reddit to understand how prevalent extreme language is in these communities.