About Book

Gaming and Extremism offers the first comprehensive overview of how video games and adjacent digital spaces are being exploited by extremist groups for radicalization, recruitment, propaganda dissemination, and mobilization. Edited by Linda Schlegel and Rachel Kowert, the book presents insights from leading experts across disciplines to uncover how platforms like Discord, Twitch, Steam, and DLive are misused to foster extremist ideologies. It delves into mechanisms of gamification within extremist messaging and explores the evolving landscape of online threats and counter-strategies. Additionally, it introduces innovative preventive and deradicalization approaches tailored to gaming ecosystems. Relevance with the Current Era and Community Engagement Mechanism: In today’s digital-first world—especially among youth—gaming communities have become central to social interaction. The exploitation of these platforms by extremist networks reflects a dangerous shift in radicalization tactics. This book is crucial in understanding how extremist narratives infiltrate everyday digital leisure spaces. It underscores the need for community-based digital literacy campaigns, gamified prevention tools, inter-agency cooperation, and cross-sector engagement (police, educators, tech platforms) to mitigate these threats and support online rehabilitation. This is a timely, well-researched, and interdisciplinary work that bridges terrorism studies with digital culture analysis. Its unique contribution lies in shedding light on underexplored terrain—extremism in gaming environments—and offering real-world countermeasures. It's especially valuable for policymakers, educators, youth workers, digital safety advocates, and those designing online interventions.