Gamifying Extremism: The Identitarian Movement Gets Another Video Game

Executive Summary

Nisos researchers examined The Great Rebellion, a video game available on popular gaming download platforms that pushes extremist, racist, and hateful pan-European ideology. Additionally, we identified links between the makers of The Great Rebellion, Kvlt Games, and the Identitarian Movement, an anti-immigrant and ethnocentrist political ideology aimed at defending European culture and ethnic purity. The study provided insight into emerging techniques amongst extremist organizations to create video games and modify existing video games to push extremist ideology for radicalization and reach potential recruits.

We identified that Kvlt Games, in contrast to earlier extremist video games, intentionally sacrificed political messaging and ideology for more obscure satire, pop culture references, and memes to avoid identification and moderation. This method appears to be effective, as Kvlt Games’ more overtly extremist first game, Heimat Defender, was quickly identified as hateful and harmful and removed from popular gaming platforms. Conversely, The Great Rebellion launched on 1 February 2024, and as of September 2024 was still available for download on gaming platforms. The game features anti-vaccine, anti-Black, anti-transgender, pro-white, and anti-technology themes and promotes a “restoration” of Europe.

The founder of Kvlt Games maintains connections to several extremist organizations, including the Identitarian Movement and Ein Prozent. We identified Kvlt Games’ headquarters located in the same building as an Identitarian Movement social club, Castell Aurora. Furthermore, Ein Prozent, a German anti-immigrant organization, funded Kvlt Games’ first video game, Heimat Defender.

The findings from analyzing Kvlt Games and The Great Rebellion highlight the increasing care taken by extremist organizations to spread their ideology and reach new audiences while minimizing identification and moderation. The use of sarcasm, memes, and pop culture to obfuscate messaging and make content less overtly hateful or harmful makes detection and moderation more difficult and proactive identification more costly. Nisos leverages analytical expertise and cross-platform analysis to identify, characterize, and provide comprehensive reporting on hateful, harmful, and dangerous online content to reduce reputational and organizational risk.

Background

Video games containing extremist content and ideology are nothing new, and have existed almost as long as video games on personal computers have existed. However, early extremist video games commonly contained graphic, excessive violence and overtly hateful and racist content, making identification and moderation rather straightforward. Recent trends on gaming platforms such as Steam, GOG, and others highlight an emerging genre of video games containing elements of extremist ideology veiled behind memes, satire, and pop culture references not clearly understood by an individual unfamiliar with the topics. These games, however, provide extremist groups and organizations a useful platform to expose new and younger individuals to their ideologies and serve as a useful tool in perception shaping and/or recruiting.

Nisos conducted a case study of Kvlt Games’ The Great Rebellion, a cheap 2D arcade-style game available on common video game download platforms, that pushes Identitarian Movement and other fringe political ideology. This study examines past examples of extremist video games and their shortcomings due to graphic violence and overt hateful content, introduces the ideology and motivations behind the Identitarian Movement and its connection to Kvlt Games, and provides an overview of Kvlt Games’ first overtly hateful and racist video game.

Early Extremist Video Games

Extremist organizations and groups using video games as either a recruitment tool or to promote their ideology are nothing new. As early as 1991, neo-Nazi groups and organizations in Germany and Austria distributed CD-ROM video games that enabled players to act as a concentration camp commandant. In contrast to recent extremist video games such as The Great Rebellion, early extremist games tended to be characterized by graphic violence and were deliberately made to be as shocking and overt as possible. Early extremist game distribution was largely limited to groups’ abilities to physically distribute CD-ROM games, making widespread distribution and reaching new audiences difficult.

KZ Manager

One of the first extremist video games distributed in the early 1990s in Germany and Austria, KZ Manager—short for Konzentrationslager, concentration camp in German—features simulation gameplay in which the player runs the Treblinka concentration camp. The player must sell gold tooth fillings (extracted from victims), lampshades (presumably made from human skin), and human labor in order to buy and gas Turks—a replacement in the game for Jews. If a player does not execute enough prisoners, public opinion drops and the player loses the game. Germany banned the game in 1990 for “incitement.”

Ethnic Cleansing

Neo-Nazi group National Alliance released Ethnic Cleansing on Martin Luther King Day in 2002, deliberately to coincide with the civil rights leader’s holiday. The first-person shooter game features the player as either a skinhead or KKK member shooting Blacks, Latinos, and Jews, who are all portrayed using racist stereotypes. The game portrays Black victims as street thugs who make monkey noises when killed, Latino victims as wearing ponchos and saying, “I’ll take a siesta now,” and Orthodox Jews yelling “oy vey” when shot. The game’s final boss is the Prime Minister of Israel, who is hiding underground plotting world domination.

Additional Extremist Games

The early 2000s saw a rise in extremist video games, driven both by increased ease of designing and producing games using open-source gaming engines and platforms as well as a larger audience due to more accessible home internet and a rise in computer-based video game popularity. Examples of other early extremist video games include:

• • Turner Diaries – The Game
  • SA4 Man
  • Shoot the Blacks
  • Zog’s Nightmare
  • Concentration Camp Rat Hunt

In more recent years, extremist video game distribution has shifted to a direct-download model to overcome distribution and cost limitations of physical disc games. In 2017 and 2018, Angry Goy and Angry Goy II, a slang term used for gentile or non-Jew, released on extremist website radicalagenda[.]net. A review for the game described the premise as “a very simple set up: a young man gets angry at the state of his country and goes out to massacre every black, arab, jew and leftist he sees.” In Angry Goy II, the player must rescue former President Donald Trump from “left-wing terrorists,” and the game features references to recent high-profile events such as the 2016 Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting and spoofs of news networks such as CNN. The game’s designer stated, “Instead of taking out your frustrations on actual human beings, you can fight the mongrels and degenerates on your computer!”

Although Angry Goy and Angry Goy II feature prominent pop culture references and a focus on modern “culture war” topics, the game features graphic violence and overtly hateful content, making the game easily identifiable as hateful content and, therefore, difficult to distribute on mainstream gaming platforms. The Great Rebellion and other recent extremist video games would avoid this issue by masking much of their hateful content behind sarcasm or difficult-to-identify references.

About Nisos®

Nisos is the Managed Intelligence Company. We are a trusted digital investigations partner, specializing in unmasking threats to protect people, organizations, and their digital ecosystems in the commercial and public sectors. Our open source intelligence services help security, intelligence, legal, and trust and safety teams make critical decisions, impose real world consequences, and increase adversary costs. For more information, visit: https://www.nisos.com.