As she watched in horror the televised coverage of the January 6 assault on the Capitol, vintage video games never crossed the mind of Adrienne Massanari, professor in the School of Communication and a pedagogy fellow at AU’s Center for Teaching, Research, and Learning. 

But in the weeks following the insurrection, a meme from a game originally released in 1981 stood out to her. The image “reimagined the rioters scaling the walls of the Capitol steps as if they were characters in Nintendo’s classic video game franchise Donkey Kong,” Massanari writes in her book Gaming Democracy: How Silicon Valley Leveled Up the Far Right, released on October 15. 

The meme included the words “Honkey Kong” in a red cartoonish font, underscoring the reference to the game and “the inherent Whiteness of the insurrection,” Massanari writes. 

When she saw the meme, Massanari was already working on the book. The image became, she writes, the “urtext” for Gaming Democracy.  

The book argues that gaming culture has permeated every facet of US and global society—including politics. She asserts that gamer controversies, including Gamergate, an online, loosely organized 2014 harassment campaign that targeted women in the video gaming industry, “paved the way for far-right and alt-right activism.” 

Gaming Democracy posits that toxic, far right ideas—such as the false assertions that the 2020 election was stolen or that COVID-19 is a hoax—have become ubiquitous in online spaces like Reddit and 4chan and that such political thought “has become increasingly intertwined with the culture of Silicon Valley.” Massanari argues that “various individuals and groups have gamed social media through play,” which has led to an interweaving of “toxic geek masculinity” with Trumpism.

The idea for the book started with “#Gamergate and the Fappening: How Reddit’s Algorithm, Governance, and Culture Support Toxic Technocultures,” a peer-reviewed article Massanari published in the journal New Media and Society.

After writing the article, Massanari says she was “interested and appalled by what I saw in terms of how Reddit was playing this role of, at the time, really starting to mainstream a lot of support around Donald Trump’s campaign. I kept thinking about the metaphor of games and play and the ways in which so much of what was being said by Trump supporters and what had come out of Gamergate used that lens of games and play to understand the world. I thought that would be an interesting topic to explore.”

Gaming Democracy is Massanari’s third book. She published Participatory Culture, Community, and Play: Learning from Reddit in 2015 and Critical Cyberculture Studies: Current Terrains, Future Directions in 2006. 

Massanari’s book isn’t an indictment of all gamers or all games. In fact, Massanari is a gamer herself. “I don’t think there are any ‘bad’ games,” she says. “The people who engage in toxic behavior are a small minority of the gamer community.” 

She also finds reason for optimism, despite the dramatic shift toward toxic, hard-right discourse in gaming.

“It would be easy to be pessimistic given the success the far right has had so far in metagaming democracy,” she writes at the end of the book. “But maybe there’s hope. Maybe we’ve finally realized that we can’t look to Silicon Valley and people like Elon Musk [who until relatively recently was celebrated by the geeks who hang out on Reddit] for solutions to our problems. Maybe we can finally question their ‘Move fast and break things’ mentality and the belief that the tech billionaires are somehow better equipped to fix these problems than the rest of us.”