Abstract

Video games today captivate 3.6 billion players globally, while generating more revenue than the film and music industries combined. Once a niche form of entertainment, technological advances have turned gaming into a central medium of social interaction, community building, and identity formation. Designed to foster immersion and emotional attachment, video games and adjacent platforms have become ideal sites for advancing cultural and political narratives that have the potential to undermine established societal norms. As such, they provide fertile ground for the spread of content aimed at stimulating contestations of the liberal script. While right-wing extremists and jihadist groups have long targeted gaming communities for recruitment and indoctrination, recent reports suggest that authoritarian regimes might harness this potential at a far deeper level—by acquiring game developers abroad and tightening control over domestic ones. Experts have warned of serious vulnerabilities, such as foreign interference through information operations and the surveillance of user data. Yet, due to a "general lack of research," we still know little about how authoritarian takeovers impact video game content, and how such takeovers are perceived by gamers (Pamment et al. 2023, 5). The NPC project addresses this gap by investigating the extent to which authoritarian governments use video games as a potential site for contesting the liberal script. It asks three fundamental questions:

1. Which authoritarian regimes have invested in which video game studios?
2. Does authoritarian influence impact gaming content, and (how) do gamers react to changes in content?
3. How resilient or receptive are consumers to authoritarian games-washing?