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How video games can make young men feel less alone

The untapped political potential of gaming.

Young American men are in trouble. They are the loneliest demographic in the Western world. Their social circles are shrinking. At all ages, they are significantly more likely to die by suicide than their female peers.

But if there’s one place where young American men are likely to congregate, regardless of race or political beliefs, it’s the world of video games. According to a 2017 Pew study, 72 percent of men under 30 say they play video games often or sometimes. The gaming world is a place they feel safe — which means it is full of untapped potential for building community, says video game expert George E. Osborn.

Osborn is the founder of Half-Space Consulting, which advises governments and NGOs on the social impact of video games. In his new book Power Play: Video Games, Politics, and the Battle for Global Influence, Osborn shows that anti-democratic powers and violent actors have been exploiting the video games space for decades.

Most visibly in the US, a large community of gamers rallied together in 2014 to harass prominent female game developers and gaming journalists. They forced multiple women into hiding while claiming that they were fighting for ethics in gaming journalism. The campaign, which became known as Gamergate, made so much noise that it attracted the attention of Steve Bannon, who organized supportive coverage on Breitbart and treated it as a recruiting ground for the racist, misogynistic, and anti-democratic alt-right movement. As Osborn documents in Power Play, the communities that sprang up to organize Gamergate became pipelines to the communities that organized the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017.

“Bannon’s intuitive understanding of the power of toxic gamer communities created the digital-activist base, the tactical playbook and the strategic approach necessary for ‘mainstreaming’ populist far-right ideas within the online media ecosystem,” Osborn writes in Power Play.

Yet Osborn also writes that there is a vast potential for good within gaming communities. He shows that gaming can help people understand pandemics and autocracies and climate change; that it can connect people to one another and make people less lonely.

I wanted to understand what those possibilities meant for the young men who are so invested in video games and are in so much trouble, so I called Osborn up to discuss. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

#Gamergate: Here’s why everybody in the video game world is fighting

The public-private video game alliance that wasn’t

The US federal government has worked on pro-democracy campaigns with video game companies. In 2024, the State Department collaborated with The Global Game Jam, a nonprofit games development organization, on an initiative called Ctrl Alt Disinfo to create video games that would raise awareness of the global threat of disinformation.

The results, Osborn writes, featured “some fantastically inventive explorations of how disinformation works, including Medieval Courier (where a cunning messenger fox tweaks messages sent between two........

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