🎮🕹️⌨️ Fortnite squads, Discord servers, and channels of deep connection
Sijal Nasralla takes us beyond likes and shares toward something that feels more like community
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In the newsletter this week, we turn to Sijal Nasralla, an organizer and gamer who is also the Director of Learning and Analysis at the Kairos Fellowship. Sijal is also an outspoken activist, and as a nonpartisan organization, we think it's important to share different perspectives about how folks across the ideological spectrum are navigating the dynamic and ever-evolving social internet.
Below, Sijal takes us to video games at the turn of the century, the state of multiplayer gaming today, and the different corners of what he calls the “Gaming Media Landscape.”
Let’s dial in!
–Josh Kramer, Head of Editorial, New_ Public
As a digital community organizer by training, I’ve spent the past 10 years trying to exploit the limited features that social media offers for political engagement and organizing. I learned how to broadcast written content for digital audiences in a way that could drive petitions, stack grassroots dollars, and grow lists into the millions.
However, while the bigger social platforms afforded me scale and growth, a few key ingredients of organizing were consistently lost: depth, relationality, and community.
It wasn’t until recently, after looking deeply at my own online social life, that I stumbled on an epiphany in a lifelong pastime: Video games are a huge part of the social internet, and potentially a way to recapture some of what I’ve been missing on social media.
A majority of Americans play multiplayer games: Competing on global leaderboards of free-to-play mobile games, building little worlds on Minecraft to share with their Discord server, or dropping into a island with 99 complete strangers to compete for a victory crown in Fortnite.
And gamers use social media to connect over what they’re playing. The consequences of toxic gamer culture are well-documented — the Gamergate harassment campaigns of a decade ago still linger. But what’s less known, and worth examining, are the ways that social gaming and the platforms around it have enabled some powerful social movements and connection.
This includes everything from raising capital for fundraisers and mutual aid, building protest movements around cultural and political flashpoint moments, and forging deep connections in moments of crisis. It’s clear to me that engaging with gaming and politics is much more than yelling “Pokemon Go to the polls!”
I think it’s vital to try and understand the Gaming Media Landscape as well as its miraculous opportunities, and devastating consequences, for the social internet of today.
The Journey Begins
One of the earliest moments of life I remember was witnessing my uncle triumphantly defeat Bowser in Super Mario World. Our whole multigenerational home burst into celebration as 16-bit fireworks splashed across the living room TV and Princess Peach was lovingly returned to her castle on the back of a Yoshi. Video games changed me, and I’m not alone.
LAN (Local Area Network) parties of the early 2000s, where everyone played the same game on connected consoles or computers, were particularly inspiring. Halo LAN parties with friends became one of the key highlights of my social life. I loved crowding into small rooms with my friends, with wires and sneakers strewn around old CRT TVs and Xbox consoles. We called each other by our gamer handles almost exclusively. We felt the elation of winning and the burden of loss. We cheered each other on and teased one another long into the night.
When I recall those times — I’m almost 40 now — I rarely remember the details of the games. More often than not, I remember my friends, the places we played, the food we ate, the jokes we made, and the feeling of being there.
To a large extent I fell off of multiplayer gaming in my teens and 20s. Video games became less of a communal hangout and more of another personal hobby and pastime.
In 2023, a small Fortnite community on Discord changed a lot of that for me.
Play becomes the organizing practice
I found myself on Discord, the largest social media network dedicated to gaming communities, with over 200 million global monthly users and over 90% of its user base being gamers.
One of the channels in the Discord server I joined was dedicated to Fortnite — a massive (108 million in the U.S.), online battle royale style game that can be played on almost anything.
I joined a network of friends playing Fortnite so regularly that we gave ourselves the name “BattleBuds,” created a unique onboarding process for new players, and volunteered hosting private server matches to play in 100-person lobbies. That good LAN party feeling was suddenly back for us in a big, new way.
And beyond the digital Fortnite islands, several BattleBuds were affiliated with the Writers Guild of America strike and hitting the IRL picket line, including improv comedian Heather Anne Campbell (the Discord server is for fans of her podcast, “Get Played”). My new friends were protesting, pausing projects, and playing an obscene amount of Fortnite.
The energy was invigorating, with many BattleBuds frequently talking about politics and sharing resources and updates from the bargaining table in voice chat. Within two months of joining, I racked up over 200 hours of gameplay, many new friends, and a lot of new ideas of how to communicate political ideas on the social internet, through gaming.
This kind, fun, and politically engaged community, who loved spending time with each other dressed up as wacky pop-culture avatars doing TikTok dances, became a seed for much bigger questions. Through my online life as an artist, organizer, gamer, and more, I began asking questions about gaming, social features, digital community formation, and political organizing online.
Where are others spending time online in the world of video games, and what is the connective tissue?
What features does multiplayer gaming offer us that social platforms do not?
Could a political project in multiplayer gaming begin by simply being fun?
If a well-organized, fun, and politicized digital community formed organically through this one fandom, what else could we build if we try?
Features of the Gaming Media Landscape
I came up with the term Gaming Media Landscape to describe where gamers exist online. The GML is a broad information ecosystem of interactive platforms, channels, and content that shape how gamers communicate, create, and play.
Gamers want to connect. Their online formations are never exclusively centered around the game itself. Influencers, fandoms, lore chats, fanfiction, social videos, message boards, collector trading, and nostalgia dumps are all fragments of gaming’s online manifestations.
Social platforms that appeal to gamers — mainly Discord and Reddit (the r/gaming subreddit boasts 46 million subscribers) — tend to offer the most opportunities for interactivity, horizontal play, and community-specific moderation.
Both platforms are important sites for multiplayer gamers because it allows them to interact dynamically in ways that mirror the highs of social gaming. Gamers trade nostalgic stories, boast about competition, build new relationships, and trade humorous bits in ways that exceed far beyond the shallowness of a like, comment, or follow.
Gamers want to flip between niche and broad interests, interact live in voice channels, connect platforms to other gaming-based apps, get exciting new content or loot to play with, moderate what happens in their spaces, and customize to their heart’s content.
Where these features offer profound opportunities for relationality, there are also significant consequences to these added layers of connection, both in terms of how gamers have exhibited toxic behavior towards each other, and also in how outside institutions have co-opted these networks for their own ends.
Not all gaming communities are prosocial, and some are about as harmful as you can imagine, from bullying and harassment to real world physical harm in the form of doxxing and swatting.
It’s also become clear to me that I’m not the only activist interested in reaching audiences and pursuing a political agenda through video games. Corporations, militaries, and far-right actors have exploited features of the GML to create worlds, nurture messengers, and introduce strategies that have influenced chatrooms, streams, and message boards for years. Reporters and researchers have done important work surfacing these efforts, including how influence is purchased by aligning with content creators and streamers.
Activism and gaming
However, I think that the social features used by gamers also offer opportunities to be used in positive, prosocial ways. While the largest social platforms continue to demonstrate their lack of interest in democratic process or co-governance, there are ways for activists to keep pace and use those features.
Play, interaction, customization, and moderating our digital communities with dignity and respect can create alternative networks of belonging, kindness, and solidarity that will stand toe-to-toe with the mobs who spawn in waves at any scent of “wokeness.”
I believe it’s possible to be sensational in kindness, curiosity, care, and solidarity. There is a thirst for well-organized and powerful digital communities, centered around belonging and purpose, that goes beyond one-off events or charitable altruism. It will take work and experimentation, but it’s possible to build.
I have been experimenting in the Gaming Media Landscape for the last few years and I’ve come to see that so much is possible: Deep organizing tests based on genuine participation and play to build powerful, fun, and purposeful digital communities. Organize-and-recruit efforts with players from the popular satirical war game Helldivers 2. Memes that spark meaningful political conversations among gamers on popular message boards.
I’ve learned so much from streaming experiments or just gaming on Twitch, co-moderating Discord servers, and interviewing academics, gamers, and organizers in the GML.
I’ve landed on specific and actionable ways for organizers, cultural workers, and communicators to reach gamers — rooted in experimentation, the affordances of social features in gaming, and the practices of conservative and civil society organizations. Now, I’m excited to train, coach, and encourage others in progressive politics to engage with these tactics.
The Fortnite-ification of Things
My findings and analysis have pointed in one direction for the next two years: activists need to play and create in Fortnite. To be clear, no game is perfect, let alone one as huge as Fortnite — the game is incentivized towards toxicity, and often makes bafflingly crass decisions like creating an AI Darth Vader NPC with the voice of deceased actor James Earl Jones.
And yet, I think it’s important to meet people where they are and take advantage of Fortnite’s massive player base and cultural influence, which are still growing. The game presents a huge opportunity for relationship building and political organizing.
It is often one of the top 10 most watched and streamed games in the world and is designed to be fun and socially incentivizing for a wide range of play styles. Whether you want to rank on a global leaderboard, build fun worlds for your trendy avatars to dance Gangam style, or just consume the funny reels made within the platform, Fortnite has you covered.
Other games are trying to emulate Fortnite's model of free-to-play, endless playstyles, open-source customization, and constant trendy content drops. Most recently, Disney announced its investment in Fortnite and its publisher, EPIC Games. That partnership is likely to scale up the popularity, appeal, and accessibility of the game. My (overly simplified) plans for the next few years in Fortnite include:
Stewarding a positive, supportive, and compassionate Discord for Fortnite players.
Sponsoring professional players and content creators who share progressive values to attract attention to activist participation in the GML.
Using Fortnite Creative to build levels and lobbies for connection and political education that help gamers articulate their wants and needs for activists to campaign on.
Creating opportunities for solidarity through a community of fun and belonging.
If you are a gamer, developer, content creator, moderator, or just someone who wants to help, learn more about, or co-create any of the above, do not hesitate to hit me up.
Like the LAN parties of old (now making a comeback btw), we can unite around play, humor, support, nostalgia, and the thrill of competition. We can create memorable experiences that help us know one another in the deepest possible sense that the internet affords. We can scaffold and rebuild our digital relationships to become practiced in caring about what happens to one another and consistently do something about it in a big way.
–Sijal Nasralla
Thanks Sijal!
Digging out the Nintendo 64,
–Josh
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Interesting, but I'm surprised you didn't quote Cory Doctorow or work through his insights. He literally wrote multiple books on this premise. For the Win is nearly all about organizing online, Big Brother features online game based organizing well too. It should be noted that terrorist/guerilla organizations have been using online platforms to communicate for years.