Video games have captured the spotlight for decades, sparking debates about their impact on players since the early 1990s. Played by over 3 billion people worldwide, this report acknowledges video games' political and ideological dimensions and their potential for being used for strategic communication and propaganda purposes. It attempts to better understand how influence takes place through gaming platforms and identifies in excess of 40 influence techniques that have successfully targeted the gaming domain and that could, by extension, be used by threat actors to achieve objectives related to malign influence and foreign interference.
The report is divided into four chapters. The first chapter provides an executive summary, outlining how threat actors may exploit the gaming domain to achieve their agendas. Chapter 2 explores the history of cognitive influence in video games. It describes the basics of the video games industry and offers an overview of research about influence through game design, social functions, social representation, and more. Chapter 3 accounts for existing research on malign influence within the video games sector, covering topics like extremism, terrorism, and hate speech. Chapter 4 offers a brief overview of the main gaming platforms and some of the controversies and policy issues that have shaped their relationship to discussions of malign information influence and interference through gaming.
Given the increasing significance of this area of research, this report provides timely contribution to Sweden's psychological defence both in terms of updated knowledge as well as suggestions for policy-relevant recommendations for further consideration.
The report, developed by the Psychological Defence Research Institute at Lund University as part of the series of reports for the Psychological Deefence Agency, can be retrieved here: https://www.mpf.se/publikationer/#video-game-platforms