How video games became a front of the global information war, 26/09/2024
And how states like the United States and Sweden are fighting back
I discover how video games have become a front for foreign information manipulation
Sony announces the sequel to Ghost of Tsushima at latest State of Play
The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom resonates amongst this week’s video game releases
Hello VGIM-ers,
I have to open up this week’s email with a hearty hello to the 700 of you (!) who signed up to read the newsletter after I received a prominent hat tip earlier this week.
For those of you who literally didn’t hear the news, I was given a shout out by Richard Osman - best selling author, world class telly host and long suffering Fulham FC supporter - on an episode of The Rest Is Entertainment dedicated to entertainment industry flops.
After chatting to him about the failure of multiplayer live service game Concord, he kindly described Video Games Industry Memo to listeners as “brilliant” and a “great way to catch up quickly” on the world of games.
I am obviously very grateful to have received such a lovely review on such a prominent podcast. And I am even happier to see so many more people join the fun little community we’re building here.
But if you haven’t heard the episode yet, you can listen to it in full on Spotify here or jump straight into the games chat here. It’s also available wherever else you may get your podcasts too, if Spotify is not your jam.
Oh, and it’d be remiss of me if I didn’t encourage all my new readers to express an interest in pre-ordering my book about video games influencing the world or encourage you to hire me to help your company learn about games, build a strategy for talking to the industry and put it into action.
When self-promotion calls, I always answer.
Anyway, that’s pretty much all for this week’s introduction. If you want to talk shop or catch me in person when I head down to Australia this weekend, say hello via george@half-space.consulting.
Otherwise, let’s settle in for a big read on a big topic from an event hosted in the Big Apple.
The big read - How video games became a front of the global information war
Video games have become a front through which authoritarian states and non-state actors are disrupting democracies via the dissemination of misinformation and disinformation, according to The State Department.
At an event on Wednesday 25th September in the fringes of the UN General Assembly in New York, representatives from the department, Sweden’s Psychological Defence Institute and leading video games businesses such as Microsoft, Roblox and Games for Change came together to discuss how the problem of foreign information manipulation is manifesting itself in games and how to push back against it.
And while it is clear that threat actors do see games as a channel for malign influence in the information war - and have demonstrated clear willingness to use it as such - the session also suggested democracies are ready to fight back: bringing together states, civil society and industry to preserve and enhance the positive impact of games on our world.
Manipulation nations
The State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), the organisation responsible for curating the event, is at the frontline of the United States’s efforts to protect its democracy from the impact of what it calls foreign information manipulation.
This occurs when authoritarian states or non-state actors “use information manipulation to shred the fabric of free and democratic societies.”
By doing spreading disinformation - harmful material circulated with the intention of disrupting or deceiving the public - or supporting the flow of misinformation - inadvertently inaccurate information which can nevertheless damage our understanding of an issue - threat actors aim to disrupt social discourse, weaken national and international debates and, ultimately, undermine states in the process.
The impact of foreign information manipulation within news and social media has already proven to be profound upon our societies.
The World Health Organization reported in September 2022 that ‘infodemics’ rooted in factually inaccurate information have had a negative impact on public health outcomes, including increasing vaccine hesitancy and damaging people’s mental health.
A 2020 study by Rutgers University found that the proliferation of fake news had weakened trust in news organisations generally, bruising the kind of trustworthy reporting that is best placed to stop people being mislead by threat actors.
And democracy more broadly is threatened by foreign information manipulation, with a 2022 study by The Brookings Institution suggesting that Russian disinformation campaigns have significantly diminished the US population’s trust in its democratic institutions.
But while the impact of foreign information manipulation has been spotted and researched within wider online spaces, and a new five step framework has been developed by GEC to counter foreign states who create issues in them, the possible impact of it within video games and adjacent social platforms initially went unnoticed.
However, a source at the State Department told me that the United States’s thought process towards games as a potential channel for influence changed from 2020 onwards.
Following the success of immersive entertainment projects within the department’s cultural programs and the industry’s rise to prominence during the pandemic, officials began to ask whether games may have an impact on wider societal discourse.
In particular, they hypothesised that the presence of extreme harms in other parts of games - such as rarely occurring challenges like child sexual exploitation or grooming of individuals by extremists or terrorists - suggested that threat actors may also be engaging in information manipulation within the medium.
It turned out they were right to worry. They discovered that authoritarian nation states and non-state actors were using game content, games communities and games culture to open up a new front of the information war - exposing democracies to new risks of harm in the process.
As a result of this, and the wider cultural significance of video games within online spaces, GEC has identified video games as an arena in which foreign information manipulation must both be reactively fought and proactively defended against by arming the public with the tools to counter it.
“We share a goal where foreign misinformation finds no fertile soil in which to grow,” said James Rubin, Special Envoy and Coordinator at the Global Engagement Center, in regards to efforts to tackle foreign information manipulation across society.
“We are focused on meeting people where they are.. and it is clear that whether it is through games themselves, or through platforms like Discord, that is where they are.”
The question is how to practically tackle the challenge.
While authoritarian states and extreme non-state actors will happily exploit video games for their own purposes, with little thought of stepping on any toes, democratic states have to gain the consent of games businesses, players and society at large to push back in the space for understandable cultural reasons.
Quantifying the challenge within games and identifying ways to meaningfully push back in the medium is therefore essential to generating support for action across the space.
And that’s exactly what the department and its partners like Sweden’s Psychological Defence Institute are trying to do.
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(Psychological) Defence is the best offense
Dr Magnus Hjort is the director of the institute. As he explained to attendees, the body is a civil defence agency that operates within the Swedish military with the specific goal of protecting the population from foreign information manipulation.
“If you have psychological warfare, you need psychological defence,” Hjort explained.
By this, he means that countries need to have strategies to foster resilience amongst their populations to protect them from the effects of information warfare.
And in practice, this means helping people to understand what information manipulation is, what it looks like and how to defend yourself against its impact in the world.
So in October 2023, in response to internal concerns that games could be at risk of foreign manipulation, the institute published with the support of Lund University a snappily titled research paper called Malign foreign interference and information influence on video game platforms: Understanding the adversarial playbook.
In it, the researchers identified more than 40 different ways video games and their platforms could be used by states and non-state actors for harm. And while there are plenty of pages in the report to flip through, Hjort summarised a number of the tactics at the event.
“Video games are being used as propaganda to influence the way we think,” he explained. “Russia is expanding its work in the field with games like African Dawn. Game images and video clips are being published with claims that they’re from warzones. Historical war games are being released, where people can rewrite histories in favour of threat actors.”
This, it’s fair to say, is a bit of a bummer. However, Hjort’s perspective on games remained both nuanced and optimistic despite the challenges outlined.
He believes that the enormous scale of games audiences and their interconnectedness through community channels creates a strong foundation for fostering the kind of digital literacy and critical thinking necessary to push back manipulation.
And while understanding of the impact of video games as a channel for foreign information manipulation is nascent - with Hjort admitting that the possible impacts and effects of games on the popular discourse is under-researched - he believed that there is room for games, civil society, academia and governments to work together to resolve the issues that have emerged from the space.
And fortunately, the discussion across the rest of the event suggested an appetite from all of those parties to get that collective work under way pronto.
Cultivating the garden
Prior to the panel of industry experts which concluded the event, Rubin had compared the challenge of tackling foreign information manipulation with that of effectively tending a garden.
A lot of the work is done by removing damaging weeds, including by pressuring the likes of Meta to pull Russia Today from its platforms after the channel was found to be engaging in covert information warfare.
But successfully pulling weeds out of the ground does not a garden make. Instead, states and civil society need to also cultivate the conditions upon which an information aware society can grow by building organic resilience and resistance to manipulation amongst the public who live within it.
And in contrast to what many people might expect given the often prejudiced perspective adopted towards the medium, games are seen as a potentially powerful - and important - place to grow this resilience.
Susanna Pollock, President of Games for Change, outlined how the ‘growing up’ of the average age of video games players has given the sector remarkable reach into all digital communities: leading to “tremendous opportunities” to leverage the reach of games to, as Rubin said, meet people where they’re most likely to listen.
Tami Bhaumik, Vice President of Civility and Partnerships at Roblox, highlighted how the platform’s wider efforts to foster digital civility, both in its spaces and within the industry more widely, could create the conditions for healthy scepticism and critical thinking amongst tens of millions of users worldwide.
And Microsoft’s Ginny Badanes, General Manager for Democracy Forward at the company, underscored the importance of ensuring that messages like this do reach into seemingly ‘harmless’ cultural spaces to counter manipulation - ably illustrated through the example of one state promoting its messages via cooking influencers creating content for social video platforms.
Importantly, it isn’t just the businesses that are invested in the games industry saying this. The State Department has already demonstrated it sees the value in pushing back against foreign information manipulation in games in a number of ways.
This includes supporting game jams in places like Ukraine and the Ivory Coast to highlight the medium’s possibility for social good, while also promoting efforts to ‘prebunk’ disinformation by teaching players about how to spot it through games like Harmony Square and via a forthcoming Roblox experience.
The challenge, however, is bringing all these strands together. As it stands, efforts to tackle manipulation in games are taking place but in a disconnected manner.
The State Department recognises from its own wider framework for addressing foreign information manipulation that its approach needs to be ‘interoperable’ to draw every stakeholder - video games companies, civil society representatives, academics and political officials - into an effective unified strategy for action.
And for now, it’s clear that we’re a long way from achieving that. The lack of research into the space, the challenges of understanding how exactly information does flow around games and the practical headache of building a public, private and civil society partnership capable of taking concerted collective action are all major barriers to success.
But the event this week was a signal of intent to overcome them. The State Department clearly has plans to push forward this work with allies such as Sweden, with industry and relevant partners in academia.
And with Hjort cautioning that a lack of action within games will only encourage further activity within the space by threat actors, it is clear that we’re at the beginning, rather than the end, of a battle over video games as a channel for influence within our societies.
News in brief
Not giving up the Ghost: Sony has announced that Ghost of Yotei, the sequel to Ghost of Tsushima, will arrive in 2025. It made the revelation during its latest State of Play showcase, which also saw the announcement of a remaster of Horizon: Zero Dawn, the immediate launch of lawsuit plagued Palworld on PS5 and the arrival of Hitman: World of Assassination on PSVR.
Dismissing games addiction: Two lawsuits accusing video games companies of creating deliberately addictive video games have been withdrawn by plaintiffs in the US. Game File reports that two cases in Ohio and Arkansas, which were brought on behalf of minors against the likes of Epic Games, Roblox and Activision Blizzard, have both been quietly taken off the table. Is this reflective of a wider decline in the credibility of gaming disorder? More on that in tomorrow's paid subscriber email…
Mood for thought: Speaking of the impact of video games on players, The Oxford Internet Institute has published new research that shows playing video games can be good for your mood. Over 160,000 mood reports taken from players of popular scrub-’em-up Powerwash Simulator showed that the average player reported that they ended a play session in a better mood than when they started it, with researchers predicting that this uplift positively affected roughly 72% of players. Is this evidence of the minute to minute positive impact of play? Or a sign that scrubbing a virtual car can is oddly satisfying? We’ll find out in the future.
Annapurna meltdown: IGN has the tea on what caused the resignation of the entire team at Annapurna Interactive, the video games arm of Annapurna Pictures. Rebekah Valentine’s report highlights how a power struggle at the top of the company, miscommunication over the future of the video game division and distrust in Annapurna’s co-founder Megan Ellison led to the walkout. Capital Y your Yikes when reading this one.
Beast of a move: And finally, Gamebeast, a service that helps people build content for services like Roblox without using code, has received $3.7m in investment. The platform offers developers tools such as LiveOps support, A/B testing to optimise their games and management tools to support their experiences. Oh, and the company thinks those services might also prove handy to defence companies just in case that’s worth mentioning too…
A message from our sponsor: Check out Arbuthnot Latham’s exclusive interview with Gavin Smith, senior commercial banker and video gaming expert, as he talks with Alastair Janse van Rensburg, creator of the multi-million selling indie game PlateUp! Discover the story behind the game’s success. Click to read the full interview.
Moving on
Will Lawes is the new PR Lead, EMEA at Konami…Ash Ligouri has shifted role at We Are Reach to become a Creative Strategist…Scopely has picked up Adam Telfer as its VP of Product…Jayson Hilchie has popped up as TikTok’s new Government Relations Lead in Canada after his departure from ESA Canada…And Matt Anderson has joined Pinpoint as its Influencer Lead…
Jobs ahoy
(Pokemon) Go and apply for the role of Senior Product Marketing Lead at Niantic…There’s a role going for a People Partnerships Manager with Electronic Arts down in Surrey…Supercell is recruiting a Commercial Business Development Manager in Europe…Or if you fancy another role on the continent, market data supremos Newzoo is hunting for a new Client Success Director…And YRS TRULY is hiring a Social Media Assistant, which is great if you love a four day week and vegan snacks in the office…
Events and conferences
Tokyo Game Show, Tokyo - 26th-29th September
Pocket Gamer Connects, Helsinki - 1st-2nd October
Game Connect Asia Pacific, Melbourne -7th-9th October
SXSW Sydney, erm…Sydney - 14th-20th October
AI and Games Conference, London - 8th November (Discount available for VGIM Insiders)
Games of the week
The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom - Play as Zelda for the first time in the history of the series on Switch this week.
Epic Mickey: Rebrushed - Remake of the Warren Spector directed Mickey Mouse adventure game is out now across all major platforms.
EA Sports FC 25 - Latest version of EA’s football series includes new 5-a-side Rush mode to allow everyone to feel as gassed as I do on a Tuesday night.
Before you go…
Hunky super nerd Henry Cavill has given his all important seal of approval to Saber Interactive’s recently released hit game Space Marine 2.
The Warhammer loving beefcake, best known for his roles playing Superman, Geralt of Rivia and a man capable of manifesting a pocket by reloading his fists, described the main game as “the mutt’s [nuts]” and gave a big thumbs up to its multiplayer mode.
All together now: one of us, one of us, one of us…
I like the bits about giving people resources to teach critical thinking—we need more of that.
But otherwise I generally come away unimpressed and skeptical of these sorts of initiatives—these well intentioned orgs talk a great game and then reveal their misunderstanding of the space with lines like “Historical war games are being released, where people can rewrite histories in favour of threat actors.” lol yeah, we all played as Persians vs. Teutons in Age of Empires. It was fine.
But is this new? There have long been "propaganda" games, especially right-wing and nationalist titles, and they are generally awful. And throughout this entire report, and reading some of the linked reports, all I can find mention of is a mod for Hearts of Iron and game scenes being used out of context for propaganda. For all the talk about games being a "new" front in information wars, they offer very few examples.
I was expecting stories about recruiters on COD, Helldivers 2, and Roblox.