Gender Politics in Digital Far-Right Engagement with Narrative-Driven Video Games

Scholars have noted an increasingly outspoken interaction between video games, far-right digital
politics, and gender. Scholarly accounts of this convergence of far-right and gaming culture, however,
neglect to explore the role of video games themselves and their fictional content. The affordances of
both games and the digital communications and communities which surround them are highly
unique, meriting further study. This project seeks to explore on three key dimensions how the gender
politics of the digital far-right manifests and proliferates through engagement with fictional or
narrative-driven video games. It examines three distinctive levels of engagement: the strategic
engagement with the fictional content of games by far-right influencers, the collective engagement
by far-right participatory communities on forums, and the ludic engagement of far-right-leaning
actors who stream or record gameplay. Through these three levels, which pioneer innovative
methodologies such as discursive gameplay analysis, the research explores how far-right
engagement with game fictions acts as a vessel for ideological critiques of gender in society as well
as constructions of the gendered ingroup. In doing so it also addresses the underexplored role of
fiction in far-right politics, and builds a deeper understanding of different types of far-right digital
communication.