 grateful for feedback. Gamification is awesome until it's no longer and when that happens is when the new right or alt-right advances the war on the fundamental laws of our society by the means of gamification. Our next speaker is going to take a closer look at how they're doing this doing that and give a warm round of applause to Anna Vogelsang. Hi, thank you so many people. I'm a bit anxious and also grateful to be able to speak here. It's not the greatest content for this time of day, so yet content-warning. By the nature of this talk it's about right-wing propaganda, racism, sexism, violence against women. I'm going to be talking about it but I will also show images and videos. I blurred some of the content but I didn't throw out all of it because I think it's important to understand how these cultural spheres that I will be talking about interact. But I know it's a difficult thing, reproduction of stuff, reproduction of stuff. I'm lucky to be white male and no victim of hate on the internet until now anyway. So if any of you are wrong-footed by this, don't feel scared to leave. I do understand. But otherwise, please stay. It's going to be going to be interesting. Also, sorry to the translations. I tend to speak a bit fast. I can imagine it's going to be difficult to translate but thanks for doing it anyway. Well, you are welcome. So let's get going. I made a plan of what we might look at. I looked at and thought it might be too much for the time we are allotted. So I threw out some of it. But I want to speak about half of the things I threw out anyway. There are some things I don't need to explain because this is a very special crowd. I don't have to tell you that gaming is the largest and soon the most influential culture industry in the world. They overtook the movies industry in 2014 and most of their revenue these days comes from mobile games. Clash of Clans had $6.4 billion in revenue. I never played it myself. But it's supposed to be a great game. It's the most successful app on the Apple Store. Millions of people worldwide play Minecraft. I'm not one of them either. This talk isn't really about games, though, or not even political games. We remember this. Concentration camp manager millennium. Not the predecessors from Nazi Germany or the war games that were spread in England. We won't either be speaking about the equivalents from the US market or fan games for real wars such as Quest for Saddam or the mod that the circle of Islamic State published. We won't be talking about school shooter North American tour 2012 where people who fancy school shootings can play through that. We won't be speaking about triple A war simulators, the normal games we play and love such as modern warfare that terrorists like to use to train. We won't be speaking about what we're speaking about real world soldiers either. Although the American army has computer games that they actually used for recruiting, we won't either be talking about the discourse that some parties are engaging in in Germany and have been engaging in for the past years. Gameification, euphemistically speaking, is the idea that we are all game designers of our own lives. Less euphemistically, you might say, it's a technique of ludicapitalism, so gamification is an interesting measure of customer loyalty building and it's popular on this new level of the economy where experiences are being sold rather than actual goods and can sell to not just customers but also to employees such as, for example, employees regard their own exploitation as fun. I don't think that society, a society that has these games has to be surprised if there are beliefs, wars about beliefs. Some examples that some of you might remember progress bars or where you can watch progress that allow you to watch a progress bar for hours and such things such as weight watchers that help in motivating yourselves, we can use it for political decisions or social decisions by finding the people who fit us with a simple swipe and this is kind of radar function where your future rantic partner is a bubble in your vicinity and this only works because all of us know Pokemon Go by now, so we can gamify movement in the public sphere and this of course gives these companies a massive basis of data and this of course allows for opportunities in cooperation. There's a, for example, companies can buy Pokemon hotspots and vicinity that's pervasive gaming but this can also be hacked such as the Nazis of the daily storm did in the United States because it allows them to recruit those who like to play games and those who like to take care of their own body and to prove that I'm not making this up this is the Pokemon Nazi challenge on daily stormer speaking of challenge since 2012 zombies run motivates joggers to run faster by pretending that they're being chased by zombies because that it's proven that this makes people run longer distances it works very well and those who don't want to run simply call an Uber and watch their employees watch their drivers gamifying their employees who in a way are breaking the first law of robotics there are gamification services and the tool sets for schools for example allowing them to gamify teaching there are gamified assessment centers where people may not get a job but a great candidate experience you can find serious results in scientific protein folding and most of you probably know capture the flag as a format at crypto tournaments that may allow you to reach an exploit a bit more quickly I don't want to talk about these principles in depth but the thing that is important in these lists but doesn't always show up is that games are supposed to be voluntary so people bring something that is called intrinsic motivation what happens if you use these techniques of voluntary engagement to stimulate political engagement and what might the consequences of that be in a society that tends to create larger and ever larger gamified worlds whether that's Disneyland or Facebook starting from a certain size these become political because people need rules but this happens along certain lines but these lines are given by society that control the by the corporations that have designed these societies and who are mainly motivated by profit if you want to be good at games you have to follow the rules or break them successfully or you have to get people to play the game successfully and I will be showing you some examples of this so most of you probably know the story but I'll tell it anyway if I succeed in that and it's going to be very shortened version of the story so 2012 the feministic girlfriend is a women's theory started and Kickstarter and she wanted to get $6,000 she got $60,000 and there was a lot of interest but she also got a lot of threats and there were games where people where you could beat her up and 2004 the text eventually person quest came out and the maker also was threatened and afterwards her ex-boyfriend was angry at her online and told everyone that she cheated on him and so from a small struggle within the game industry quickly they became a culture fight a full grown culture fight and that's seemingly between feminists and the feminists and some game industry industrials tried to destroy games and some right-wing people are the heroes who tried to save our games from them and here in this example one side was stalks so a lot of documents personal documents of them came out away leaked and they had to move and the discussion well it really escalated in English you call a place where wars fought a theater for war and here we can see that for someone some people it this theater of war can actually be a game or yeah so the theory that it was back then is hard to hold because actually it's still happening and a lot of this is happening this is one of the main stages and there were more than two million tweets with gamer hashtag gamertate gamer gates in two months and a lot of right-wing people soon realized that they could really use this for example bright bar to really push this topic and he really attacked Milo Yiannopoulos and he tweeted a lot about this and he soon started the progress of separating those who are ready to receive those right ideas and that what we call metapolitics in Europe got really started there and that was an important milestone for the self organization of the right-wing in the net one big point is fortune there and so called rates soon got caught a part of their culture and they were mostly a testing field for a gamification of this these structures sometime those rates turned into real-life phenomenon and that was against copyright lobbyists operation payback 2010 it was against Scientology before that and then there was occupy wall street and at the latest point that is when they separated into several streams and then in the u.s. an important soft drink producer asked his customer asked the customer what they should call their new drink and the poll was won by Hitler did nothing wrong which meant that they had to stop this campaign altogether and that means that they have a far greater reach than at the right wing has just a far greater reach than only the target audience then there was this goal to red pill fortune so they wanted to enlighten all the public how the whites are actually the suppressed minority or majority how we want to look at it and so they did this on a politically incorrect part on fortune and according people were posting and according to some pseudo random number of their post was decided what board would be red pill and according to what bought they would read pill they were already adjusting the the content and they were quite successful with this coordinated propaganda action the next big great was 2013 operation lollipop where they started on fortune and started a lot of fake accounts on Twitter and they called this social justice warriors so very extreme examples of black feminists or civil rights activists and they just turned it into the extreme to provoke adverse reactions 2014 one year later this escalated even further and even on fortune preparations for Gamergate and such actions were banned and the people who were so happily there they had made it a new place and that was the start of internet jen or hn the most attacks from 2014 started actually from wizard jen which was a small shootout from fortune today we call this in cells or fall cells but they called themselves with cells and the self image was that they were just wizards and intelligent and they couldn't deal with women because they were too clever and they just confirmed themselves and compensated for insecurities so but many people there actually suffered from real issues so actually the the fight was not just against a woman who destroyed a game or something but also against women who wanted to tell us something about depression and ought to tell the affected people something about the depression then this man is an important interesting player about this he actually then left hn and was sorry about what he did and I'm not showing this because it's about him but I'm showing it because it's an interesting picture and a lot of things come together here so a lot of types of men come together here one important part is also the pick-up scene that actually play the big game of picking up women and Angela Reschka had a talk about her game the game the game it's an interesting talk I can recommend it but this is actually a bit different because there's a darker side so there is no isolated life we all live together and so if one person says that the this life is just a game then the other people have no no say in it and all this topics well researched within the pick-up scene and they used all this knowledge extensively and they were using gamer set young man in the cellar in the basement and all these people came together and became active and one thing that they had in common is actually anti-semitism anti-semitism is always an option and I have this cracking oh yeah I've seen this cracking from digital courage the data Craig or doctor post that actually I don't like it maybe you can get rid of it then there's the memes there's Hitler memes anti-semitism memes white supremacy jokes paper the paper the frog and a lot of evolutions of these and actually it's a complete universe of different pathetic man a different versions of ma'am and there are some figures for the in-group and then others for those that don't belong in those are called NPCs that's the people who have no agency they that's people that follow on foreign scripts that have no choice that's the the good supposedly good people and so the enemy's got got their image and they became the enemy and I refer the stigma time well people radicalized themselves in fighting against those images and the heroes became holy man and the mass murder was in the first place some entertainment program on HN and when you look at the comments and the shitposts to the press the inside jokes from the side culture it was just entertainment and part of that was also that his own deed was a live stream and it was exemplary for many things that the right scene learned from others they use live streams for example but this was a first in that everything was streamed in his first person perspective so in the same way where you can watch and follow other people when they play a shooter and like a let's play us is how this is how I am playing how are you playing could you do it as well as I can and this is the message that he tries to also send when he is showing how he is doing it and this is just part of the game but he was actually just a copycat from andre privick and in the encyclopedia dramatica he still has the highest score for a first person shooter and the repeatability of this what those two mass murderers did is an important point about the game if it's not repeatable it's not a game but it's also very political so we have a long following of wannabe stand-up comedians or alone entertainment artists and then there was a lot of following if the first threat when the first threat of fans and followings of the Christchurch murderer was full they had to open up to 15 follow-up threats but then it just closed down then there are games where you can play Hitler or Mussolini or the murderer from Christchurch and the goal is to shoot feminists or civil rights activists or then different cities where Jews or Mexicans or different ethnicities were shot so the main thing is to shoot someone and the the shooter from Halle he took over some of these these points and it was supposed to be funny for the in-group and he also streamed everything on twitch which is a play a platform for let's plays mostly and he added another play formula that's crafting so he created his own weapons as well and in his document he says hey the whole deal is to show the viability of improvised guns of course there are of course people die but they're part of it anyway I want to show that people that we can be successful in this game even in countries where weapons aren't so easy to acquire the terrorists of Christchurch and a Paso posted their announcements on H&M that was that was taken down at the end the attacker from Oslo posted it on another Chan and then the attacker from Halle posted it on crowd Chan who then posted immediately pulled the plug and then it was posted on a small anime board that couldn't deal with it and the ensuing shitstorm but of course the people were still there the operators were still there but there was no longer a safe server and this meant that 1.7 users 7 million users had become immediately homeless and this now exists it's called 8 gun it's operated by the same person as 8 Chan before it's Jim Watkins this gentleman here he was at a hearing in front of the US Congress with this QA non pin and was fired was celebrated for it and this has nothing to do with getting gamification anymore but maybe not all of you know look in it which he also helped it's an onion reading protocol that also uses blockchain as a network and it doesn't only want to improve the tour protocol but also create an economics incentive to make the whole protocols safer or more secure and the creator was active on low key net he coded larp and he's deeply involved in this scene and I think we it would be important to talk about the economic aspect of this first it's it's a very new thing that this privacy platform suddenly attached to capitalism but I'm going to be speaking about this at length later on but all of this is one-sided people are saying hey we're playing this game you didn't know about it but now you're dead what if the other side of the opposing team actually getting involved and accepts this as a good example of this it's a campaign of the Chan scene which started about two years ago and that touched questions of political part participation and representation then that is he will not divide us on the 20th of January 2017 the day where Donald Trump was inaugurated as a president this exhibition at the Museum of Moving Images in New York was unveiled they had this exterior wall that was live-streamed or the camera on the exterior wall of the museum and passes by were invited to speak into the camera and say he will not divide us which would then be live-streamed on the internet this installation was supposed to be there for four years the entire term of office of President Trump she'll above one of the people who started this is a pretty well-known actor which made him a good target for Paul they had created a lot of Trump memes so they were naturally on the other side of the political conflict and they were planning a raid they were planning to create a game of trolling this live stream of all means possible I'm showing you this video by day two Shire is getting sick of hearing about pepe I'll look off he's a rich white liberal he doesn't care about the word polin that Shire was particularly triggered by Nazi role-playing so it became a game to make Nazi references while he was on camera bang bang killer did nothing wrong in a rage he sexually assaulted some dude after not even four weeks the museum cancelled this installation after the trolls had escalated this so far that Le Boeuf physically assorted a participant they they built this fence instead of the installation although this was not good art Shire had created one of the most fascinating things to watch on the internet it is the single best reality TV show on the internet right now and it is going on for the next four to eight years the video from which I extracted this is a summary of the first season because it turned into a kind of reality thing because Le Boeuf is a bit fond of fighting but the next episode was cancelled quite quickly when somebody drew a weapon in front of the camera so this message of he will not divide us was moved to a to a secret location on a flag but chance still track them down and they eventually managed to to his own flag instead and they won that's capture the flag two weeks later a new flag appeared on the roof of the foundation for art and technology in Liverpool this is the building was was guarded but of course these gamers took a guarded building as a challenge they tried to burn the flag with a very strong laser somebody built a drone with a flamethrower attached there were psyops and emails to people working for the foundation to turn them or to so in security and three people eventually managed to get on top of the roof and into the live stream and they had forgotten a pair of scissors to remove the cable binders but they were chased across the roof by security and the police and so the foundation cancelled this installation because they considered it too dangerous a few weeks later it appeared the flag appeared again on the white wall and some anonymous room this was a clear challenge it took them four hours to find this apartment it was the flat of one of the involved artists so somebody on a pole ordered a few pizzas there and then they didn't do a lot after that because they'd clearly won but it's still going the flag waved in some in Poland and in some hot in Scandinavia for a while but it's mostly been waving on the on top of the of l'unique in France and this flag has been attacked several times and it's currently it currently looks like this in the live stream and I think it's a great example for the of the gamification of serialization as entertainment but also the gamification of this struggle a similar thing happened in Germany earlier it's the drachen game but I removed it from my list so I'm not going to be talking about it but it's not it's not very exciting you don't need to hear about it but instead I want to talk about this medic war for warfare happened in in Germany because things have been happening in in Germany to not just in the u.s. we can Christa Germanica sudden thankfully this is in the past now as well so this is combined between somehow between the r and a g of the romantic runes but it also looks like a broken Bluetooth logo it's a joke that I haven't gotten yet but it's pretty old they got known by strong meaming and pushing of the AFD at German party before the last election and then the reaction of young boomer man a German comedian and then someone from the German parliament attacked a German news magazine with partially like seven billion emails per hour ever tweets per hour at times and then there was this other group that also memed a lot but they didn't get as much attention and so less repression and so they protected themselves as satire or live action role-playing so they when they came back from the first repression and that looked like this somewhere in the wastelands three years after the invasion this video is from the fall 2018 so three years after the invasion is about 2015 when this group was attacked vigorously and all those steel helmets that's for one unironic romanticization of the soldier get up but on the other hand it's also a set higher on the boomer man attack agreed you my name is Nicola Alexander Nicola Alexander was the was a quite successful right-wing youtuber before his start as governor sub-germanica but he changed to bit chute and also to discord to avoid being deleted from YouTube and this platform is also mostly used by gamers and it includes features like gamification of gamification like leveling and you can rise up through the ranks so there are a lot of roms roles for the meme gaming and pre-war game a lapping so now I have to explain lapping maybe lapping is a role-playing live action role-playing gaming as a hobby a lot of people do that and there's a multitude of different worlds where you can enter and just do it for fun and this format is obviously also available in the military and it's also there in historical re-enactment that sometimes produces weird historical movies where people re-enact world war scenes but they are also these lapas from the third way small neo-nazi role-players that role-play being a Hitler young and then there are others who pose with soft air guns but then also sometimes really kill people luckily so far only in the US but that's always the question if when something like this appears is it just make-believe or is it real and it's really difficult to evaluate this if everything is supposed to be satire or not real and some of them these even look like punks so after the first wave and after boomer man some other things were necessary so the video that I first showed also was called the great strategy change and they were at first also way too many people who really didn't really belong so now they were saying now we get a lot more exclusive and we only let people in who really belong there and I'm gonna show more the lackeys of the system always proclaim the right danger I can tell you there is no right danger not yet but because this country was so polluted with leftist ideas that in reality even the right wing is left it's a system that doesn't even doesn't not only not provide a fixed point but is like quicksand that actually drifts let's you drift off and tries to infiltrate you the right ones that those are actually social justice warriors in reverse they are actually the same sort of people that they pretend to fight against but have a different label and this sort of people does not belong to my species even if they like me walk on two legs and I will not spend one more second of my life with people who are not of the same species as me I wouldn't even hold them as pets I will cut them out of my life like the pound of flesh in the merchant of Venice I want to I will cut them out I will suck them out like poison out of a wound the insanity ends now there will be no more tolerance for weaklings because this tolerance there will be no more tolerance because this tolerance is what made us weak tolerance destroyed our country tolerance destroyed our culture and everything and I stopped this now because it goes on for 15 minutes and it's pure fascism and everything this guy says is just copied one to one from this court and being from the theater I find this really interesting but this also means that only words instead of deeds can count because that's where you only can only way I can tell what people actually mean oh you're fighting culturally so in the first wave there were influences and politicians from AFD and now in the second phase Martin Selma and Nikola Nikola Alexander thought about steel helmets and use this videos so one of these was for politically reasons against terrorism but he only said we are too few for that now so for four weeks ago reconquista Germanica they dissolved themselves and they complained about being watched by the police agencies and he was well he was complaining that he was under surveillance and claimed that now he will destroy his own fighting ship and that wasn't be the worst thing to drown yourself basically and now this is the last chapter and I say thank you for everyone at home because this is where the stream ends and this is something that's still active and I don't want to advertise that so this is where the stream ends