Brendan Downey

#50190372

DMS 448

Week 12

This week in class, our topic of discussion shifted to focus on a darker area of gaming culture: the alt-right, white supremacist section of the internet. Although I did not particularly enjoy discussion this week, I learned a lot and my perspective was changed. In my opinion, anything “supremecy” related is evil and should not be given attention. Supremecy is defined as being a superior race of people, being better than another human being or deserving more than another human. It is inherently evil and giving attention to these groups of people does nothing but encourage them. Supremecy groups thrive on hate and fighting, so I do not understand why you would do anything but ignore them. Despite this, discussion this week taught me a lot about the impact these groups have on other online communities. Perhaps due to the fact that you cannot avoid them, hate groups online and in video games have been prevalent since chat rooms were invented. As a child, I can recall Call of Duty chat rooms slandered with the N and F words. At the time, it was like background noise and should never have been exposed to children.

In TreaAndrea M. Russworm’s “A Call to Action for Video Game Studies in an Age of Reanimated White Supremecy,” the author discusses how video games have become a fertile ground for nationalist recruitment. In other words, when a recruiter hears a young gamer swearing and cursing, they hear a potential recruit for their organization. This is something I never considered before the class reading and scares me since. I fear for a future in which my children will be recruited by hate groups online, without ever leaving the bedroom. Because they are relatively new and ever changing, the future of chat rooms is unknown.

As a class this week, we streamed Civilization VI. Civilization VI, Sid Meier’s sixth in a long line of empire building games, was released in 2016 for all systems and has been popular since. Civilization is a unique franchise in that empires can be built, destroyed and conquered. In these games, you feel like a GOD controlling the world. Personally, Civilization may be my favorite video game franchise.