Understanding Attitudes to Extremism in Gaming Communities

In our previous GNET Insight we looked at how quantitative measures can help us understand the prevalence of extreme language in videogaming forums, using a dataset of Reddit.com posts from videogaming subreddits. Contrary to current speculation, we found that extreme language is not something which haunts mainstream gaming spaces. However, some gaming spaces did contain a high count of extreme language. These spaces were unique compared to other gaming spaces. The subreddit /r/KotakuInAction, for instance, contains a high amount of extreme language and is uniquely extreme when compared to the more mainstream subreddit /r/VideoGames and the subreddit for the videogame Hearts of Iron IV, /r/HOI4