In 2020 the New Bedford Whaling Museum in Massachusetts picked up a one-star review that read "worst aquarium ever." It is a museum about the history of whaling, and it keeps no live whales. Six years later, the museum has printed the line on hoodies, T-shirts, crew necks, and bags, according to Boston 25 News. — Read the rest
On May 31, 1921, an armed white mob poured into Tulsa, Oklahoma’s majority African-American Greenwood district and began setting it ablaze. Families were driven out of their homes at gunpoint as their neighbors looted their belongings and burned their property to the ground. The lucky ones escaped the city with their lives, the less fortunate were rounded up and detained by law enforcement, and scores of men, women, and children were simply gunned down in the street.
Within the space of 48 hours Greenwood, a beacon of prosperity previously nicknamed the Black Wall Street, was wiped from the face of the earth. More than 10,000 black families were left homeless, and the death toll, tallied at 36 in 1921, is now estimated to be upwards of 300.
In all likelihood, most people who tune in to Sunday’s highly anticipated premiere of “Watchmen” (9 p.m. ET, HBO) will have never heard of this bloody, racist massacre that occurred almost a century ago on American soil.
The thought that such a crime could happen at all beggars belief to those of us who cling to the version of the American story that draws the place as heroic and just, where our greatest wrongs are made right. But nearly two weeks ago came the headlines that scientists and forensic anthropologists have begun the process of searching for the mass graves where untold numbers of murdered Tulsans may be buried.
And this is why series creator Damon Lindelof opens his part of the story with a re-enactment of that massacre that includes historically accurate eyewitness details from the thick of the nightmare. The vision of planes swooping down and dropping bombs on the screaming, unarmed citizens below, and the Klan openly hunting them, might appear to be heightened elements tossed in for dramatic effect, just part of the story that differentiates reality from fictionalized alternate history.
Except, according to records, that is actually what occurred. By air and on the ground, American citizens waged war on other American citizens, and made sure the survivors were frightened enough to stop talking about it, thereby keeping this account out of the history books.
The Tulsa massacre is the origin story of Lindelof’s “Watchmen,” an inspired, riveting continuation of the seminal comic book series co-created by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons first published between 1986 and 1987.
In the original series Moore and Gibbons presented an interrogation of our relationship with superheroes and the popular notion of heroism itself with its story of people with purported superhuman abilities emerging between World War II and the 1960s and changing the trajectory of history itself.
In Moore’s and Gibbons’ history, these heroes gave the United States political and military advantage, allowing America to win the war in Vietnam, making it a state in the process, and gain the upper hand during the Cold War.
Within that history, too, are the effects of things that never came to be. Richard Nixon was never forced out of office, and term limits were abolished, allowing him to remain president well into the 1980s. After that, he was replaced by our first celebrity president, Robert Redford. It is against the law for freelance masked vigilantes to operate, and those that remain either work for the government or have gone into retirement.
The looming threat of World War III serves as the backdrop to the A-plot, a story comprised of many smaller tales and plots told from various points of view. But this overarching anxiety pitting the United States against the Soviet Union is annihilated when a gigantic squid reported to be from another dimension drops on Manhattan, immediately killing millions.
Lindelof’s continuation is intimately informed by that game-changing climax, only not in any way that the fly-by comic book consumer might immediately connect. The threat in the “Watchmen” comics mirrors the overriding fear hanging over the Reagan era, which is that of nuclear annihilation. Twenty-seven years later, in the alternate and actual histories of 2019, the all-destructive threat assumes the form of violence driven by white supremacy.
Only in this new “Watchmen,” the cops in Tulsa are the ones wearing masks, yellow face coverings for the uniformed beat cops, and more elaborate, fully immersed get-ups for its detectives. Nominally this protocol allowing the police to remain anonymous was enacted to keep officers safe; only Tulsa’s Chief of Police Judd Crawford (Don Johnson) allows his face to be seen while he is on duty.
In practice, as is quickly evidenced, this inability to be identified allows the cops to operate with near-impunity and intimidate any population it deems a threat – mainly poor whites suspected of making up the ranks of the racist Seventh Kavalry, branded a terrorist organization.
Second in the chain of command is the fearsome cloaked Sister Night, the alter ego of Angela Abar (Regina King), a devoted wife, mother of three, and bakery owner. Angela claims to be retired; a hideaway under her bakery proves otherwise.
And her costume is the sleekest and most intimidating of her band of law-enforcement besides that of her colleague Looking Glass (Tim Blake Nelson), a severe by-the-book soldier whose engulfing reflective mask renders him featureless, and hints at a streak that is equally skeptical and paranoiac.
I suspect each will inspire a few Halloween costumes, maybe and hopefully replacing the popularity of Rorschach’s mask following Zack Snyder’s 2009 theatrical adaptation. In alt-2019, the Rorschach mask is the uniform of the Seventh Cavalry, making it the equivalent of a Klansman’s hood. He’s not around to critique this appropriation of his mantle, but other original characters are, including Doctor Manhattan (referenced but not seen), the former Silk Spectre, who now just goes Laurie Blake (Jean Smart), and Adrian Veidt (Jeremy Irons), now the lord of a manor and still very much an arrogant tinkerer.
What Lindelof has achieved in the six episodes of “Watchmen” provided for review is extraordinary for its execution alone. It is dark, but it’s also exciting; grim, but also invigorating. The action sequences are stunning, as are the performances. King is a mesmerizing presence, as is Louis Gossett, Jr. as the mysterious Will Reeves, a figure who seems designed to irritate Angela at first but, owing to his age, is obviously there to give her clues as to how modern-day Tulsa connects to its past.
For all of its fantastical details, elements of “Watchmen” resemble the real 2019 too closely to be thought of as comfortable escapism. But the viewers that it hooks will be as fascinated, inquisitive, and passionate as its haters are rabid. If that isn’t a hallmark of inventive, provocative television, I’m not sure what is.
As I stated earlier, Lindelof’s “Watchmen” is not a divergence from the original story but an extrapolation – and a brutally intelligent one – of the original comic’s theories about our blind trust in authority, our misplaced reliance and trust in power, and even our concept of identity, shared and individual.
And yes, part of this has to do with the title itself, and Lindelof’s signature creative approach. The audience that knows him via “Lost” may have been flummoxed by “The Leftovers” and its insistent, unsettling interpretation of the mystery surrounding grief and loss.
What’s funny is that “Watchmen” is more straightforward than “The Leftovers” but will nevertheless confuse anyone who tunes in expecting a straightforward superhero tale, or even an obvious sequel to the comic.
“Watchmen” is very true to the original mythology – so much, in fact, that at the very least I’d advise reading a few summaries about the comic’s plot before diving into the show. This is because Lindelof intentionally steeps “Watchmen” in history: its own, and ours, and the version that answers the various “what if” questions that hold the potential to tweak the trajectory of an entire culture.
On the page, “Watchmen” liberally toys with the meaning of story and the power of perspective, but it also forces the question of whether the systems and structures we presume to be good or working for us actually are. The HBO series also does this in obvious ways, but makes answering that question more complicated and foggier as the series progresses.
But where Lindelof’s take finds the strongest and more fertile common ground with Moore’s is in the examination of history, and the difference between what actually happened and the so-called official record.
What “Watchmen” posits throughout its story is that history is only as accurate as the honesty in the edit and of the editor. In large part, history is a means of asking a culture to adopt an identity by remembering the past in a prescribed way. At its most aggressive, it demands we accept a particular point of view to the erasure of others that may blemish that perspective – essentially asking an entire nation of people to live in the heads of a select few.
That the series begins with an actual historic account that’s been intentionally kept out of the books is part of the trick, one that dares the viewer to simultaneously believe and distrust everything we see afterward. That’s very much in keeping with 2019, both the version in “Watchmen” and the one we’re living through. After all, if hate can wipe an entire town off the face of the earth in two days, an event that tens of millions never knew about, then why couldn’t squid rain down from the sky?
“Watchmen” premieres on HBO at 9 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 20.
Perez Hilton always wanted to be famous. This is a statement of fact and not meant to make light of his self-harming incident broadcast via TikTok livestream on Tuesday—quite the opposite. Videos and images of Hilton, 48, covered in blood and cutting himself with a knife should be interpreted as a cry for help, not attention. A person can understand that much without seeing the footage.
But many who watched didn’t have a choice. Although Perez’s livestream proceeded for around 15 minutes before it was shut down, screenshots and clips rocketed across the internet, invading countless social media feeds. Some saw those disturbing images simply by picking up their mobile devices.
Fortunately, Hilton was transported from his Miami home to a hospital to receive medical attention, according to the local sheriff’s office. But such incidents have become increasingly commonplace to the point of numbing us.
While Wednesday morning Google search trends data showed that people were hunting for images of Hilton, I went to YouTube to see what he was up to in 2002. That year, he starred in a short film called “Dating Up,” which is not listed under his IMDb or Wikipedia filmographies.
He describes it in the video summary as “A short film about gay dating. In a world before Grindr!” It’s also a glimpse of the time before YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, and before the man born Mario Armando Lavandeira Jr. launched PerezHilton.com in 2004 and quickly became one of the world’s most popular, controversial and despised gossip bloggers.
I chose 2002 because that year’s most famous video captured the Feb. 1 execution of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Footage of his beheading circulated in the bowels of the internet for months, until the now-defunct Boston Phoenix published a link to it on its website, igniting furious debates about the morality and journalistic ethics of that decision.
Such discussions seem quaint in an age in which the video of Charlie Kirk’s assassination was posted to social media moments after it happened, and a gunman in Christchurch, New Zealand, livestreamed his killing of 51 worshippers at two mosques on Facebook.
An age, it bears adding, when X and Meta—Facebook and Instagram’s corporate owner—no longer emphasize stalwart moderation guardrails in the name of reducing “censorship” on their platforms.
The circumstances leading to Hilton’s distressing livestream and Pearl’s filmed execution are entirely dissimilar. But what brought the 2002 video to mind was that it marked the first time in modern history, at least that I can remember, that the public questioned what purpose watching something too horrible to fathom ultimately serves. Such discussions helped establish the difference between witnessing as a matter of civic responsibility and leering voyeurism.
Images of Sept. 11, 2001, were still fresh and traumatizing for millions who watched the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers collapse on live TV when Pearl was murdered.
But his death was an intimate injury to his loved ones first and foremost. Making it public, therefore, was viewed as a ghoulish act by many, including Salon’s former national correspondent Bruce Shapiro. “The idea that tossing the desires of Pearl’s family into the ashcan is ‘just what journalists do’ is only a cover for indiscriminate National Enquirer logic,” he said in a June 2002 column.
Months after that, the Phoenix’s media critic Dan Kennedy contended that it is our obligation to watch such difficult accounts in an essay for Harvard’s Nieman Foundation. “We turn away from such evil at our own peril,” Kennedy maintained.
The twin forces of cellphone footage and instantaneous social posting have long cultivated what is now understood to be a society-wide problem: the separation between the reality unfurling mere feet in front of us and the filter provided by electronic screens and lenses.
Somewhere in the middle, the rest of us wondered how absorbing such horror would change us, whether as individuals or as a society.
Twenty-four years ago, it was very easy to turn away from something you had to go digging for in the first place. YouTube would not exist until 2005. Instagram’s founding happened five years after that. TikTok turns 10 this year.
In the years between those companies’ founding and now, social media has given us plenty of opportunities to take up those debates again. But when such content is widely available, and we have so little choice as to whether we can avoid it, conversations about the ethics of it all seem like a luxury.
In exceptional cases, disseminating footage that’s hard to stomach serves a noble objective. Graphically violent video pouring out of 2011’s Arab Spring uprisings opened the world’s eyes to the deadly state violence people suffered under the repressive regimes of Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Syria and other Arab nations.
In the United States, bystander videography has been bringing incidents of police brutality into American living rooms since at least 1991, when Los Angeles resident George Holliday captured cops viciously beating Rodney King on videotape. But the first cellphone equivalents to go viral were the 2009 videos of a police officer fatally shooting 22-year-old Oscar Grant III in the back at Fruitvale Station in Oakland.
And the list of people whose last living, breathing moments were captured on cellphone videos and shared with the world has only gotten longer. In 2014, the nation watched Eric Garner suffocate to death as a New York City police officer subdued him using a prohibited chokehold. In 2016, Diamond Reynolds filmed the moment that a police officer shot her boyfriend Philando Castile to death during a traffic stop in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area and posted it to Facebook Live.
In 2020, 17-year-old Darnella Frazier recorded Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes. And earlier this year, multiple bystanders recorded the shootings of Minneapolis residents Renee Good and Alex Pretti, footage that contradicted Trump administration officials’ claims that Good was a “domestic terrorist” and Pretti was an “assassin.”
In all those incidents, bearing witness galvanized the public. The international furor over Floyd’s death sparked nationwide protests and briefly mainstreamed the Movement for Black Lives. Videos of Good and Pretti’s killings by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents turned all eyes to Minnesota, leading to the ouster of Kristi Noem from the Department of Homeland Security.
At the same time, our social media algorithms were not as loosely regulated a decade ago as they are now. Teams of human moderators once employed by all the major platforms have been gutted. Nobody should be shocked to know that the easiest place to find Hilton’s self-harm videos is X. As for TikTok, a spokesperson told the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday, the platform relies on automated moderation systems. They flagged Hilton’s alarming livestream within minutes, closed other live streams within 90 seconds and banned the account, the spokesperson said, but its removal was delayed by what was characterized as “a moderator error.” (TikTok previously banned Hilton in 2020 for violating its community guidelines. At the time, his account had 1.6 million followers and averaged 10 million views per week.)
Want more from culture than just the latest trend? The Swell highlights art made to last. Sign up here
The twin forces of cellphone footage and instantaneous social posting have long cultivated what is now understood to be a society-wide problem: the separation between the reality unfurling mere feet in front of us and the filter provided by electronic screens and lenses.
Knowing this, the fact that the top search terms on Wednesday morning indicated that people were looking for images of Hilton’s self-harm instead of contextualizing reporting is telling but, sadly, not surprising.
Lurid real-world footage of people harming others or themselves is being served directly to us whether we want to see it or not. What we might debate, as we did 24 years ago, is what that’s doing to us.
“I NEED TO SEE THE ODYSSEY IN 70 mm IMAX.” | Universal Pictures/The Odyssey official trailer
In late July, Universal and IMAX extended 70 mm IMAX showings of The Odyssey through mid-September. In New York City, these screenings basically sold out immediately, save for a few seats in the front row.People trekked to AMC Lincoln Square 13 — one of only 25 theaters in the US, 41 in the entire world, that can screen the film in this format — to wait in line to buy tickets in person because the app was constantly crashing. Similarly, September screenings across the countryare still packed.
This phenomenon signals to me that there are a lot of people (Virgos? Oracles?) who have a better grasp of the future, specifically the 30 days between August and September, as well as the concept of an upcoming Wednesday, than I will ever possess.
I also see it as a sign that scarcity is the most powerful social currency of the moment. Like a cup of frozen yogurt people wait hours for or a Trader Joe’s tote that incites a hot frenzy, seeing Christopher Nolan’s latest masterpiece in its intended format is just the latest and greatest example of how access to something limited or exclusive has become a dominating cultural force.
Why seeing The Odyssey in 70 mm IMAX is an odyssey in itself
Paul Hardart, a professor at NYU Stern School of Business who specializes in the marketing of film and television, sees the demand to see The Odyssey in this specific format as a collision between scarcity, and high value cultural currency. Hardart said that in order to really understand why the movie has become such a phenomenon, you have to understand that there’s a higher bar for going to see a movie in a theater than there used to be.
“Coming out of the pandemic, what has changed — particularly in the movie business and particularly the theatrical movie exhibition experience — is people go to comedies, dramas, and adventure movies less frequently,” Hardart told me. One of the big motivators to get people off the couch and into a multiplex is the promise that the movie will be an experience.
“To get me out of my home, it’s got to be worth it,” Hardart said of the current mentality, adding that The Odyssey is exactly this type of movie. “I want to have an experience and I’m going to go with my friends and you know what, I might pay extra for it. I’m going to go see The Odyssey the way it was intended.” When you’re able to get an 70 mm IMAX ticket, not only do you get to see this great work of art, but you also get to tell everyone you were able to do so despite it being so difficult.
“I saw it in a regular theater and I felt like a loser,” Hardart added. It’s not that the regular, non-70-mm viewing didn’t have great performances, or beautiful cinematography, or any of the factors that contributed to all of the critical adulation that the movie’s received. Hardart thought it was fantastic. But he wanted to see it in the way Nolan intended, in a format that’s only available in 41 rooms in the entire world. This experience-first approach isn’t specific to movies; Hardart is also seeing it happen at concerts, festivals, and any kind of in-demand, exclusive event.
“If you go to the US Open, they have those Honey Deuce drinks; so many people there are taking selfies of themselves drinking these $25 drinks,” he said. “I don’t know if they’re there for tennis. But I think some of them are there to say, ‘I went to the Open, I had the experience, and I drank this bespoke drink, and I want you to like me or respect me or think I’m cool.’”
The dopamine-fueled reason we want things that no one else has
Jared Watson, an assistant professor of marketing at NYU Stern, studies the things people buy to feel cool, and the broader subject of consumer culture at large; he introduced me to a concept called signal theory. In the context of consumer behavior, it’s how we try to communicate to others that we’re hip, or smart, or likable — any trait that might not be immediately observable — through the things we buy and possess. Thanks to social media, our experiences have become as visible and effective as material objects in telegraphing an identity.
“We’re all constantly trying to show people who we are and what we’ve done and the life that we have,” he told Vox. “And scarcity is really gasoline on that fire.”
There’s still massive social currency to be mined.
The more difficult it is to have an experience, the higher its social value. Watson said that humans get much more satisfaction when they’ve experienced or purchased something before everyone else has. Once everyone has access to the thing we’re using to signal, its social value goes down.
This may help explain The Odyssey’s 70 mm IMAX phenomenon. Because there are a limited number of showings, seats, and theaters, it’s going to be a long time before the number of fans who’ve seen it in 70 mm outnumber the people who haven’t, if that day ever comes. There’s still massive social currency to be mined.
There’s also the fact that humans love the anticipation of getting our hands on something, maybe even more than obtaining it, according to Ginger Pennington, an associate professor at Northwestern University. Pennington studies human motivation and consumer psychology.
“The pleasure that you’re feeling is more intense right before you get the thing you’re coveting than when you get or when you actually have it and are able to consume it or use it,” she said, explaining that the positive hit resembles the pleasure some people get from gambling, and is part of what drives shopping addiction.
Essentially, getting to the front of a frozen yogurt line is going to be more satisfying than whatever the frozen yogurt tastes like; nabbing a Trader Joe’s bag is going to make us much happier than stuffing the tote. And perhaps finally getting tickets to The Odyssey will give you more pleasure than actually seeing The Odyssey. Though, to be clear, I do not pretend to know how intensely one can love The Odyssey or Christopher Nolan. I just know I need to see it in 70 mm.
But if there’s one place where young American men are likely to congregate, regardless of race or political beliefs, it’s the world of video games. According to a 2017 Pew study, 72 percent of men under 30 say they play video games often or sometimes. The gaming world is a place they feel safe — which means it is full of untapped potential for building community, says video game expert George E. Osborn.
Osborn is the founder of Half-Space Consulting, which advises governments and NGOs on the social impact of video games. In his new book Power Play: Video Games, Politics, and the Battle for Global Influence, Osborn shows that anti-democratic powers and violent actors have been exploiting the video games space for decades.
“Bannon’s intuitive understanding of the power of toxic gamer communities created the digital-activist base, the tactical playbook and the strategic approach necessary for ‘mainstreaming’ populist far-right ideas within the online media ecosystem,” Osborn writes in Power Play.
Yet Osborn also writes that there is a vast potential for good within gaming communities. He shows that gaming can help people understand pandemics and autocracies and climate change; that it can connect people to one another and make people less lonely.
I wanted to understand what those possibilities meant for the young men who are so invested in video games and are in so much trouble, so I called Osborn up to discuss. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
The public-private video game alliance that wasn’t
The US federal government has worked on pro-democracy campaigns with video game companies. In 2024, the State Department collaborated with The Global Game Jam, a nonprofit games development organization, on an initiative called Ctrl+Alt+Disinfo to create video games that would raise awareness of the global threat of disinformation.
The results, Osborn writes, featured “some fantastically inventive explorations of how disinformation works, including Medieval Courier (where a cunning messenger fox tweaks messages sent between two courts to sow mayhem), Polar (a game where you manipulate information by playing tarot cards with different propagandizing effects), and My Little Conspiracy (which puts you in the shoes of an early online moderator capable of guiding the conversation online).”
The next year, President Donald Trump began his second term, and Elon Musk’s DOGE began aggressively cutting budgets across the government. Educational video games didn’t make the cut, and the State Department clawed back the money it had already granted the project.
You write in the book that there’s always been a wide audience for video games across demographics. But when people talk about gaming’s traditional audience, they’re mostly talking about young men. How does that happen?
In the 1980s and the 1990s, video games were not sold on the basis of who wants to play. They were sold on the basis of who buys technology. There were two primary audiences: families with kids, and young men buying tech.
Then a couple of things all happen at the same time: The introduction of the smartphone in about 2007; the emergence of digital storefronts like Steam and The App Store; the financial crash. Video games companies start to think, “We have done very well in a small number of markets. What happens if we start reaching a wider base?”
The number of people around the world playing video games goes from hundreds of millions to about the 3.6 billion that we see today. When you look at the gender split of players, roughly speaking, the gender split in the US is now nearly 50/50, and the average age of a player is much closer to late 30s, early 40s. It creates this space where that traditional audience of younger men start to feel left behind, like the industry is moving away from them.
What’s really interesting, when you look at this in the context of the research that I’ve done, is that it creates a grievance culture amongst some of those younger men. That ultimately opens up the opportunity for someone to begin taking advantage of it.
In the book, you talk about how there are a few different things that make gamers an attractive group for political actors to try to target. One of them was this idea that gamers are highly likely to act on their beliefs. What does that mean in this context?
The nature of play — I think it was actually the writer Naomi Alderman who talked about this — is that it encourages agency. If you compare it to other creative mediums, even the most linear of video games, a player [moves] through it in their own way. They don’t have exactly the same experience as everybody else.
It encourages people to really believe in themselves as participants in the medium. They are not solely consumers of the culture, and therefore they feel that they have a greater say over what happens.
Then it [also] creates a strong community tie between the people who are involved in play. The sheer breadth of choices available to you brings the community together to talk about how to play, and ultimately the way it makes them feel. [That’s] part of the reason why these information spaces are so powerful.
Along those lines, you document Steve Bannon getting interested in Gamergate and leveraging that phenomenon to help create the alt-right of the 2010s. A lot of the political groups you discuss who try to intervene with gamers use top-down propaganda, but it seems like Bannon’s really interested in them as a specific community, right? He’s not making didactic games about why they should support Trump. He’s talking about how they’re heroes fighting for ethics in gaming journalism. What’s the effect of that choice?
It creates a sense of power within those communities they may not have otherwise felt. If you compare it to the last US election, Kamala Harris’s campaign created an officially branded Fortnite experience. It promised players a chance to engage with the campaign’s key pillars. Which is exactly the kind of top-down, non-inclusive communication where you are going into someone else’s arena and putting something in there that would never emerge from that space organically.
Obviously the message doesn’t work. It ends up reeking of elitism.
I think what Bannon realized is this group had its own things that it felt were important. Particularly within Gamergate — I think that they were talking about things that were toxic, lies, untrue. But it coalesced to create an identity around that group. Bannon realized that ultimately, if you promoted it upwards, then they would feel part of this wider community.
A lot of the most visible political activity associated with gamers in the US has been pretty dark and even quite violent. I’m thinking of not just Gamergate, but the Charlottesville riots and the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Is it possible to harness the energy of this community toward more constructive ends?
I just came back from Games for Change in New York. It’s a big festival in the US every year. There’s satellite events around the world. It looks at the way that these dynamics can be used for various social goods, provided that you are actually leaning into them.
The UN’s Playing for the Planet Alliance reached hundreds of millions of people by asking game makers to create content on their behalf [about climate change]. It wasn’t a case of saying, “We need you to create games that do this specific thing.” It was much more, “Here is a theme. Create something that works for your community.”
When more elite institutions chose to engage with games communities on their terms, they tended to achieve much bigger reach, at a much lower cost, and with much more positive outcomes than any of the hostile uses that I talk about in the book. And frankly, because these communities have often felt pushed to the side, they also feel particularly validated when someone comes into their space and says, “Actually, we do recognize your power. We would love to work with you to make the most of it.”
How do you know that the effects are so much bigger than something like Gamergate? Are there numbers you can cite?
You’re talking about this potentially massive effect, but thus far it’s tended to be sporadic. When you compare it with a lot of the examples that I look at in the book, especially Saudi Arabia’s attempt to use video games within its soft power strategy, there’s clearly much more strategic thinking [from the Saudis] about the way to influence these communities.
That’s one of the missing pieces of the puzzle in a lot of democracies. We have the ingredients for this to work really effectively, but at the moment it feels like we’ve not got anyone cooking.
I came away from this book with this sense that for a lot of young men, video game communities are a precious space where they feel seen in a way that they don’t in a lot of the rest of society right now. What makes this world so special to these men?
Video games have always been social. With young men in particular, because the medium has been so closely attuned to them, [many of them] are going to find their groups and communities within these worlds.
This is me speaking more from British experience, of thinking what it’s like to be a man growing up in the UK. We’ve seen significant cutbacks in local investment into things like community groups, clubs, youth spaces. Online communities and online game communities have helped replace a lot of things taken out of civil society.
You write about campaigning to combat the loneliness epidemic in the UK through gaming outreach. How did that initiative come together?
I was contacted by the government around April 2020, during the pandemic. I was working at the time as the head of campaigns and communications at Ukie, the video games trade association.
Quite early into my job, I realized all of the different games companies that formed Ukie had very different cultures. You couldn’t tell them what to do, because frankly, it wouldn’t work.
So I went in and said, “Okay, we’ve got an ask. We want you to encourage your communities to find one hour to sit down in their favorite online game with a friend, family member, or co-worker, and ask them how they’re doing.”
Different companies took part in the campaign. But they went out to their communities with different messages. Some of them were going out with streams from their community managers. Some of them were just replicating the messaging that we had. Some of them were doing more dedicated messages to players via games.
It’s not particularly scientific, so take it with a pinch of salt. But afterwards, the polling firm Ipsos MORI found that across Europe, players in the UK were roughly 10 percentage points more likely to say that video games made them feel less lonely than other parts of the continent.
Looking back on that, I can see that a lot of the ideas I’ve had, about how games can be an information ecosystem and about how you effectively communicate to it, can be found in that campaign.
It’s about decentralizing the message. It’s allowing people to take it and run with it. That’s when it becomes really effective.
Login
