Episode 75 – Fighting Extremism in Games (with Rachel Kowert)

Welcome to the Ethics and Video Games Podcast, where we explore issues at the intersection of ethics and video games. We'll look at controversial ethical issues about video games, like what should be censored. In video games, what counts as cheating? And in video game design, what makes the game morally interesting? You can subscribe and listen to all of our episodes wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also find us spreading ideas about ethics and video games on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. And if you like what we're doing, give us a review on Apple Podcast. Games are a particularly fertile ground for extremist recruitment. Why is that? What's special about games and gaming culture that might make them attractive spaces for recruitment? How does extremist recruitment work in games? What is being done about it right now, and what can be done to help prevent the spread of extremism through games? Hi, I'm Shlomo Cher, philosophy professor and video game ethicist. And hi, I'm Andy Ashcraft. I am a video game designer. All right, let's play. All right. Welcome, everybody. We're here today with Rachel Kohr, PhD. Rachel is a research psychologist and research director of Take This. She's a world-renowned researcher on the uses and effects of digital games, including their impact on physical, social, and psychological well-being. An award-winning author, she's published a variety of books and scientific articles relating to the psychology of games, and more recently, the relationship between games and mental health specifically. Her YouTube channel, Psyche Geist, serves to bridge the gap between moral panic and scientific knowledge and a variety of psychology and game-related topics, which she did when she was here with us for episode 43 and talked about the various kinds of potential moral panics or harms that come with video games like violence, sexism, addiction. Check it out. It's a great episode. In 2021, she was chosen as a member of the Game Awards Future Class, representing the best and brightest of future video games. Dr. Kohr has been featured in various media outlets, including NPR, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Wired, video game publications like Kotaku and Polygon. She's awesome, and she's back. Rachel, welcome back to the show. Thank you for having me. All right. Rachel, before we get started, I want to take a minute for you to tell us about Take This. What do you guys do as an organization? We are the oldest mental health nonprofit that serves the gaming space, and we occupy this kind of interesting area where we serve gaming industry and gaming communities. So we provide mental health information and support, and we aim to destigmatize mental health challenges among both groups. Are games particularly prone to being a place where any kind of mental illness, mental challenges, mental health challenges are stigmatized? Yeah. I mean, it's a really unique space. I think for the industry, because it's a relatively new industry and it grew so fast, there's a lot of challenges there with like diversification and burnout and that sort of stuff and psychological safety among leadership. And with gaming communities, it's really interesting because games tend to be focused on as the problem versus a tool that might be fostering a solution. So we try to provide information about like how do you seek mental health support with someone who's culturally competent about the role that games might be playing in your life versus just being like, "Oh yeah, it's the games." That's the problem. Right. Right. Great. At some point, we need an episode just on your organization, I think. Yeah. We have a clinical director who would love to come talk to you. Oh, that's perfect. All right. So we're here to talk about extremism games. So why are games particularly vulnerable to extremism? And I mean, I didn't know they were particularly vulnerable to extremism. And how influential is extremism in games? Yeah. I mean, I didn't know they were vulnerable to extremism either until a few years ago. I read the ADL report that said one in four game players are exposed to white supremacist ideology in game. And I actually stopped reading the report and called up Daniel Kelly, who's the author of the report. And I was like, "You did your numbers wrong. Your numbers are too high." And he was like, "No, I didn't, Rachel." And I pivoted my entire research paradigm. So I was like, "This is bad. We have to figure out what's going on here." So it's quite pervasive in games. And there's a lot of reasons why games are particularly vulnerable. Friendships form differently in games. They're moderated less effectively than social networks are moderated, for example. So it's a big problem, actually. So when you say, by the way, ADL, the Anti-Defamation League, for those of you not familiar with that, one of the premier organization, is it only an American organization or is it a worldwide organization? I want to say it's only American, but I could be wrong. I think it's only American, monitoring, essentially, forms of extremism. Now, when you say game friendships are different, how are game friendships different? And how are they different in a way that would make them more vulnerable to extremism? Yeah, good question. Games are what we call emotionally jump-started. The friendships made through games are emotionally jump-started, which means you learn if you can trust someone before you get to know them, whereas in traditional relationships you get to know someone and slowly learn if you can trust them. So if Andy and I are playing and Andy helps me kill a dragon, I like Andy. I know nothing about him, but I like him because he helped me kill that dragon. But if he doesn't help me, I don't like him, even though I don't know anything about him. So having that foundational level of trust leads to relationships forming faster, being more long-lasting, the relationships that are traditionally formed over the internet. Yeah, that's interesting. So if someone is on your team, they're literally, immediately, literally on your team, they're on your side, if someone is helpful to you, you're reciprocating with good feelings in some way. Yes, absolutely. Okay. And games do this a little bit better than other shared activities because we are doing things together and we have shared goals and we are accomplishing things together, right? Yes, absolutely. And we're doing it because it's playful and it's fun. And yeah, there's a lot of different elements at play there. Yeah, I mean, how often do you actually meet somebody and immediately go do something where you're helping each other do something and having fun, right? It's really rare. Yeah. In games, we do it many times a day if we're playing many times a day, right? With lots of different people. Yeah. With lots of different people and eventually someone might click. Now when we talk about extremism, the ADL I know I think is most concerned with any kind of white nationalism or white supremism. But are we talking about any kind of extremism here? Yeah, so extremism is an umbrella term, right? So what I look at in my work, I look specifically at different kinds, racism, misogyny, white nationalism, Islamism, anti-LGPT QIA, anti-government sentiment. And then yeah, the ADL looks a lot of anti-Semitism and white supremacy. And that's not, you know, every form of extreme ideology, but it's the big ones that we're seeing both in the world today, but also reflected in gaming spaces. Okay. So across the spectrum, how does this work? So how do I actually, I'm playing a game. How do extremist ideas or maybe these kind of social connections get spread through the game? Yeah. So we have a lot of ideas about how it works, but there was a research paper that came out last year from Daniel Kohler, who's a German colleague who went through two police reports of two 14-year-old boys who were radicalized through games. Specifically, it was Roblox, they were playing Roblox and they met someone in the game and they liked them and they played with them over time. And then with no mention of political ideology, there was just like some cool dude they were playing with. And then they said, "Hey, I like your style. Do you want to come join this discord? I'm a part of." And when they joined the discord, so they moved from the game into a third party space, which we think is kind of an important point that happens there with radicalization. The discord was populated with people who already had more extreme ideologies and the fact that it was a political space became very evident very quickly. And then they started making asks of the boys, like, "Hey, this racist meme, isn't it funny? Why don't you make a meme?" Or then they said, they asked them to go to school and perform the Nazi salute at school, which is a really big deal because they're German and you can't do that in Germany. It's illegal. But they did it and that kind of raised the alarm bells for everyone around them. And then their friends on their discord said, "Go enact some verbal violence." And that's when the boys said, "Ah, maybe this is too much." And they went to the police. But what was really interesting in the police reports was that they both actively said, "I knew what they were asking of me was wrong and I didn't want to do it, but I just wanted to be friends with them." And so I did it. So were these, these are two separate incidences or are two kids who were friends and one incident? Two kids who were friends that were incited by the same kind of recruiter perspective. Right, right. So they were, they were in this together. So they had each other to back them up, which, which probably helped them get out of it and actually go to the police. I think, I would think that is a really good point. Yeah. So it's very interesting too that like you can sort of measure their kid's morality versus the social pressure to like, I don't, I just made this friend and I don't want to lose this friend. Right. Like you can see like as the asks ramped up. You could see the gears turning. That was the tipping point. Right. Right. It was a specific tipping point. Right. Yeah. Can I just say like as, as a parent, I'm, I'm so incredibly shocked we're talking about Roblox as our starting point here, as opposed to, you know, Counter-Strike or any kind of first person military shooter, we, I would think the culture would be separate. We're talking about middle school boys or, or, or actually you didn't, did you say boys or kids? They were boys. They are boys. Yeah. Actually is there. It's funny that we assume. Yeah. It is funny that assume and we, and I'm sure statistically that's not an accident, but let's, let's verify that statistically. Are we talking about recruitment a lot more of boys than girls, or is it, or are we talking about, let's say, let's say age wise, we started with kids. Is kids the norm here or the exception? I love you ask this question. Kids tend to be the ones we talk about when we talk about fears, but they're recruiting all ages. So the younger ones would have the advantage of, in theory, being more vulnerable to these ideologies and more susceptible, whereas the older people have more means in ways. So we look at people like the Buffalo shooter was in their mid thirties, right? That was somebody who was actively kind of brought into ideologies as an adult. So it's not necessarily one or the other. I wouldn't, I wouldn't even say that I've seen statistics that say it's predominantly one or the other. It's really everyone is at, is at risk if they have some kind of vulnerability to this kind of ideology. I suspect the tactics may be a little bit different depending on what, what sort of aspect of the person you are trying to exploit. I believe that that is true. But at the end, it comes down to social connection and friendship. Yeah. Either way. Wow. That's interesting. So at the end, it's just about building trust. And a hundred percent. Loyalty. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. That's really interesting. You mentioned kind of the age in terms of the sex, is that also, you know, roughly the same or is there a bigger focus on males? I'm trying to think about the research that I've seen. I think it's tend, it has tended to be male focus, but I don't know if that's because it is that way or that's just the way the work is. And also a lot of extremism, like there's a great report that came out from Jessica White and some other colleagues that discussed how misogyny is kind of the underlying thread that ties all the extremist ideologies together. So like Islamism, white nationalism, any form of race, like they all kind of share this idea of misogyny, which would preclude women from being included in the group, I suppose. Right. Interesting. Right. Okay. Now, we talked about kind of how this can work with Discord, right? Yeah. It's a great game. They can take you to the Discord. There's a lot more conversation. The Discord could be open to people outside of, well, everything anywhere in the world. So you're going beyond games. What about Twitch? Is Twitch related to this in any way or involved in this in any way? Yeah. You know, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue did a report in 2019 looking specifically at Twitch and its role in white nationalism, white supremacy kind of ideology sharing. And they found it happens in two ways, actually three ways. You can play a game that's made specifically for propaganda dissemination. There are these games that are being made in people's basements that are like awful games, but they're made to kind of push these ideologies like they're really hateful and racist. And let's stop people from Mexico crossing the border into Texas and we're just going to like shoot them all like games kind of like that. It could be people playing popular games like Roblox or Minecraft or whatever to bring people in. And then their voice, what they're talking about are things related to extreme ideologies. And then there could be the use of the technology itself. There's a thing called hate rating, which is when you take everyone in your channel and you suddenly infiltrate somebody else's channel, but rather than doing it to foster goodwill, you're doing it to spread hate and harass the people who are there. So you can also use the technology of the platform. Can you explain that real quick? Yeah. So, um, rating is a function of Twitch. Usually people do it when they're signing off for the day and they'll say, okay, well, I'm leaving, but Andy over there, he's still streaming. So we're going to rate Andy's channel. Let's all go over there. Hey, Andy, let's go hang out with him. And that's very common. Nearly everyone does that, but hate rating would be cool if you were doing it for friendly reasons. Oh, people love it. Oh, I just got rated by my friend. This is great. Um, hate rating is when you're like, oh, there's Andy. There's something about him. I just don't like, he is nice to women. So we're going to go to Andy's channel and we're going to go in there and we're going to say these awful, horrible, hateful things to him and expose all of his community, uh, to this hateful rhetoric. So that's, that's hate rating. Right. Okay. Wow. I'm going to make my channel an ugly place for my, for making an ugly place for you and your community. Yep. That's terrible. Uh, I want to, I want to go back partly because we started this conversation by talking about take this and moral panics and stuff like that. Uh, do I need to panic about my child playing roblox and Minecraft since you, since you use both of those examples is somewhat principal examples. I did. Um, well, I think that there's really important that parents know who their kids are playing with. I don't think the game itself matters as much, although I did mention, you know, like shooter games and military simulators tend to have higher rates of, um, hateful rhetoric and tend to have higher prevalence of this kind of extremist action happening, but it can happen literally anywhere. And I think the panic, you should be panicked if you don't know who your kids are playing with regardless of where they're playing. Yeah. It's the internet. It's not, it's not a good place. Right. It's the internet. You don't want your kids playing in it. Yeah. All right. And, uh, obviously Minecraft and, uh, Roblox both have settings for your kids, uh, that can allow you to decide, uh, you know, how much communication they can have with other people. For sure. Yeah. Lots of platforms have these settings. You know, you can like my children love Minecraft. My children play Minecraft all the time, but never on a setting in which they're engaging with strangers. They're also really young. Um, so they play on like private servers with people they know in the real, in the real world. Correct. Like their cousins. Yeah. Very much it. Yeah. But you know, as you get older, you have to loosen the reins, right? Like you don't have to. Right. So that's why it's really important as parents to keep a pulse on like, what are you doing? Who are you with? Why are you doing it? How are you liking it? Um, and having that open line of dialogue. So if you're always panicked about games, your kids aren't going to want to come up to you and be like, this guy I met on Roblox is kind of weird. Um, because the, you know, they might think you're going to freak out or those lines of dialogue aren't open. So I think it's really important just to talk about it. They're going to lose the ability to play the game. Right. Right. Yeah. I think that it's horribly ironic that hate has figured out how to hack the feature in our brains that allows us to make friends, you know, but, you know, that's not traditional recruitment happened. I mean, like localized groups, like, um, uh, one dimension, because everyone kind of has a touch point to it is like Al-Qaeda, right? So it was, they were geographically close in proximity, right? And friendships were made in bonds reform and then together they mobilized for horrible actions. This is just on a much grander, larger global scale and almost without an ideology. Not quite though. They all have ideologies, but like we mentioned, like misogyny, right? It doesn't have to be quite as localized or geographically specific and ideology can really just be like women. Speaking of women, um, let's talk about, uh, what's the relationship here with gaming's uh, very, uh, famously, uh, toxic culture, which includes women, women, I say that, but I don't want to downplay misogyny is actually super hateful and an awful ideology. It's more than just at women, but yeah, um, misogyny is the underlying threat of gaming culture. I mean, if we think about gamer game 2014, that was really kind of the motivating factor behind all the hate that that originally happened. Absolutely. Yeah. Straight up. Right. It's not even that. It's not even hidden. It's a known fact. Um, and so, you know, this idea and this kind of culture of gaming, um, is, yeah, it's very evident. Like if you ask anyone, even, even my mom would know that gamer culture is associated with like a disdain for women. Now, does that mean that, uh, gamer culture is particularly prone then because of this to recruitment? Yeah. I mean, I believe so. I think that you can play on that culture. I call it a cultural asset of influence because it's like, we can both lean on the fact that we're both gamers and, you know, what gamers are, they're people who don't like women or don't like people who aren't white or don't like people who aren't heterosexual and then together we can kind of like bond over that idea. Right. Cause once, once I bought into the idea that I'm a gamer because gamers are cool, then somebody else can define what gamer is and I have to go, all right, well, I guess I've that too. Exactly. Oh, that. And so now we're talking about identity. So, uh, so, you know, we've to us how we connect this idea of the gamer identity with the idea of identity fusion, right? And the way identity fusion kind of acts in relation to extremist recruitment within games. Yeah. So a lot of us have our social identities, right? Gamer would be a social identity and those tend to be separate. So if I talk about Rachel as an individual and I talk about Rachel as a gamer and it's separate, but sometimes they fuse and the best example I can give is Marines. My dad was a Marine. Once a Marine, always a Marine. There was no lines between my dad as an individual and my dad as a Marine. So identity fusion is interesting for two reasons, one, it forms when you tend to have shared values and experience a series of stress building, uh, exercises together, a lot of shared experiences, um, which we know games are like that. And the other thing interesting about fusion is if fusion happens, you tend to be more likely to self-sacrifice for group goals. So I will do something that hurts me, Rachel, if it means something great for gamers, um, which is again, in line with military, um, how you would imagine military, um, identities to be. So we looked at identity fusion among gamers and we found that fusion does happen, uh, with gaming culture and that it reflects the toxic gamer culture that we've come to know. So higher fusion with gaming culture was associated with higher rates of racism, misogyny, uh, endorsement of beliefs of white nationalism, um, Machiavellianism, which is a personality trait associated with being cynical and deceitful, uh, recent aggressive behaviors, kind of like the whole kind of spectrum that you would imagine. And it was not influenced by gender and it was not influenced by years, um, that they've spent gaming. So it, to me, it was really interesting. So it didn't matter if you were a man or woman or how long you played games, but it did matter how often you played games, which to me would suggest it's again about exposure to the social community and how often you're exposed to that and, and bringing those own ideas into your own. And it's probably true too that if, if you play games every day that don't expose you to that community, if you just play solo games, you're probably not in the group. Yes. And, and we followed up actually, we looked at call of duty players versus Minecraft players without exact reasons. We were very curious. Now at the time, my hypothesis was called duty is more toxic of a social environment than Minecraft. And we tested for that and that was true. And we found that that profile emerged more strongly with call of duty players than Minecraft players. But then I was like, well, also it's a first person shooter and it's kind of militaristic and there might be other kinds of things that play, but there was a difference which suggested is not uniform. You are correct. Like it's going to be different across groups. Right. Um, can I just, uh, I want to go back to something we talked about earlier before we recorded. You compared this to, uh, uh, this kind of recruitment to grooming in a sense. I did. Yeah. Can you explain that? Yeah. So I think a lot of people have a hard time understanding how recruitment for extremism can happen online, but a lot of people have some kind of understanding about how grooming for sexual exploitation of children happens online. And it really is the same kind of idea like this, we call it in the research a radicalization funnel where you start out wide and you slowly funnel in until you find like the most vulnerable person that you can then exploit in some way. So it's grooming, but for violence. Okay. So we got this problem and it's a very tough problem. Yeah. Okay. So, um, and also we're starting to blur the idea, the difference between recruiting and grooming. Uh, yes. All right. But grooming would be about like shifting ideology and then actually recruiting would be mobilizing. I suppose. Okay. To action. Okay. Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah. So, um, all right. So I'm thinking, uh, Jesus is already so much toxicity in video games and doing something about it is very, very difficult. We had an episode where our guest talked about ways that we might try to fight it and called this a, an absolutely wicked problem, uh, that seemed almost impossible to, to actually effectively tackle, um, and yet you're working on a project funded by the department of homeland security in the United States, uh, where the goal is to do just that, help fight extremism in games. So what do you do? So let's start with, uh, what is already being done right now to fight extremism in gaming? Uh, not much, I'm going to say, not to like be a downer, but really, um, there was a recent research project that came out of UC Irvine that actually read the terms of service, like went through the fine lines of the terms of service of many of the major gaming companies and only one listed extremism as an actionable offense in their terms of service. And it was Roblox actually, um, who actually had it listed. So, um, step one is acknowledging the problem, which we still haven't quite gotten there. Um, so when you ask what we're doing, it's like, well, we're not even really formally acknowledging the problem. And you know, when I show up to talk into groups, I will say most people are kind of like, oh, like they're not like super psyched to see me. Um, um, but I will say, we're always very excited. Oh, you are excited. Yes. Um, I will say the industry does a lot to tackle toxicity and it really is about building on the infrastructure. They've already established, like they're aware they don't want their spaces to be full of hate speech. They don't want their spaces to be ones that are exploited for awful things. So they are on board and they do really, I don't want to discredit, like they do a lot of work in that space. So this is just about getting the subject matter expertise to tweak the current strategy to address this specific problem. So is, is the, is the pushback just because it's expensive and hard? It's expensive and hard and you need a business case because they're beholding the shareholders and how's this going to make the money. And I think there's also a lot of assumptions, which I believe are false assumptions that the toxic player is their core player base. Um, when really it's just a loud minority from, from the research that we can tell the actual perpetration is very much a minority, they're just, they just do it a lot and they're really loud. Um, right. So it's about making the case of like lost, lost money, like who, how many people are not playing your game because of the reputation that, that we can all think of a game that we don't play because the reputation is awful. Right. Do you have a sense of how, how, how big that minority actually is? Um, well, for my work, perpetration is less than 5% of people that we see, which I'm not going to say. That seems like good news. I mean, 5% is too much, but it's less than you'd imagine and I'm not going to say that as representative of everything. Like I didn't study everyone, um, but it's far more common. Like witnessing is like more than 50% because one person can do a lot of, can spread a lot. Right. Right. And so, you know, if 25 people, the 25% of the people can, can acknowledge that they've witnessed it. Right. I mean, it's probably 60% people have seen it and most of them haven't realized it. Yeah. Or just think it's just, that's just how they do it here. That's not actually something problematic. Right. Right. So, I'm assuming that number is higher in certain games, right? That have more. Certainly. Yes. Certainly. So, I mean, given that one person can essentially alienate, piss off, annoy, right? Lots of other people, is there, um, can we get you on the record to say that there is little truth to the claim that they would be alienating their game, their, uh, gaming base if they actually took action or is that a game by game kind of situation? If this is the business case against. I would feel confident saying that they are not alienating their primary, uh, market. The market is huge. Just 3 billion people who play games. Right. Right. I mean, I would say that. Like, officially, which is the problem. I'm getting there. I'm working on it. I'm working on it. Come back to me any year and we'll see if I have any questions. All right. Right. Is it, is it a problem? Is it also sort of a trickle down from, uh, sort of a tech industry, libertarian, laissez-faire kind of thing, you know, because these sorts of cultural things sort of, you know, come from the top, right? Yeah. What a great point. And so, the games are part of the tech industry and the tech industry is typically very, like, I don't want people to impose any sort of rules on me. And so, I don't want to impose rules on my players on what they can say and what they can do. Yeah. And so, therefore, we create these spaces that are available. Well, there's two things that reminds me of, one is that, you know, the culture of games and the culture of game studios definitely have a reciprocal relationship. Like we've seen in recent years, the headlines of like Riot Games and Blizzard and like the kind of, you know, environments that people are working in. And so, it's like kind of no surprise that like culture also kind of resonates in that way. But the other thing you mentioned is like, it is, there's a very specific American issue because we have, you know, freedom of speech and it's, you know, above all, that's, that's kind of the rule. So, there's definitely a hesitancy or an outright refusal to like limit speech in any way for that. But that when it comes to the incitement of violence and terrorism, it's really a slippery slope. I went to this event in London last year about terrorism and extremism, and lots of different delegations were there. US was there, New Zealand was there, Australia was there. And the Americans were telling a story about a YouTube video that was a clip of all of the major kind of terrorist attacks that had happened in the last 10 years. There was clips of Christ Church and Buffalo and whatever. And there was a voice overlay that was really like a call to action, like, oh, our brothers and sisters, like we should keep doing this stuff. This is great. Or whatever it was. And they're like, but we don't take it down because it's freedom of speech. And New Zealand was next to me and they looked at me and they're like, oh, yeah, no, we take that down. Like, we're not gonna let that stay. So, it's really an interesting dichotomy. Right. I mean, even here in the US, you can't incite violence. That's specifically not legal. I guess it didn't hit the threshold of incitement for violence, but it is, yeah. Incitement for violence is, I mean, you know, there's ambiguity there. And my students are definitely unaware of the way speeches viewed in other countries in really, really different ways. It's kind of like, they view it as either you have the totalitarian countries that just censor you freely or you have like anything goes virtually, you know, everything's protected by the First Amendment. Right. There's no sense of the grayscale between those. Right. Right. So, how different countries try to balance these sorts of things. And of course, it's interesting that in the United States, it's interesting when I teach about libertarianism. And I've had quite a few libertarian game students, you know, game design students that really go into this, but when I teach about libertarianism, a lot of times my international students are just like, what the hell is this? But America's understand it really easily, right? Because we have things like the First Amendment. And a lot of times we treat problems like this as, God, these are just unfortunate things you can't do anything about because, you know, people should be able to talk to whoever they want to because the cost of stuff and that is too high. And I think this is one of those things that. Yeah. But it's one of those things because it's like, where are you going to draw the, are you never going to draw the line anywhere ever? Because what came out of that discussion was that they were like, we agree that it's wrong, but we want YouTube to take it down because it breaks their terms of service. And it's like, right, right. And you also have this kind of situation where, well, here you have these game companies and the game companies are not bound by the First Amendment, right? But they are, but they are part of a certain culture if they're, especially if they're American game companies and that culture is, as Andy said, you know, more libertarian leaning. But at the end of the day, they're also bound by the requirement to return shareholder profit. So they do kind of want to watch what their spaces are doing. And then God, who knows, maybe they also have a responsibility to protect people, you know, besides how the profit is going to go. So the competition is so fierce that even if I lose 5% of my people, that might mean that I stop being the number one spot. Well, yeah, here's the thing, like we don't have much time left together, friends, and I want to make sure to make this point, which is the people in the industry genuinely care. I don't want to give the impression they don't. I sit in these rooms with them and they genuinely, like bleeding heart, realize that this is a problem, most of them. But they say, I am beholden to the bottom line. So that's really the hard part of like, okay, how do you make this a business case to where it's like we can match your ethics and like where you care with like actually making actionable change in this space? We need to target the boards. The boards. Right. Yeah. You know, make, you know, make this an important feature of your company. So Rachel, so let's talk about how, what can be actually done? How do we deal with this problem in the gaming world? How do we deal with this problem? One, I think even just a public acknowledgement of it not being an accepted in your space, like it's like the conversations I have, don't have the rule, don't be a dick. Like have the rule, like we will not have explicitly hate speech. We will not have explicitly this and make it actionable and make it consistently actionable and then be transparent about it. So Xbox just released their second transparency report. They released one like six months ago. They're the only major gaming studio to release these transparency reports about what is happening, how is it being actioned, what actions are we taking and what do we see. And I think having that shared knowledge is the first step to really understanding the scope of the problem, how it's being taken care of and what tools are at hand. So that would be. Yeah. That's great. Yeah. This is our original case with Roblox, right, where it's a lot more of a, hey, let's move. Let's become friends and move to our discord. So it's so hard to do anything about that. It's really hard, but I will say that there is some ongoing work in the European Union that's looking towards how do you create resources for law enforcement to action post report, which is not ideal. You still have to get a report, which is really the problem because making friends feels good and who's going to report that. But even when it does get to the reporting phase, there's like this weird space where like people don't really know what to do about it. So there is some work happening, but you're right, that is a way harder problem. But we can start with the low hanging fruit because we have like nothing really at the moment. Right. It could be. It seems like there could also be some sort of campaign. If you're making games that, that especially for, for kids to like, hey, teach the kids about stranger danger, you know, like your parents and real. I agree. I mean, I would love whoever's listening. I would love to be part of a PSA for digital citizenship and digital literacy. Like I don't understand why we don't have the equivalent of like only you can prevent forest fires, but for digital engagement with, with other people, like it's, it's beyond me that we haven't had that yet, but like desperately we need it. Speaking of, uh, so extremism is, uh, you know, it's a problem bigger than gaming. And obviously you get, you know, departments like Homeland Security that deal with extremism and extremism and they're funding the research that you're doing. Yeah. Uh, does this mean that, uh, they also see a role for the government to, uh, help fund, uh, essentially some sort of a fight against extremism in games, or do they see this as ultimately just a responsibility of game companies? No, they are funding that. They're funding the development of counterterrorism, PCV, they call it prevention and counterterrorism games. So I think that it's, it's a both, right? Like we have seen letters from the government now, a few senators have written very public letters to, to members of the gaming industry being like, what are you doing about extremism? Because I do think the industry absolutely has a role to play. Um, but so does the government. Last, last one, um, Rachel, um, you asked me before we, we did this to, uh, to, to ask you one final question that I, I am dying to ask you, what does any of this have to do with the Witcher? Oh, my favorite question, you know, this is why you guys keep me coming back. What does this house to do with the, what doesn't it have to do with the Witcher? I mean, let's be honest, there's a recasting situation we could talk about. There's, you know, yeah, everything all roads lead to the Witcher. So I appreciate that question. So no answers, no answer, what's it have to do with the Witcher? Nothing, the Witcher is wonderful and perfect. Oh, okay. And the Witcher makes me happy after a long day of staring at Nazi propaganda. The Witcher brings me joy, that's the Witcher has to do with it. All right. Uh, Rachel, uh, one final thing, um, yes, can you, um, what do you want to live our listeners with? And if you can keep it short under a minute or so, um, games are generally more good than bad, but yes, there are bad things happening. You know, if you are a parent, please have a touchstone with your children about what's happening online. And if you want to learn more about the science of games and what is actually happening, you can find me on my YouTube channel, site guys, where I have lots of information, um, readily available. All right. Rachel cohort. Thank you. Once again. Thank you. You're present. All right. Hey, good podcast, uh, GP, play dice, everybody. Thank you for listening to the ethics and video games podcast. 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