There’s a lot going on with the title of this book that points to many contentious aspects of the current political climate in the United States. The gaming here, Massanari tells us, is not just about the playing of video games, but the way right wingers will game online interactions to their benefit. These places are not the oft-cited public square, but they are places where people contest democracy, whether through the Big Lie of the 2020 U.S. election, or other, related myths. The subtitle lets you know it’s not just the individuals using these platforms who are involved in this process—the companies that make these interactions possible have done plenty to give right-wing voices a higher volume in these spaces. The tech broligarchs have, through ostensibly politically neutral choices, made it possible for the far right to min-max their influence on society. None of these outcomes are accidental.
Two helpful concepts Massanari discusses throughout the text are geek masculinity and dark play. Each has a role to play in the process described above. For geek masculinity, Massanari explains how figures such as Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg have become wealthy and powerful not through physical prowess or social graces, but through their (alleged) technical know-how and knowledge. She traces the idea of the triumphant nerd (or geek, she notes that she uses the terms interchangeably) at least back to ‘80s movies such as Revenge of the Nerds, Weird Science, and Sixteen Candles. Where she takes Lori Kendall’s idea of geek masculinity a step further is in discussing how it has boomeranged back into appified health and fitness regimens, so it's now possible to be a brogrammer and a geek all at once. Gotta chase those sick gains at the gym and then power through some coding for your latest software push. Measure and maximize everything, or you’re just wasting time! And, if you do make those gains and get that promotion, it’s because you worked, not because you happen to be a cishet white dude. So, being able to use technology to prove masculine prowess is part of the deal now.
Dark play, a concept articulated by Richard Schechner, entails a game in which all parties may not realize they are playing or what success looks like. Massanari contrasts this idea with how animals or pets might fight. Cats and dogs are enacting a playful version of life-or-death combat and know when to stop. Foxes or wolves know when the tension has escalated too highly. In dark play, those participating may not all realize a game is being played, or that they are participating in it. If they do come to realize that play is happening, they will find the rules to be “not just mutable, but unstated and contradictory” (p. 101). In some sense, middle and high schools are a haven of dark play, given that what is cool or funny or interesting is subject to these same flexible rules. There are arenas where this competition gets even more harmful, too.
Maybe you can start to see how boys and men can use their geek masculinity to engage in dark play through social media sites to game certain outcomes that they find beneficial and that are punitive toward anyone who cannot play by those ambiguous rules. This take is not my construction; Massanari spends most of the book discussing various examples of how these two concepts came together to help right-wing ideas become part of the national discourse. Some salient examples are Gamergate (of course!), Donglegate (new to me!), and r/The_Donald (cesspit). In each of these cases, the way geeks and nerds were able to assert control over the policies and moderation tools of various social media sites made them able to engage in harassment campaigns or political propagandizing. Anyone who may have interacted with the prime movers in these spaces may not have realized what they were up against until it was too late for them to prevent harm from spreading further.
There are plenty of other scintillating ideas in these pages as well. Before she gets into the fuller discussion of geek masculinity, Massanari describes some of the facets of cyberlibertarianism, one of which concerning how people talk about the physical space of the Internet. She explains how “the early web was variously described as an ‘electronic frontier,’ an ‘information superhighway,’ ‘cyberspace,’ and a ‘global village’—metaphors that recalled ‘uncivilized’ landscapes that needed to be tamed by pioneers and ‘cybernauts’” (p. 71). Given that the idea of unregulated access to these lands is part of the history of westward expansion in this country, it’s no wonder that tech bros chafe at any kind of legal consequence for their actions.
I always enjoy when the music I love shows up in unexpected places, and I’m glad to say there was a moment in Gaming Democracy where this was the case. In explaining how certain kinds of niche knowledge can be beneficial because they reveal social capital, Massanari uses the example of a record-collecting punk. I felt both seen and attacked when reading the example of how “a fan of hardcore punk might demonstrate high subcultural capital (after amassing a collection of rare seven-inch vinyl records by Minor Threat and authoring a popular zine about the genre) but might have relatively low cultural capital in the mainstream (as knowledge of punk rock is considered niche and is not value outside this particular subculture)” (p. 114). I mean, I only ever had the 12” that collected the two MINOR THREAT 7” records and my zines have never been “popular,” but I recognize myself in the description regardless. I don’t think the people at my job care about my ARTICLES OF FAITH or CAUSE FOR ALARM singles.
In all seriousness, this book is a powerful contribution to our shared understanding of what has been happening in alt-right spaces on the Internet and real life over the past few decades. It did not start with Gamergate, as Massanari acknowledges, but that moment did crystallize a few different patterns of behavior. The ultimate expression of the way dark play interacted with society is through the events of 1/6. As Massanari argues toward the conclusion of her book, this is an example of metagaming, or using knowledge beyond the game to gain an advantage within it. In that sense, the game (i.e., the election) was over, but the losing team did not recognize or accept the outcome, so they stormed the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the result. (Until I read this book, I hadn’t seen the Honkey Kong meme that overlays sprites from Donkey Kong onto some of the rioters climbing the walls outside the Capitol; I laughed.) She concludes by arguing that we should take seriously the threats these online spaces make while also working toward strengthening in-person communities and engaging in mutual aid. She finished this book before the 2024 U.S. election and the accompanying calculated pivots toward authoritarianism by the biggest names in Silicon Valley, so her advice only rings truer in the wake of those developments.
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