ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Media Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1586566
This article is part of the Research TopicThe Dark and the Light Side of Gaming (Volume II)View all 7 articles
Extremist Identity Creation Through Performative Infighting on Steam
Provisionally accepted
- 1University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, United States
- 2University of Cambridge, Cambridge, England, United Kingdom
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The video game marketplace Steam has long hosted a lively social network for the purpose of connecting game players and game developers. Over the past five years, however, neo-fascist and neo-Nazi communities have begun using Steam's community features to build large-scale socialization and identity creation networks. These networks, while insular, involve large numbers of Steam groups and users, who share hateful and violent content with one another. In addition, these same users frequently spread extreme messages on more public-facing content, including in game reviews and game forums. Using open-source data and scaled social network analysis, we show that the far-right ecosystem on Steam possesses characteristics of collective radicalization and mobilization. This poses both an immediate danger to gamers and game developers who rely on Steam and also a longer-term risk to social safety.
Keywords: video games (psychology), extremism, Social Network Analsysis, far-right, Social Media
Received: 03 Mar 2025; Accepted: 08 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Newhouse and Kowert. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Alex Bradley Newhouse, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, United States
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.