Gaming is dismissed as a hobby for isolated teenage boys. In reality, it’s an information space of roughly 3.6 billion active users bigger than film and music combined and Russia, China, Saudi Arabia and Steve Bannon all figured that out before Western governments did.
More people around the world play video games than follow any religion except Christianity and Islam, which sits oddly with gaming’s lingering reputation as a pastime for isolated teenage boys. According to industry analytics firm Newzoo, there are roughly 3.6 billion active gamers globally, and the industry is expected to generate around $188 billion in revenue this year, more than film and music combined. And yet, the public conversation about gaming has barely moved on. It still tends to revolve around the same handful of concerns: addiction, violence, or whether kids should be allowed anywhere near Roblox. Those are real issues, but they tell only a small part of the story. Gaming has become one of the biggest cultural spaces on the planet, and increasingly a place where governments compete for influence, shape narratives, and try to win over the next generation of players.
Games journalist George Osborn has spent years mapping exactly that shift, and in his new book, Power Play: Video Games, Politics and the Battle for Global Influence, he argues that games aren’t content people consume, they’re spaces people inhabit digital versions of what the sociologist Ray Oldenburg called “third places,” the cafés and town squares people gather in outside home and work. Discord servers and Steam forums have become exactly that for billions of people, and whoever controls a town square gets leverage over the people in it.
Almost everyone with something to gain from that leverage has noticed. In 2023, a 16-year-old Russian streamer broadcast a Hearts of Iron IV session from inside the Wagner Group’s St Petersburg headquarters, simulating a war with NATO. RUSI has documented Russia’s Defence Ministry running gamer-targeted recruitment alongside studios glorifying Wagner’s operations in Africa. China has taken the ownership route: Tencent fully owns Riot Games and holds a roughly 28 percent stake in Epic a position significant enough that the Trump administration is now weighing forcing a divestment on national-security grounds. Saudi Arabia, where two-thirds of the population is under 35, has poured tens of billions into becoming a gaming hub, a soft-power play Western capitals were slow to register.
But it’s worth asking how distinctive gaming really is. Twitch hosts most politically-oriented live streaming, but YouTube still dominates actual political viewership among young men, who use it for political content far more than TikTok. If YouTube is doing more of the persuading, gaming’s real edge isn’t necessarily influence but rather the fact that this is a newer and far less scrutinized space than the platforms already under a microscope.
None of this is new, Osborn argues, just newly visible. In 2005, before Breitbart, Steve Bannon ran a company that farmed and sold World of Warcraft gold, eventually raising $60 million from Goldman Sachs — a formative stint inside gaming’s economy and culture. From there, Osborn traces a line to Gamergate, the 2014 harassment campaign that began with false accusations against developer Zoë Quinn and metastasized into sustained abuse of women across the industry. Bannon later recognized in that anger an army ready to be organized, saying in 2017 that young men come in through Gamergate and then get turned onto politics and Trump — a pipeline Osborn credits with helping build the modern alt-right. At its most extreme, the same subculture bled into violence which has been traced across the past decade.The Christchurch and Buffalo shooters both livestreamed their attacks in the style of first-person shooter games, even including leaderboard references. But that doesn’t mean video games caused their radicalization. Rather, gaming culture became another channel through which extremist ideas that were already circulating elsewhere could spread and take hold.
The 2024 election added a quieter case. JL Partners, among the only pollsters to correctly call Trump’s popular-vote win, ran surveys inside mobile games to reach voters who distrust traditional polling.
Osborn’s answer isn’t to have fewer games. He argues that treating gaming as inherently radicalizing misses the point of why it became such a powerful space in the first place. In 2022, he says the British government approached him about adding pro-Ukrainian messaging to a game. He turned it down, arguing that once games become a channel for state messaging, every authoritarian government has the justification it needs to do the same. His instinct is to “protect gaming the way you’d protect a free press” but I think the harder question is what that actually looks like in practice.
That gap is filling fast. Age-verification and digital-ID rules are arriving across the UK, EU and China at once, and Osborn warns some of it is surveillance dressed as safety. China’s system is the cautionary case: minors capped at three hours a week, enforced by real-name registration against a national ID database, with facial recognition to catch kids borrowing an adult’s account — and still, over three-quarters of surveyed minors evade it. Meanwhile a new class of political creators is filling the vacuum states haven’t: Hasan Piker has built a following in the millions from inside gaming culture, and the Palestinian creator Absorber, who built his audience playing Fortnite, has confronted Israeli soldiers live on stream for an audience that tunes out cable news entirely.
If governments are serious about tackling this, then “protect gaming like a free press” has to mean something concrete. It probably starts with the kind of standardized cross-platform reporting that RUSI has been calling for, especially when 43 percent of gamers who came across harmful content never reported it. It could mean making the FBI and DHS’s information-sharing arrangements with platforms like Roblox, Discord and Reddit a normal part of how these companies operate, instead of something that only comes to light through public records requests. It also means asking harder questions about foreign ownership of gaming infrastructure, in much the same way governments already scrutinize telecoms. At the same time, it means avoiding China’s approach of solving child safety by building surveillance systems that stick around long after the original problem has changed. None of that is as simple or politically satisfying as banning games or blaming gaming culture. But that’s also probably why so few governments have seriously pursued it.
The bigger lesson is that, whether we like it or not, the next fight for public opinion is no longer happening mainly on front pages or cable news. A lot of it has already moved elsewhere, and it’s happening in Discord servers, in the middle of online matches, and across digital spaces where governments, extremist movements and influencers are all competing for attention. The problem is that many of the institutions meant to defend democratic values are still looking somewhere else, focused on the scoreboard instead of the fight itself. By the time they catch up, the battle for the next generation’s attention may already have been won.