← CONFLICTED
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- [00:00]
Thomas Small
And we're live on matchday as Doug
- [00:02]
George Osborne
reaches for a buffalo wing.
- [00:04]
Thomas Small
He's got it. Oh, and he's gone for a can of Pepsi, too. What a finish. There's no doubt about it. It just tastes better.
- [00:12]
George Osborne
Matchdays deserve Pepsi.
- [00:21]
Thomas Small
What if the most important political battleground of the 21st century isn't found in parliaments, but in the underground world of video games? For decades, gaming was dismissed as unimportant and frankly, held in contempt. Yet today, billions of gamers gather in vast digital worlds. And these virtual spaces are not merely places where people play. They are power arenas where states, corporations and political movements compete for the crown of global influence. George Osborne is a writer and a gamer whose new book, Video Games, Politics and the Battle for Global Influence, reveals the explosive intersection of gaming technology and politics. Osborne explains how video games evolved from a niche hobby into one of the largest social ecosystems ever created, why countries such as China, Saudi Arabia and Russia have sought to harness the influence those games networks give them, and how online gaming communities are the overlooked trump card in our increasingly networked political world. I'm Thomas Small. This is my Conflicted conversation with George Osborne. Hello, George. Nice to see you again. Thank you so much for coming on Conflicted. I cannot wait to talk to you today.
- [02:00]
George Osborne
I'm very excited to get into it. Thank you so much for having me on.
- [02:03]
Thomas Small
Now, George, we like to start by introducing our guests to our dear listeners. Tell them, George, a little bit more about you. You are, you know, a journalist, I'm afraid to say.
- [02:13]
George Osborne
Yes, yes, no, I am a writer. I also do a little bit of consulting work as well, advising lots of businesses and organizations about the intersection between video games and politics. It's a strange intersection that I found myself falling into over the course of the last 10 years, partly as a result of some strange career choices in my early 20s.
- [02:35]
Thomas Small
Tell me about it, buddy. Who didn't make those back then?
- [02:38]
George Osborne
Exactly. It was very much. I didn't really know what I wanted to do, so I went freelance and tried just about everything. And then, due to a strange confluence of events, ended up as the head of communications at the video games trade association in the UK called ukey. And then as a result of that, I started to talk a lot more to political organizations, civil society businesses, especially during the pandemic. And a huge number of different organizations suddenly realized that video games had this massive audience and there was a massive ecosystem around it. And when everyone was stuck indoors, it was like, well, it's a good place to reach people with messages. And what seemed to happen off the back of that is that kind of thinking stuck. So what I now do is I write about a lot of this in my own newsletter, which is called Video Games Industry Memo. And yeah, then I work with various organizations helping them to understand what on earth is going on here, because it's a hell of a change.
- [03:35]
Thomas Small
Well, that's good because you're here to really initiate us into the inner workings of the video games industry and the intersection between video games and politics, video games and culture, you know, international culture that I don't know anything about. Before reading your book Power Play, Video Games, Politics and the Battle for Global Influence. A really fun read because, you know, it's weird to be early middle age now and to have lived through the rise and rise and rise of video games, only to read a book like yours and realize, wow, the stuff I was tinkering around with in the 80s on my NES, you know, playing Super Mario Bros. 1, in fact, playing Mario Brothers before they were super. You know, to think that those things have grown into not just like an economic behemoth, but a social, cultural and political behemoth. And I think a lot of people my age don't know about that. So your book is really revelatory.
- [04:40]
George Osborne
I genuinely believe that enormous numbers of people, people have not really understood what's happened in this space for a couple of reasons. To some extent, it's pretty poorly covered, it's pretty poorly reported, especially if you look towards the traditional Western media. The perception of video games as this kind of relatively small cottage industry aimed towards a very specific type of audience has kind of sat with the sector now for many decades. But actually, if you look especially what happened to the industry, probably from the mid 2000s onwards, it exploded in size. If you're looking at the industry around about 2005 ish, it's a $25 billion ish global industry. You then jump forward to this year, in fact to last year's figures for 2025, and suddenly it's 188 billion, reaching 3.6 billion people around the world. And it's this complete change in dynamic. And as that dynamic is taking place, the nature of games themselves change. And the whole opening to the book, I'm trying to make this wider argument about political influence. But what I realized was we actually need to explain to people how on earth a space like this has emerged and how it has grown and sort of spend a lot of time just going, okay, well, here's how video games helped flatten access to Technology, here's how a change in the way that they were made suddenly expanded the audience massively. And then about how you need to connect all those people to create this social space. But you're right to say, and completely fair to say, this is a transformation that's passed a lot of people by. And it's partly due to the way the industry's covered and partly due to the industry itself being a little bit secretive in ways that's not always helpful.
- [06:26]
Thomas Small
I mean, I really have not been very au fait with video games for a long time, I think. Christmas 1987, I woke up to find that Santa Claus had left a Nintendo Entertainment System under the tree. And me and my siblings, I have a lot of siblings, but especially me and my older brother, we played that a lot. The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Super Mario Brothers, Super Mario Brothers 2, Super Mario Bros. 3. But then in the run up to Christmas 1992, I think it was, Santa did not leave a Super Nintendo under the tree. And from that point on, the kind of world of console gaming and I parted ways. I kind of played PC games for a couple more years, like Doom and Quake and these things, you know, we networked them together. It was real fun. So I kind of dabbled in that. I'd always been an adventure game guy. Sierra Online, the LucasArts games. Monkey island is obviously the greatest game of all time. That sort of. I'm that sort of guy. But by 96, 97, I was finished with video games, with computer Games, until for one month, I think in 2015, maybe 2014, my flatmate at the time got me into Red Dead Redemption and I lost a month of my life. Totally obsessed with Red Dead Redemption. Kind of came out of it a month later and thought, what the hell happened? I can't let this happen to me again. And so that's it. I mean, I just really. I don't like video games very much. I find them to be quite dangerous, spiritually speaking. But perhaps you have your own story. I mean, were you. Are you a massive gamer?
- [08:05]
George Osborne
So, yes, essentially your point where you begin to divert away from games is the point in which I start. So the Super Nintendo, the game boy, the N64, those were the first consoles that I really remember playing games on as a major form of sibling bonding. I'm the youngest of four. I'm going to say that my two older brothers loved playing video games. My sister loved them a little bit less. But my nieces now absolutely love games as a result of me.
- [08:35]
Thomas Small
That's Part of the story. We'll talk about that.
- [08:37]
George Osborne
Exactly. Indoctrinating them. I think that's. That's the word that we use there. But yeah, I mean, for me, I think one of the things that I really realized was that I really grew up alongside video games, and they became just such an important part of my identity in terms of some of my favorite cultural experiences. Things like the Legend of Zelda, Ocarina of Time in particular.
- [09:01]
Thomas Small
Oh, yeah. I mean, I hear great things about that. My younger brother, my kid brother, he loves that game. It's like, deeply rooted in his subconscious as a human person.
- [09:11]
George Osborne
Yeah, exactly. And it's deeply rooted within his subconscious, my subconscious, and the subconscious of enormous numbers of people who've grown up. I was laughing when I saw a social media meme recently which was a woman who was posting, why does every man in his 30s on their dating app profiles say he wants to go to Japan this year? And it's. Well, if you think and trace it back, every man in his 30s and 40s had a Nintendo or a Sega Mega Drive or a Sony PlayStation. And it's like, well, where do you think that sudden Japanese influence is all coming from? And it's like it becomes a part on the foundation of people's lives. And I think what happened with the medium itself is as the medium started to become essentially larger, as it started as development started to democratize so you could make more games, as networking started to evolve so you could really connect together, as it became easier to buy games just on lots of different devices, they became something that was a part of your life, not just from when you were younger and you would sort of cut off once you hit a certain point, but become a part of your life overall and remain a part of your identity. So, you know, at this moment in time, like, there's a report called the Power of Play that came out last year, that's done by the big trade associations, and they reported the average age of a player globally is now 41.
- [10:34]
Thomas Small
Oh, my.
- [10:35]
George Osborne
Because of the democratization of video games across all of these different devices, like mobile devices, consoles, PCs. So, yeah, I've grown up with the medium and I've loved it. And so have millions and now billions of other people.
- [10:47]
Thomas Small
And it really sticks with you. I remember when, what about three years ago, when the Super Mario Brothers movie came out. I did go to see it. It did work its magic on me. It was a nostalgia explosion. I loved it. I've watched it many times. I actually think it's a really well Made fun film, good story, traditionally told, great score. All those themes from. You know, it is weird, it like unlocks something in you. Alth it was a reminder as well of when that parting of the ways for me happened. Because when the Nintendo 64 came out and I went to a Blockbuster Video to sort of try it out, they had a preview console there and it was the first time I had been confronted with like 360 degree gaming for what was it called? Mario 64. Right. And I just, I was already a grandpa. Like I just didn't have the ability to play it. Anyway, let's get into the meat and potatoes. So your book starts out by kind of telling the story, the history of video games and computer games. But especially you kind of unlock the fact or you reveal the fact that consumer demand for video games, so as more and more people wanted to play them, it actually drove technological development and innovation that has had profound effects on not just video games, but like the whole technological ecosystem, I suppose even into like the military industry, industrial space. But certainly the fact that human beings and more and more of them wanted to play games has had huge consequences on the technological infrastructure of our world.
- [12:18]
George Osborne
Yeah, absolutely. And there are a couple of big things that feed into that. I mean the first one, and it's almost the most of human explanation of it, why do games play such a big role in changing software, changing technology? And a lot of the time it's just frankly that it's more fun to make games than it is to do anything else with technology. You look at the example of the early home computers where people are putting out guides where they're saying you can do all of these things like make spreadsheets and make word documents. And then people are like, you could do that? Well, you could make blackjack. Blackjack's fun, let's make blackjack. But then by doing so you have to start looking at the hardware and really start pushing it to its limits. You have to be looking at very early screen technology and going, well, how do we display this visually? You start having to do different things in terms of like parallax scrolling, which is like if you see a map in a video game when you're looking at it and it sort of shifts left to right, that actually requires you to go and code things. And then once you start getting an industry around video games, you get this really interesting. It could almost feel dichotomous in a sense, but it's actually really closely related is you're trying to create technology that is as powerful as Possible, but as cheap as possible because you need it to be powerful. Because video game marketing in particular revolved so much around the latest whiz bang device. Can do something that your previous devices didn't do, but you have to make sure it's still affordable to your key audiences, which at the time were young men and families. And so what you had to start doing was looking for the innovations that would result essentially in either more powerful technology at a lower price, which is a lot of the work that Nvidia does in its early years on its graphics processing units because it's trying to make components for video game PCs.
- [14:08]
Thomas Small
Yeah, there you go, right there. Nvidia, like now what, this huge epoch changing behemoth starts out making graphics chips for video games.
- [14:17]
George Osborne
Yeah, absolutely. And in a very similar vein, Nintendo ends up doing a partnership with the chipmaker ARM who becomes kind of key to the foundations of things like the Game Boy advance and the Nintendo ds. So the reason why they're working together is because Nintendo in particular has this philosophy around essentially making the most of what it's kind of calling withered technology. So either older or less powerful tech that it's eking the most out of. And so arm, who making a lot of chips for mobile devices, suddenly it looks really powerful in the context of a 100 pound portable games console. And so when you get to the point that Apple is going, well, who are we going to partner with on our chipset? ARM eventually becomes the front runner and now is 99% of our mobile architecture.
- [15:02]
Thomas Small
And that's on the sort of the technology side, the consumer technology side, as it were. But you also make the point in the book that the development of the software development architecture was the real game changer. And you even compare it, if I rem correctly, to Gutenberg's printing press in the transformative effect it's had to our world.
- [15:22]
George Osborne
Yes, and you know why I do that, Thomas? Because like you, I'm a man of history and I love to try and try and bring in a reference to Gutenberg in almost anything that I'm writing. But yes, there's this big revolution where you know the making of games, you know, you're starting off with people trying to use coding languages to make games, and coding languages still are used to make games. But what happens is that over time these technologies that are called game engines, so there's two big ones, Unreal Engine and Unity, they begin to make game development much easier by essentially creating frameworks where you can start doing what you see is what you get development, you're looking at a screen, you're adding things in. And by doing that, it does two things. One, it provides people with a whole set of tools for making a massive variety of games. But the second thing is it combines with this bigger trend around software as a service. We need to make this thing as affordable as possible so everyone can get access to it. And so suddenly the number of people who are making games explodes. It becomes, you're talking about hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people registering accounts with these companies. And that as a result does a couple of things. It just massively widens the number of video games available because, hey, you can make a hell of a lot more if a lot of people are making games. But it also begins to create a framework in which those games can appeal to different types of people on different types of devices in different parts of the world. So the games industry no longer has to be. You have to make certain games for certain consoles in maybe six or seven markets like North America, Japan, a variety of European markets, and instead it becomes possible for, say, a developer in Southeast Asia to make Flappy Birds, the very addictive, simple, one tap mobile game.
- [17:16]
Thomas Small
I think I remember seeing people playing that on their iPhones and stuff on the London Underground. Is that right?
- [17:22]
George Osborne
Absolutely. And that's a global phenomenon made by one person in Vietnam in his spare time.
- [17:28]
Thomas Small
Amazing.
- [17:29]
George Osborne
And you start to see these examples of all kinds of hit games, even something like wordle. If you look back at the story there, a developer called Josh Wardle develops a video game in his spare time as basically a birthday present for his girlfriend and ends up selling it to the New York Times and it becomes the flagship of their games app. And all of that is possible because that democratisation of development has happened. And that means that video games almost can become communicative as well. You can start creating things that communicate thoughts, ideas and concepts.
- [17:59]
Thomas Small
So hardware is getting better, it's getting cheaper, the game development engines are making games easier to build, democratizing the production of games more and more. And then digital distribution channels and all these new devices arise and that kind of overlaps at the same time with the rise of social media. And I think, like, if I'm not mistaken, I don't know when Steam is first introduced, you can tell us, but Steam is kind of like social media for gamers and then discord and all these things arise. And so the rise of, of the latest generation of super networked, super online, super social gaming is part of the wider story of the huge transformation that social media in general has had with huge political consequences.
- [18:51]
George Osborne
Absolutely. Because video games, like other forms of creative media, used to be locked to boxes. Right. You used to have a cartridge or a disc and you used to have to put that in something and you had to wrap that box in something and you had to, to ship it somewhere and distribute it. And, you know, there's a fun little story in the book about World of Warcraft, which is obviously a very online video game. They were still having to sell boxes of it in Australia and actually that meant that if you wanted to do various production things with your art, you had to do it months in advance because the boxes literally had to be designed and made their way over to Australia. So you suddenly have, you have this physical environment and then suddenly storefronts like Steam, which is a PC games video game selling store created by Valve, begins to emerge in the early 2000s. And initially it emerges as this tool for the developer, Valve, to distribute its own games, to allow people to download them wherever they want. But what they quickly begin to realise is that actually the infrastructure that they're using to sell and distribute their games over the Internet could be used by anyone. And so Steam evolves into, into one of the first and now is still one of the most powerful digital storefronts for distributing games. And over the course of decades, you reach a point where to be able to sell a game on Steam to millions and millions of people around the world, its active user base is well over 100 million. All you had to do was pay a hundred dollar fee and you could become a global exporter of video games. And so what that means is that anyone who is creating video games around the world can suddenly start selling to the world. Minimal localization, and away you go into all of these territories. And so if you look at the typical video game territory that's not one of the giants like North America or China, most of those territories, about 80 to 90% of revenue that's generated by developers is export revenue. They're essentially going out, selling abroad and bringing it back in. And so what you have is this turbocharging of the selling of games content at the same time that other creative industries are struggling with different kinds of models. Spotify explodes, but the subscription model starts to challenge the fundamentals of the music industry, whereas with game development, it grows out much, much more successfully.
- [21:12]
Thomas Small
And then in Hollywood you have Netflix and all of the new technology there that really disrupts their normal production and distribution channels.
- [21:19]
George Osborne
Absolutely. And alongside that, you're exactly right there's two big things that happen as well. To support that ecosystem of video games selling on the storefront, Steam starts evolving all kinds of social functions. So things like adding friends, having groups, setting up your own forums, having ability to talk to one another, share memes on the channels of certain games. And while all this is happening, the mobile device market explodes. And so Apple and Google, after releasing their early smartphones very quickly realized, well, there's a huge amount of appetite for people to make content and sell it everywhere. So why don't we serve it by launching our stores and launching our app stores?
- [22:02]
Thomas Small
Why don't we get a nice 10% cut of that cheddar cheese?
- [22:06]
George Osborne
Yeah, well, exactly. Or in this case, 30%.
- [22:08]
Thomas Small
Oh wow. My lord. They're clever. Clever clogs over there aren't great controversy
- [22:13]
George Osborne
amongst competition regulators everywhere. But as a result of doing that, anyone who's got a smartphone suddenly able to to get video games. And as developers then suddenly realize, well, what happens if we give our games away for free but keep on updating them and keep on providing players with content they can buy? The answer is that mobile games suddenly becomes the biggest category free to play. Mobile games suddenly take over and dominate the industry and becomes the biggest vertical by miles in comparison to PC and console. So even today with that about $188.8 billion or so, anywhere in the region of about 60 to 70 billion of that will just be pure mobile revenue with the other two kind of battling out for the rest. So yeah, and that changes the dynamics of play.
- [22:59]
Thomas Small
Well, you know, dear listeners, you might be wondering what the hell has any of this got to do with what we usually talk about on conflicted. Why are you talking to a video games journalist and expert and author of an excellent new book, Powerplay, about video games. And the truth is George, that games today, video games, computer games and this huge online ecosystem of gaming, full of millions and millions, billions of gamers, it has a lot of political power or it holds a kind of potential power. And before we talk about the different ways that different actors have tried and succeeded or failed to harness that potential political power, how would you define the power that this new phenomenon of globally networked video game and gaming and gamers holds?
- [24:03]
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- [25:31]
George Osborne
So I would say it's summarized like this. Video games stopped being the arcade machine in the corner of the bar and they became the bars, the cafes, the parks of basically our digital society. They are places where people congregate. There are places where people communicate. There are places where people form identities both amongst themselves, but within their communities. And the specific nature of games has really driven that in a way that meaningfully impacts our political environment in a few ways. Because one, the first thing that it does is that it has essentially connected all of these players into a shared ecosystem together where they can talk to one another and where they can forge those identities. But to do so, a couple of things had to occur which included the connection within the game itself, which meant the construction of a whole new layer of communication ecosystems within video games. But then also this creation of these massive, interlocked, overlapping, developing social network connections through things like Discord, the voice chat app that a lot of people, in fact millions of people around the world,
- [26:43]
Thomas Small
use to talk about video games and non video games. Paid subscribers to the conflicted community have a Discord channel that they use to debate all sorts of geopolitical topics and historical topics. Which is my chance to plug the conflicted community. Please, dear listeners, join the conflicted community.
- [27:00]
George Osborne
And we absolutely must plug, because that is the essential thing for us to be doing here. But so yeah, so what happens is the game itself becomes each of these games host communities which are then wrapped around. There's essentially Discord communities, there are live streamers and Creators and influencers creating content. There are subreddits, then there's just the wider conversations on things like X and other platforms like that. And then what happens is that this means that games end up playing a remarkably strong role in driving the conversation within social media ecosystems. So you look at Reddit and essentially R gaming is invariably like the third most popular subreddit edging out world news. With about 47 million subscribers, you have roughly 3 trillion minutes of TikTok content solely about video games coming out every single year. You have about 6 billion hours of YouTube content watched every single month on these content verticals. And even within Roblox itself, the big, huge platform where people make games, I think it was about three years ago that the Roblox PR team told me there's about 2.5 billion chat messages shared in there every single day. And that was when the platform had approximately 60 million fewer daily active users than it does right now. And so what happens is that within these spaces, the groups that form within there, they are able to talk about a game. They're able to talk about something that's at the heart of their hobby. But like any other third place that we would see in the real world, whether it would be a sports stadium or a park, people can then start using those connections within there to start politicizing in their wider world. And unlike those, say, more physical places, all of these people are connected to digital infrastructure, of which people who play video games are generally very online, very capable campaigners, and ultimately well placed to start tilting the information environment online. Which means, as we are well aware, a lot of the modern media debate is shaped by what happens online online, by what journalists are watching, by what media outlets are tracking. And so that means that kind of important point of what is setting the agenda. Games is kind of like the subterranean subculture that is actually affecting all of this. But because it's poorly understood, lots of people within traditional liberal Western democracies don't pay attention to it.
- [29:27]
Thomas Small
Yeah, there's a sort of class situation or something going on here. Let's try to, to kind of interrogate it a bit because I think we're all aware that social media in general, and let's say x especially 10 years ago, when X was in its absolute ascendancy, X, or Twitter as it then was, Twitter was like the same thing that the coffee house had become in 17th and 18th century London. A place, a third space, a digital third space, where the intelligentsia, the elite, authors, thinkers and ordinary people were mixing and mingling and sharing ideas. And we know that that really affected the barometer of global politics over those, over those years. For good, for ill. You know, people debate that, but at the same time it would be like as if at the. As, as coffee houses were proliferating around London, another thing, like a kind of, maybe like a gambling hall in the basement of. Of pubs was also being generated full of people doing things like bear baiting and cock fighting. And the kind of. The glitterati who were going to the coffee houses were just not really aware of those basement spaces, or if they were aware of them, just held them in contempt. And then maybe by the end of the 19th century, like millions of people flooded out of these spaces and launched revolutions and took over their liberal bourgeois world. So we kind of know from history that these, these third spaces that are held in contempt and therefore are shrouded in mystery by an ignorant elite who are populating other spaces can have a lot of political power, a lot of potential political power. And video games now, and these networks are that for our world and not just in the west, everywhere.
- [31:12]
George Osborne
Yeah. And I think Bear Baiting Simulator, that's the next hit game to come out, I reckon. Cock fighting.
- [31:18]
Thomas Small
Cock fighting.
- [31:19]
George Osborne
Cock fighting. Level up your fighting cock.
- [31:22]
Thomas Small
I mean, look, this is a family friendly show.
- [31:26]
George Osborne
This is a family show. I apologize, but I totally agree. And I feel like one of the things that really emerged for me through the research, and I know we'll probably come into it more when we start speaking of the various case studies, is when it comes to video games, especially within the kind of traditional powerhouse markets where consoles and PCs first popped up, the stereotype and the perception of video games as this kind of isolated, nerdy, in your basement, antisocial hobby formed and crystallized and essentially solidified probably by about again the mid 2000s. And even with an enormous amount of change in the games industry, there's still probably, that is still the dominant narrative, I think, within those kinds of places. So there's a tendency, I think, especially amongst elite decision makers in places like public policy in the media, to not take these spaces seriously. But what you see is that the video game world truly becomes global as a result of the smartphone, as a result of social networks, social media. And so what happens is that you have an enormous number of countries where people hadn't really played video games before, but suddenly they emerge and they emerge in a very social context. And so you then have a lot of countries around the world who don't have that preconceived negative stereotype. Around games as strongly because their markets simply not have access to games. And instead what they see is there's this massive form of entertainment which is bringing millions of people into its borders. And they're talking and these groups, whether it's state actors, non state actors, campaigners, these ones who don't have those preconceived notions, they're not saying is this high or low culture, they're asking the question of could this be influential? And I think one of the things that really comes out across the course of the book is a lot of these kind of more recent actors, the ones who've seen that power emerge, they've actually managed to really effectively begin to influence wider political discourse by using games essentially as a lever. Because frankly, the traditional elites in other places treated them with such contempt that they both haven't realize there's an opportunity there. And also that the audiences of video games feel pushed to the side. They feel like they're not listened to.
- [33:59]
Thomas Small
We'll talk about the kind of culture war aspect of this story, I think at the end, because it's in a way the spiciest part of the story. But to help people understand kind of what we're talking about, I wonder if a couple more analogies from history might work. So, you know, if you can imagine in America, let's say in the 20th century now, there's there were a lot of churchgoing Americans. So every Sunday they would go to church. And because it was basically a Protestant, a low church Protestant society, there were thousands of denominations and obviously tens of thousands of churches everywhere. And in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, people decided that, you know, if we could somehow network these churches together and we could make a sense of a shared identity among these low church, Protestant believing Christians, then we can harness the network effects of that and create a political movement. And that's called like the Christian Coalition or the Moral Majority. Now that's the kind of right wing version. Now at the same time, people were going to factories, let's say in the 1910s, 1920s, they're going to factories every day, hundreds of people, thousands of people in some cases working in, in one factory for one company. And other people are like, if we can bring all of these factory workers together in a big network, a kind of labor un, then we can harness the power that the network gives us. Now the thing about video games is that the network was built up for commercial reasons. Really, it already exists. And some people realized that the power was already there. It's not like we don't Even have to build up these networks. They're there. We just have to infiltrate them and exploit them.
- [35:38]
George Osborne
Yeah, absolutely. And I feel like, if you're looking as well for another analogy, that I think can build upon what you're saying, and I think talk about this potential as well, about entertainment spaces in particular, being a place where influence can be felt. It was 2023 in Turkey. It was a series of protests in football stadiums against the government's response to an enormous earthquake. And so what fans did they recognize? Obviously, protest within Turkey can be tricky. So instead, what they organized was fans from multiple football clubs, including Fenerbahce, one of the biggest clubs in the country, brought cuddly talk toys to the stadiums and threw them onto the pitches as their sort of sign of protest. The way the government was handling what was going on in there. But what they knew is that there's an enormous amount of broadcast media, there are photographers, and whatever is going on in particularly that regime there, those images were going to be broadcast and they were going to be picked up, not just in Turkey, but around the world, because actually what was happening within the space was so captivating that naturally people were going to look at that and go, there's thousands of cuddly toys on this football pitch. This is such a strange scene. What's causing it? What's the story behind it? And I think when you look at game communities and you talk about those networks, it's that idea of, for both positive and for negative purposes, those stories can emerge from a community and just ripple out across our information ecosystem. In a more positive example, there's an example of. Of a World of Warcraft player called Matt Steen, who had a degenerative muscular disease and he dies in 2014, and his parents put a little note onto his World of Warcraft server to announce that he had died. And his friends hadn't realized what was happening. They didn't realise he had this disease at all. And so they all end up going to his funeral in Norway. It becomes essentially a massive phenomenon. It becomes a huge story. It gets turned into a documentary called the Remarkable Life of Ibela. And now millions of people around the world have heard that story. And it's like. So you can see that these can project from what starts off as maybe a discord community, a subreddit, if the story is captivating enough, as with anything else, it can project into the rest of the world, but it just happens to be very heavily networked, all of these different channels connected together. So if an idea picks up it can pick up real steam very, very
- [38:03]
Thomas Small
quickly and it often remains wholly digital. Obviously we're talking about things, things like memes, things like in jokes and it's all, you know, none of it necessarily ever emerges into meatspace. It stays digital. It is, it is omnidigital and it is often consumed by, created by, shared by people who spend a huge, for grumpy old men like me, a very dangerously huge amount of time online. And so yes, networked together they have the potential for a lot of political power and therefore or state actors and others need to do something about it. And your book sort of outlines three general strategies. Someone can try to control this power, they can try to co opt this power, or they can try to collaborate with this power. So let's start with those who try to control the power. And you know, in your book you use China as the best example of this, a gaming superpower, but one which an authoritarian system like the Chinese Communist Party felt the need to really like discipline, contain control.
- [39:12]
George Osborne
Absolutely. Because we talked about this element of surprise nature of video games transforming and about how in a relatively short period of time the industry went from being relatively small to suddenly enormous. And I think China is possibly one of the most indicative examples of this. Where in the early 2000s the Chinese video games industry is very small. It's predominantly a handful of massively multiplayer online video games which have made it into the market and are online. Because the Chinese video game market, frankly there were a lot and there remain pretty rampant issues with things like piracy. I mean, when you were looking at the Chinese consumer market back in the early 2000s, people didn't have enough money to buy things like games, consoles, sort of traditional value that Western companies and Japanese companies were selling them for. So a very small PC games market which was making maybe about half a billion dollars. So, you know, nothing to be sniffed at in 2005. By 2015, it's become a $25 billion market as a result of, roughly speaking, half a billion 600 million Chinese players coming online.
- [40:22]
Thomas Small
Holy moly.
- [40:23]
George Osborne
Because they start playing popular Chinese video games via mobile devices, which, you know, obviously the mobile device revolution affects the whole world. But in China, especially as that, that kind of manufacturing hub, it becomes something that's so ingrained into the way consumers behave that naturally everyone ends up picking up a pretty high end smartphone quite quickly. But because all of these Chinese video games, to avoid things like piracy, they've always made sure that they're kind of always online because you can't pirate a video game if you have to have an active Internet connection because you can't just download the file and play it. But those kinds of games are almost always social games games. They're places where multiplayer games where you team up with different people and battle against each other, because, hey, you need a live online connection to do it. And so as a result of that, you need to build communication functions to connect people together. And Tencent, the big, huge Chinese giant, it begins by essentially making some of those services and then developing video games like the massively popular Honor of Kings, which. Which becomes again, capable of generating $2 billion of revenue in China alone in 2015 as a way of serving this audience. But then suddenly, the Chinese government is looking at this space and going, well, we wrote a load of rules around censoring online multiplayer games on PC, but we don't have a framework for this. Suddenly we have hundreds of millions of people in an online space talking to one another freely. Talking freely, right. And. And even though, and this is something that I go into more depth in the book, the Chinese Communist Party had realized that its approach to censorship had to change in a digital age, because whereas before, you might have been looking for the people with the printing press who didn't have permissions or licenses or anything and tracking them down, obviously in a digital age, that's not going to work. Everyone can create. So you have to adopt a different approach to censorship, which is more catching people within a wider net and then essentially filtering to find people. But what they realize is they're not looking really hard at this space at all. And yet you have hundreds of millions of people in there. So how do you end up controlling that space and making sure that you are aware of what is going on? That becomes one of the big projects, seemingly for the Chinese Communist Party over the following 10 years. And what you see is a very consistent cracking down on video game spaces to make sure they are much more tightly controlled, which happens to go hand in hand with a handy moral panic around video games and mental health, which the Chinese government, based on the timeline, seem to make the most of to essentially justify much closer surveillance of citizens.
- [43:01]
Thomas Small
This is interesting because again, if you're a grumpy old guy like me who doesn't play video games and may think that they've had maybe, on balance, sometimes a malign influence on our society, sometimes you might wonder, is it actually, actually healthy for this activity to be going on to this extent? I've sometimes read reports of the way the Chinese government regulates the gaming industry and the online world. And I, I know I allow myself to wonder, well, you know, maybe that's not so bad. And maybe some of that mental health discourse has affected me. You know, I think of video game addiction, the possibility for like social disorder if people don't go to work, you know, things like that, not to mention malign foreign influence, which the west has not been free from. So I wonder if the Chinese response to this rise of massive online networked gaming is good, is wise. What do you think about that?
- [43:56]
George Osborne
Well, so one of the things that's definitely true of the Chinese video game environment is that game developers are much more aggressive when it comes to monetizing video games, that they're much pushier in terms of if you release a game for free, free, you have to make your money somewhere down the line. You have to sell people items, you have to sell them currency, you have to sell them packs of cards, whatever it is, to try and get them to purchase. And in a lot of the traditional games markets, people are like, I'm not actually a big fan of that because I grew up paying a certain amount for a video game and playing it. And that's the way my transaction worked. Whereas in China, this kind of always online approach meant that players were pretty familiar with the idea of, idea of paying to play. And Chinese developers were very, very willing and remain very willing to try to monetize just about every single thing moving. And I was speaking to a China market expert about this and they were saying it actually makes a lot of sense in the context that capitalism is so strong now within China, or at least its particular form of it, that actually people want to spend a lot of money in their games to be able to show off to other people online, to be able to show their wealth. But whatever, one of those things is that it naturally then intersects with other conversations around gambling, around this concept in Chinese culture of spiritual pollution. And so there is an element to it which is reasonable concern. But I think one of the things that's very noticeable is internationally a conversation begins to emerge around this concept of something called gaming disorder, which is essentially a mental health condition which, which is created initially in the US in their sort of statistical diagnostics manual for psychological conditions, and then ends up working its way up to World Health Organization level.
- [45:43]
Thomas Small
It's a technical disorder, gaming disorder. How interesting.
- [45:47]
George Osborne
Yes, absolutely. And what happens is there's a big academic debate going on about it. They're still going on now between people who are saying it's a specific condition that if you play too Many video games, it is a mental health condition of its own and requires treatment versus a group of people who are like, actually it's just a wider behavioral issue. Like this is as true of things like shopping addictions. It should be in that kind of category. Or it's actually usually just a sign of another condition like depression. You play too many video games because you're depressed. But what was happening was this debate was going on and then suddenly the whole wades in to say, we're going to add it to ICD 11, our big classification of diseases. And within four months of that, the Chinese government shuts down its licensing system for approving mobile games within the country and keeps it shut for about a year.
- [46:38]
Thomas Small
Wow.
- [46:38]
George Osborne
And during that process, lots and lots of things are going on. Developers are trying their best to try and get their games released and they can't do it. Which includes, I believe, sort of a pretty major delay to player unknown battlegrounds on mobile from Tencent, which obviously people were very upset about because at that time that was such a huge game. But the thing that emerges from it, and one of the really big concessions are the video games companies start to talk about anti addiction measures. And anti addiction measures are aimed at young people. And to be able to aim these measures at young people, you have to identify who the person is and you have to identify their age. And while you start seeing, seeing is in this instance and then in another shutdown, and then in another shutdown over the course of four years, this anti addiction set of measures, the way this works is to slowly but steadily get people to log into systems that are designed directly by the Ministry of Propaganda that asks them to put in their state ID to identify how old they are. And yes, those measures then lead to players being locked out of a game if they're a certain age for a certain period of time. But most importantly, what it does is it says if you are any of China's hundreds of millions of mobile game players, which is whether the CCP is really looking for its source of concern, you are now having to make sure that all of your in game interactions, all of those things, they're now associated with you logging into this game via your state ID id. It adds a whole nother layer of information to the way that essentially the Chinese are looking at and monitoring their citizens. And I think part of the reason why I believe that this is part of them essentially using this as just a reason to act, rather than necessarily fully being authentic, is after years of concern over this and in roughly about 2023, after a few phases of this, the Chinese government issues a press release essentially saying, we've solved games addiction. Hurrah, it's gone down in the country.
- [48:39]
Thomas Small
More like they learned how, how useful this way of kind of controlling or at least deriving information from its citizenry was. So more video games, please. More video games. Maybe also with an unemployment problem that is underreported, they might think this is a good way to keep the unemployed sedated.
- [48:56]
George Osborne
Sedated and busy. But it's that sense of in which they just go, actually, problem solved. And then I looked at some of the data they reported and you know, they were still showing people playing enormous amounts of video games. But it was. What was noticeable was by this point they developed such a strong system for monitoring what their citizens were doing in games that now it was captured in this wider censorship net, which I describe in more detail in the book. But it's essentially, you're still in China. You are relatively free to do what you want to do. You can talk about what you want to talk about and you can access services via indirect means. But the whole point is just to make sure that you're in the net. And so if you then take a step further, then the government might go, well, okay, so you were just talking about some things that were a little bit problematic in a game, but now we've seen on Weibo that you've been talking about Pro Hong Kong, we can start tracking you. And so it's the Chinese looking at that as essentially a source of control. Not to mention, of course, all of their specific rules around what kind of video games you can and can't make and what kind of content can be included if you want to officially release in the world's biggest video game market of $52 billion.
- [50:04]
Thomas Small
Yeah, I mean, that is extremely influential. It also shows that authoritarian states have been much quicker really to grasp the political importance of video gaming and video gaming culture, much faster to do so than our liberal cultures, as we will show. And moving from control as a strategy to deal with this situation. Situation to co opt. It is also an authoritarian state that you use to kind of be emblematic of that strategy. Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia plays a huge role in the global video game industry. More than maybe a lot of people realize the young, youngish now certainly he was young then. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is known to be an avid video gamer and in general is very much plugged in to that kind of. Of Gen Z millennial global culture. He loves anime, he's traveled to Japan just to sort of indulge in his love of anime. So he's that kind of guy. And under his leadership, Saudi has really, you know, achieved an oversized role in global gaming.
- [51:10]
George Osborne
Saudi Arabia's investment in video games is astonishing. And it's astonishing on a couple of levels. I mean, the financial amounts involved are, are incomprehensible compared to other markets. In the uk. A few years ago there was an announcement that the UK's domestic games fund was going to be boosted over eight years to the tune of £30 million. Hey, that's great. It's a nice amount of money to be using to make video games. Saudi Arabia, via its essentially subsidiary called Savvy Games, has invested approximately about $30 billion dollars into video games companies. And it has also separately acquired via the public investment fund directly Electronic Arts, the maker of many of the world's biggest sports games, as part of a $55 billion deal which again, the PIF put a further 30 billion into Electronic Arts.
- [52:03]
Thomas Small
That name rings a bell to me because one of the games I used to love to play back when I did play games was the Ultima series. Do you know the Ultima series made by Origin Systems or whatever, and then apparently that was bought by EA and then they just like destroyed the series. And people my age, 47 year old, grumpy people like me, we remember EA as the great destroyer of Origin.
- [52:26]
George Osborne
I would say EA probably remains a broadly unpopular video games company even amongst its many millions of players, which is quite the achievement. But yes, it did own intellectual properties like Ultima, which it's not really done much with. But now it's mostly known for its massive sports games. So things like EA Sports, fc, Madden, College Football. And one of the things that's really noticeable about the Saudi Arabian video game strategy, like there are a few things to it. I mean, the first is how serious it is. It's pretty much the only country in the world that has a formally written national video game strategy which came out in 2022, which Mohammed bin Salman actually puts his name to because of his personal interest into it.
- [53:09]
Thomas Small
And what is that strategy? Strategy?
- [53:11]
George Osborne
The strategy is to essentially build a Saudi Arabian video game ecosystem from the ground up. So the idea is to, over the course of, I think it's roughly speaking up to 2030, but maybe squidging a bit further because it was written a little later in the Vision 2030 process. But the idea is to try and create a cluster that supports, roughly speaking, 39,000 jobs and generates about $13 billion of economic value for Saudi Arabia each year.
- [53:36]
Thomas Small
It.
- [53:36]
George Osborne
And so to do that, as I say, they've invested an enormous amount of money into the ecosystem. But the second part of the strategy that really stands out is they've invested that money very smartly and strategically is that savvy games, which is kind of like the key ecosystem builder. It has bought some very high value, very smart games companies like Scopely who make a game called Monopoly Go, which makes billions each year. Oh, I've heard of, of that Niantic who makes Pokemon Go, which I've certainly heard of that which Saudi Arabian owned business acquired 10 years after various clerics had suggested that Pokemon Go should be banned on the basis that it did not fit with Wahhabist theocracy.
- [54:19]
Thomas Small
Oh, how interesting. There's a wonderful, wonderful story there. How interesting.
- [54:23]
George Osborne
But they also bought things like the world's biggest esports company so they could begin arranging tournaments in Saudi Arabia Arabia. And they funded the first Esports World cup to bring all of these esports teams and all of these esports competitions together every year in Riyadh to give a nascent industry a real thing to move around. But beyond that they also funded business accelerators, they funded investment funds, they put money into schools and universities to build talent. They did everything you would do if you wanted to build a successful video games cluster from the ground, ground up. From a public policy perspective, they did it all. And they've done it all quite frankly brilliantly.
- [55:02]
Thomas Small
Really interesting. It overlaps I guess with their investment in sports, in real world sports, like in all the Premier League. I mean, I don't know, I mean I don't actually know at Newcastle. I think they bought Newcastle, right. And of course they have like Cristiano Ronaldo playing for them now and they're really trying to big up the sporting industry and they think in Saudi they of kind, kind of consider video gaming as a kind of athletics. It's like sports. And I can sort of see on a domestic sort of side why mbs, you know, has tried to harness this power of the video games. Because you know, he has this, you know, largish country with a lot of young people, maybe in this case a lot of young men, although I think, you know, women and men play maybe even Saudi. I think a lot of Saudi girls play video games. And, and one of the things that MBS did was defang the religious police and he called the bluff on the Wahhabi clerical establishment who had always held the threat of forcing the people to rise up against the House of Saud if they ever moved against the clerical establishment. Well, MBS called their bluff. He sort of had the temperature of the young and thought actually if I just let them have fun freely, more or less, then maybe they'll like me and my romance reforms more than they like these long bearded, he says hypocritically, Wahhabi clerics, et cetera. So I can see domestically why a young man seeking to carve out for himself a center of political power would use video games and sports to kind of harness the power of video game networks. But what about in terms of international policy? Because Saudi Arabia is often accused of what's called games war.
- [56:42]
George Osborne
WASHINGTON well, so this is the thing is that you so nicely teed up with the third point, which was it was the acquisition of Electronic Arts to merge together its economic and soft power strategies around sports and games. So by going ahead and buying because the thing is, before I go into the specific implications of that purchase, you are absolutely right about how sports and games are merging together in Saudi Arabia. Just enjoy. General so Cristiano Ronaldo, for example, was one of the first ambassadors for the Esports World Cup. So he was appointed by the Saudis as one of its leading ambassadors. He's also now featured as a character in a fighting video game called Fatal Fury, which is a game that is now one of the titles competed on in the Esports World Cup. So you have him literally living in that game world. But then Fatal Fury itself, because it's a fighting game, is included on the branding of some of Saudi Arabia's boxing tournaments, right?
- [57:39]
Thomas Small
Oh yeah, this is real synergy. It's brilliant actually.
- [57:43]
George Osborne
It's real synergy. And so when you then look at that acquisition of Electronic Arts, you know, there's been that question because EA has about 700 million players across the world in terms of its overall player base. And there was, there was a letter which was co signed by a couple of US Senators, including Elizabeth Warren, who when this acquisition was announced was saying, should it be investigated on the grounds of foreign influence concerns? And one of the things they really focused on was like player data. Could the Saudis, the regime in particular, take advantage of this data to repress people? And maybe they could, I don't know, possibly. But I don't think that's what they were thinking. I think actually what they were looking at was going, they've bought Newcastle United for, for roughly speaking, about £300 million. And in football, your influence can't go much further than buying one big name club you might want to operate like a multi club model, but ultimately what happens is you have one fan base who supports what you're doing. In the same way that similar investments in Manchester City and Paris Saint Germain have worked, but you're kind of stuck with that. But by buying Electronic Arts, you buy a company that has relationships with all of the sports teams, every single football club that's featured in the game, every single NFL team that's featured in Madden, every single college football team that's featured in the game, and all of the players underneath. And so what that means is that you are just softly in this force that drives the social media conversation year round within these sports that exists independently of the clubs. And you know, there's examples of it where like Last year when EAFC 26 comes out, top footballers like Manchester United's Bruno Fernandes are interviewed by the Premier League about their stats within the game and whether or not they agree with it. That reaches about 3 million people. And then when you looked at the launch of last year's college football, Texas Tech University on its own college football channels reposts the trailer of the game because their masked raider mascot is included in the game for the first time. Right. And, and so what we're not talking about here is this idea of Saudi Arabia very explicitly influencing these places. You're not going to suddenly see the crown Prince in the trailer for the next Esports FC game. But what it is is it's this classic understanding of soft power as an attractive force and saying that actually if you've got these hundreds of millions of players of these games who are participants in these sports and they start playing these games and they, they think I now want to go and see my top professionals in EAFC duke it out. Well, now I'm going to go to Riyadh to the Esports World cup to go and see what's happening there. And it's an incredibly clever influence strategy.
- [60:24]
Thomas Small
It's really interesting. The kind of influence, soft power PR influence or whatever that a country like Qatar thought it was achieving by buying Paris St Germain in the old days, 20 years ago or whenever they did that by buying EA Saudi is like basically harnessing that by a thousand. It's buying because there's actually so much more interest in engagement with and money in the video game sporting thing. And by owning the company that makes the most of it, you can basically buy all the teams, you're buying all the teams in one go. It is brilliant. So by sort of co opting the power of Video games in this way, satisfaction Saudi is a kind of trailblazer in this way.
- [61:05]
George Osborne
I would say one of the things that is really important around this is you have to take it seriously because of how seriously they take it. You know, one of the kind of common criticisms I've seen of people is just, you know, oh, they're just buying stuff up, they're splashing money, they're throwing it all over the place and it's like, yes, Saudi Arabia has considerably more money to invest in this kind of things than other nation states. But that does not explain how much more seriously the Saudi state has taken this project. It does not explain how whenever I've spoken to anyone who's involved in the Saudi game development scene that they're talking about genuine energy in that sector, how you're talking about real buy in. I spoke to the CEO of Saudi Games, Brian Ward for the book and when I was interviewing him I could see in the background of his offices in Riyadh was a massive portrait of Mohammed bin Salman, which absolutely kind of terrifying in some senses. But you know, also it's like the genuine investment and interest, you know, because it's not just him who's interested in the state. Like Prince Faisal is president of the International Esports Federation and I spoke to him for the book and he was more knowledgeable about video games than any video game policymaker I've ever spoken to.
- [62:23]
Thomas Small
That is so revealing about the generation of men who have come to power, power in Saudi. It's so interesting. They're like the first gamer gamer, what do you want to call them? Like the gamer princes or the gamer shakes.
- [62:35]
George Osborne
It's the game of princess. But the thing is, is that, and as you say, and I think it's a sort of a really important point around this is why they're co opting it is because they understand, they understand their audience. You know, Saudi Arabia is a country with a remarkably young population who were particularly again similar with what was going on in China, quite quick to jump onto the smartphone revolution. And so therefore we're consuming vast amounts of content about things that were going on in the wider world and going, I don't think this theocracy looks like my kind of speed, right. And so actually like, you know, and I think that's one of the really important points here is that the Saudis are being successful in this space because they take it seriously and they understand the interest to, to this younger audience. And by making games a big part of their overall national story, they increase domestic support amongst these audiences, but also have that international reputation too.
- [63:32]
Thomas Small
So interesting when you think that because of Vision 2030, which was launched 10 years ago and which underlies this new Saudi, that they're trying to build no less authoritarian than before, in fact probably more authoritarian, but having inherited a world in which apart from the mosque, there really were no other social networks on the ground in the country. And so how are you going to neutralize the power center that was able to harness the power of the mosque network unless you sort of look and say, hey, you know what, Every Saudi under 25 and that's like 60% of the country are on their, you know, headphones, microphone things and they're talking to each other all the time and actually when free to speak they don't say nice things about the mosque. So that just gave the state a foundation for a new way of governing. You know, it's not democratic, but it's sort of populist. And that's kind of the way that I'm going to sort of pivot to the third of the strategies. We've talked about control and we talked about China, we've talked about co ops now in that Saudi and now we're going to talk about the. Those who seek to collaborate with the world of massively networked gaming. And this is Russia and populist movements in the west. Let's say illiberal or non liberal movements in the West. So let's start with Russia. I mean I kind of think of Russia as having infiltrated gaming systems by basically spamming everything with anti woke messaging. That's kind of, that's how I think think of it. Is that just two dimensional? I mean, is there more to it than that?
- [65:11]
George Osborne
I mean it's a pretty good starting point to be honest. I think actually when you look at Russia and you look at what it's doing within video games, I think there's a kind of a historical context around Russia. Information warfare influence is, and again something that I tried to go into a bit of depth into in the book where possible. But it's this idea of Russia having kind of always known that it's had a certain amount of strategic weaknesses, especially when during the Cold War competing with the U.S. frankly it just didn't have the same conventional force. And so it starts developing this approach of active measures of trying to essentially confuse, disorient, knock your opponent off.
- [65:54]
Thomas Small
Subversion. Subversion through cultural infiltration.
- [65:57]
George Osborne
Subversion. Yeah, absolutely. And why? One of the things that's really important to note here is obviously something that the US did as well. And it's certainly not the case that it's Russia alone.
- [66:07]
Thomas Small
Of course not.
- [66:08]
George Osborne
Of course not. But the Russians did it well. And I think that's the kind of major different dimension. It's like if you go and read about things like Operation neptune in the mid-1960s, where in an effort to try and discredit governments who essentially fought against the Nazis in the mid-1940s, in an attempt to try and essentially just. Just disconcert West Germany, they end up dropping a chest full of fake documents in the middle of a lake to try and take advantage of a craze where various different people, as a result of hearing rumors of Nazi gold in crates at the bottom of lakes, documentary crews were diving into them to try and find them. And what happens is somewhere in Czechia, they find out a documentary crew's gonna do this. So they drop a chest to the bottom of this lake, they find the ST stuff, they immediately confiscate it. And when they eventually reveal what the documents are, they happen to be things that are incredibly embarrassing in terms of West Germany's relations with France, U.S. germany, that is fascinating.
- [67:08]
Thomas Small
I've never heard of that. I mean, the kgb, what evil geniuses. And I suppose there's a direct line between that and real effects like 1968, the rise of kind of anti West Germany student activism, and into the 70s, radicalism, that KGB was sowing some seeds there.
- [67:25]
George Osborne
Yeah, absolutely. And one of their whole things was if we can dominate and disrupt the information environment, we can get ahead. And one of the things when you look at Russian society in general is especially when you start looking at Vladimir Putin's time in charge of the country. Putin was a former KGB officer with a specialism in this line of information warfare in Germany.
- [67:47]
Thomas Small
Germany, actually, in East Germany.
- [67:48]
George Osborne
In Germany. Right. And so a lot of the early 2000s, it's almost about creating this kind of confused, chaotic information environment in Russia as a way of creating a set of conditions where Vladimir Putin is essentially able to go. These are the narratives. This is what you should believe. And so Russia obviously starts to look at different ways it can achieve this strategic goal across lots of different social networks, across a of lot. Lot of different things. And we've seen a lot of things in terms of the Mueller report and impact on American elections. But what they realize is, well, video games, they're plugged into all of these social networks. So when the war in Ukraine got underway, they were starting to go, well, what can we do in these spaces? And so the book ends up looking at a few different examples of what the Russians do, which includes commissioning their own video video games that promote Russian narratives in regards to the war, because they recognize that this is something that could multiply out of game spaces and begin to shape perception. There are video game streamers who start to promote the messages of the Wagner military group completely organically because they want to do their bit to support the war effort. And then one particular guy, a guy called Grisha Putin, suddenly ends up in Burkina Faso live streaming a video. Video game, a modified video game he's made, which promotes Russian narratives in Africa to an audience in that region. And then the final thing is they start going after Ukrainian game developers who essentially oppose their narrative. So the makers of a game called Stalker 2, which, the original Stalker was one of the most popular video games in Russia, but it was made in Ukraine. So when the war starts, the Stalker 2 developers are like, well, we're not going to sell this in Russia, because obviously you're attacking us. And so their game comes under sustained attack in terms of hackers trying to steal information, in terms of political operatives trying to imply that it's a secret recruitment tool for trying to find Ukrainians dodging the draft. And it even ends up being discussed in the Russian Duma as a project that should be essentially banned from sale because it's promoting Nazi messages. And so Russia, just weapons weaponizing this entire space because they recognize all of these stories can resonate in the online communities, but when people hear them, they end up writing about them elsewhere. So there are examples in there of the streamer Grisha Putin being written about in places like the Wall Street Journal, because they're like, this is Russia's propagandist. And the Russians are obviously delighted because suddenly a guy who's only being viewed 14,000 times on his stream is suddenly reaching an audience of millions of people across the world because he's being given the visibility. So it's Russia's understanding that the information war you fight in games can multiply outwards, and it's very smart.
- [70:36]
Thomas Small
And does Russia, has it infiltrated the Western network of gaming? I don't know if you're on Discord Channels or Steam things. Are Russian games distributed in the west or is there any attempt attempts to ban them, regulate them, censor them?
- [70:52]
George Osborne
Yeah. So there's a tactical shooter game called Squad 22 ZOV, which is essentially, you get to enact the Russian side of offenses in places like Mariupol, which is obviously a very cheery, cheery game. To be enjoying. I have played it, you'll be pleased to know it's rubbish. That's the most important thing about it. But this game is freely available on Steam because Steam's libertarian ownership has a very light approach towards content moderation. And so unless there is a law banning specific iconography, like for example in Ukraine and Germany, the Z symbol which is featured in the game is a ban symbol. So therefore it's not on the stores, it's available everywhere else. I was able to download it in the uk and one of the things that links back to something else we were talking about is in those forums underneath the game and it's listing on Steam you have a full blown flame war. Memes slinging out everywhere, pro Russian memes, all essentially promoting the Kremlin point of view because they realize that Steam is one of the few channels that millions of Russians still have access to, but obviously hundreds of millions of other people do in the rest of the world. So it's this realization that that where they've been cut out of a lot of other pipelines in the rest of the social economy, they're really present, still there. So yeah, they're still visible.
- [72:15]
Thomas Small
Well, moving to the west and to liberal democracies and the fact that liberal democracies have been much slower and much less adroit at harnessing the power of video games, or at least, or even just responding to this new power. You open the book with an anecdote about Ukraine as it happens when you were approached by the British government to, well, tell us the story. It's kind of amazing that this happened, frankly. George.
- [72:43]
George Osborne
Yeah, so it's April 2022 and the war in Ukraine has been going on for a couple of months. And over the course of the previous couple of years I'd done quite a bit of work with the UK government on public administration information campaigns because as mentioned at the start of this interview, we were talking a lot about the fact that video games reach a huge number of people in social spaces, especially when you're indoors. What's a great place to get things like Covid? Public health messaging? How do you get that to people? You integrate it in game environments or you use the social media channels of game developers to promote these messages. And so I liaised with various people to organize that. But then, yeah, out of the blue this email lands and essentially it's quite sheepishly asking. It's someone from the Department of Culture at Media and Sport in the UK and they're saying, look, we've had a Chat with some people at Cabinet Office. So the central government department that sits around the key business of government. And they were wondering whether or not you might be considering putting pro Ukrainian messages messages in the Russian releases of popular video games. And that's a pretty big thing for someone to ask.
- [73:56]
Thomas Small
Absolutely. How interesting.
- [73:57]
George Osborne
I was like, well, welcome to the propaganda front lines. But for me it was actually quite straightforward. There was never going to be a chance that I was going to recommend this because lots of the games companies we worked with had already pulled out of Russia because obviously they didn't want to be in the territory making money, especially with. With. With sanctions and everything coming into place.
- [74:17]
Thomas Small
Sure, yeah.
- [74:18]
George Osborne
So in the end, I kind of politely say no after a few sort of side conversations and the person emails back, obviously relieved because, you know, someone. I think it was one of those things where someone had had a bit of a. What I felt was at the time, a bit of a mad idea and they were just very relieved to find out that it wasn't going ahead. But then, yeah, within, over the course of the next few years, it's like 2023, I ended up reading a paper from the Swedish Psychological Defense Agency, part of their sort of military, which is about building resilience to things like disinformation, which identified like 40 or so influence tactics via video games. And I was like, that's strange. And then a year later, I was at a State Department event with the Swedish Psychological Defense Agency talking about how the American administration and at the time, James P. Rubin, a former Clinton official, or was taking this seriously as an issue around the world. And then six months later, that entire part of the State Department, the Global Engagement center, was shuttered by the new Republican administration, by Doge and the new Republican administration. Well, no one called Donald Trump's victory really in terms of the sort of the polling establishment in 2024. And they certainly didn't call the number of electoral votes he was calling going to get, except for one polling firm called Johnson Partners, J.L. johnson Partners, who managed to successfully call his win and his Electoral college count. But they were the only polling firm who were reaching people via in game adverts. So to correct issues with their polling samples in terms of reaching younger men, particularly black and Hispanic men, they were reaching out to them via their games. And as a result of that, they were the only people that tapping into this information ecosystem, they realized that more
- [76:05]
Thomas Small
people were going to vote for Trump than the elite people thought. You know, that's why we all woke up that Morning wondering, like, what the hell happened? I was assured, I was assured that we were all with her, but turns out not very many of us were.
- [76:19]
George Osborne
No. And it turns out that a community of predominantly younger men who had been consistently engaged with by various iterations of, of Trump's team over the course of a period of actually basically nearly 15 years, turns out that when it came down to it, that was the side that they were going to swing for. That was the person they were going to vote for, the person who they associated with, listening to them and to their interests.
- [76:49]
Thomas Small
Well, let's talk about Trump and MAGA and video games. Because in a way, just as Barack Obama's election election team in 2006, 2007, 2008 were the first very savvily to harness the power of social media, which was new on the scene then, Facebook had only been released a few years before. YouTube had only come out. Twitter was in fact not even out yet. But I think Obama, in his two elections, they and the Democratic Party used the new power of social media very, very well to win those elections to take over control of the United States government. Well, in 2014, 2015, 2016 and onwards, this new MAGA movement, which had kind of exploded the old GOP from within by this outside renegade, Trump, who's just kind of changed everything, you know, for good, for bad. That depends on what you, you know, who you talk to. But they clearly did the same thing that Obama had managed to do for social media, but using this new video game architecture. And people like Steve Bannon, I think, were particularly foresighted in this. And this also overlaps with a very strange episode which I only kind of understood when it was unfolding. Gamergate. I almost feel dirty even saying the word because it seemed so tawdry and frankly stupid at the time. And yet it has had sort of real big downstream consequences.
- [78:18]
George Osborne
I mean, I would say the summary of Gamergate as tawdry and stupid is pretty much on the money. But look, but it genuinely. Yeah, massive consequences. And what's kind of fascinating is how all of this unfolds. And again, something that I try to outline as much as possible is Bannon is a really key figure in this. So I think when people tend to think about strange Steve Bannon sidelines in the world of entertainment, most people go to Seinfeld and the fact that he was responsible in terms of securing the deal to get that finance.
- [78:52]
Thomas Small
Oh, God, I forgot about that. Gosh.
- [78:54]
Sponsor/Announcer
Yeah.
- [78:55]
George Osborne
So Steve Bannon makes a good bit of his money off Seinfeld residuals, which is, which is great.
- [78:59]
Thomas Small
So ironic. I wonder what Jerry Seinfeld thinks about that.
- [79:02]
George Osborne
Yeah, you know, it's just like that's one that we've got to hopefully ask him one day. But with Bannon, one of his other big forays into the world of entertainment happened in the mid 2000s, where when he was at Goldman Sachs, he was attached to to a company called International Gaming Entertainment. And their big business model was selling gold and selling accounts for big popular online multiplayer games. And the reason why they did this is because as sort of slightly mentioned a bit earlier, certain games have become less like your traditional products and they become more like services. And so what that meant is to be able to have the best items or the most progress, you often had to either spend hours and hours playing the game game or you had to find a way to kind of jump over the barriers presented to you by the in game economy. So people would just start buying up accounts of very highly levelled World of Warcraft players. They could play later parts of the game or buying currency. But this was all against the terms and conditions of these various online games. So the publishers weren't very happy and the players were particularly unhappy because what they disliked was the fact that their communities were being invaded by people who were just in there to grind characters and then sell them off to people who frankly were not putting in the kind of the time, investment and overall effort to contribute to the community. And so in the mid 2000s, this company looks like it's on course for greatness. But then it suddenly gets shot down from two angles. The publishers make it very clear that they do not like what they're doing and they're basically banning it, forbidding it, and taking all legal action that they can stop it. But the player community tendency revolts as well. So in World of Warcraft, players start to begin instituting English language tests on certain quests amongst their party of players. Because most of the people who are engaged in the processes of say, farming more items or trying to generate more gold so they could sell it online, they tended to be Chinese and they had very poor command of English language, so they started to do that. But then one player actually launches a class action lawsuit against International Gaming Entertainment wins and its business model is basically barred for five years and the company collapses. Out of that, Bannon does two things. First of all, he keeps a hold of a couple of World of Warcraft news sites. So in his media portfolio there are a couple of World of Warcraft news sites, but the Other thing he looks at is, he goes, this is a group of disaffected young men who are incredibly capable online campaigners who are able to sink big businesses. There must be some power here. So 2014, Gamergate, it's a hate movement, essentially, that emerges from a falsehood, which is that essentially a male games journalist had slept with a female developer and as a result of that had positively reviewed her game. Now, that is not true. They had had a relationship, but there was clearly like no evidence of him, him ever writing anything like that, ever writing a review or engaging in it. But what it led to was this emergence of a whole sort of subculture which became known as the Gamergate and Gamergaters who began to organize and started to generate things like conspiracy theories, connecting together this woman, a woman called Zoe Quinn, to other women who work in the games industry, Brianna Wu and Anita Sarkeesian in particular. And then what happened happened was that kind of conspiracy transformed from just being. There is a problem with ethics within video games journalism, which was the kind of high and mighty concern towards being what was quite clearly like a targeted campaign of harassment. And, you know, I spoke to a woman called Keza McDonald, who's now the Guardian's games editor. She got drawn into this web and due to the incompetence of the Gamergaters, they accidentally sent her the dossier that she. They had compiled on her, which apparently included one of those kind of detective murder boards, pinning together all of the connections between people.
- [82:57]
Thomas Small
All of this proving Steve Bannon's point that there's a lot of like, organizational power here. These people know how to do dirty political work.
- [83:05]
George Osborne
Absolutely. And because of Bannon's interest in this, and also the interest of Milo Yiannopoulos, who was the tech reporter at Breitbart
- [83:14]
Thomas Small
at the time, which was owned by Bannon or somehow funded by Bannon. Is Bannon linked to Breitbart?
- [83:18]
George Osborne
Yes. Bannon by that point was kind of like the central figure there. So what happens is that they end up taking up the cause of Gamergate, especially once they start realizing that it's actually dominating the social media discourse. And by October 2014, with a combination of that social media energy and a bit of what Breitbart is doing, they briefly managed to convince intel to pull advertising from a video games media site in October 2014 on the basis that one of the journalists, a female journalist called Leigh Alexander, was apparently wrapped up in all of this. Now, again, wasn't true. Intel later apologised, but they never put the Money back in. But what people realised was like, ah, there's something here, right. We can take an extreme idea that isn't necessarily rooted in truth. And what we can do is as long as we've got a noisy enough online community, we can begin to dominate the social media discord. Course, what will happen is we can begin to win these kinds of opportunities and then what happens off the back of this is newspapers start covering it. So you start seeing things like the New York Times covering this. But because going back to an earlier point, liberal democracies don't really understand games
- [84:26]
Thomas Small
or don't respect them. They hold them in contempt.
- [84:29]
George Osborne
They hold them in contempt. You know what, Thomas, I didn't want to say it, but I'm going to have to agree there.
- [84:34]
Thomas Small
Oh, I know they do, because I do. That's what I'm telling you. I understand that kind of attitude towards
- [84:39]
George Osborne
video games, of course, but what it means is that when they're covering the story, they're swallowing the Gamergate line completely.
- [84:45]
Thomas Small
Oh, they don't know how to contradict it because they don't know what the hell's going on. Well, although they were aware that this was like there were some, to their liberal way of thinking, dark animal urges involved, they knew that something atavistic was kind of growing down in the sewers of, you know, of the white male incel world. That's how they imagined it. And maybe it was kind of true and so they knew something was happening, but they just didn't really know certainly what it was and how to stop it.
- [85:13]
George Osborne
Yes, absolutely. And what that meant as well is that even though they might have known that kind of thing was going on, especially anyone who had even sort of frankly passing familiarity with the chan boards, like 4chan and 8chan.
- [85:26]
Thomas Small
Yeah, 4chan.
- [85:27]
George Osborne
Is that actually nevertheless. Because. Because it had then been kind of given a presentable face via the write ups Breitbart was giving it, it meant that talking points that should have been really strongly contested were just swallowed whole. And then they're suddenly washing into the media debate and it leads to this conversation here where like a decade and a half later you're like, I'm still not entirely sure what went on there, but did they maybe have a point? Was there a point there? Because actually this is the thing, is that our wife wider discourse and debate was shaped by this. And what happens is Bannon realizes these are the shock troopers, these are the people who you want at the heart of the Trump movement. And in the following couple of years, you see Gamergate's tactics being adopted by the political right, but also going into become foundational members of the alt right, foundational members of QAnon. And what's really interesting is on the right, people accept said this Milo Yiannopoulos in the run up to the 2016 election, talks about this crazy conservative coalition which includes all of your traditional conservative figureheads and the gamers. But when you start reading mainstream media write ups of the movement that's assembled behind Trump, they're never mentioning video games. No, the BBC news pieces about it aren't mentioning gamers. They're not in there at all. And so they miss the fact that these people or have become essential for promoting Trump messaging, for essentially being the campaigners and shock troopers who are shaping the political environment online.
- [86:56]
Thomas Small
Whereas those same Guardian journalists and other elite mainstream journalists did not miss the fact in 2008 and 2012 that Obama's coalition was being built on Facebook, on Twitter, et cetera. And that it seems to me, looking back now at the last 20 years, saying since social media began, I don't think that the MAGA movement or the populist right globally has a monopoly on employing these new ways of communicating and networking to bring forth false narratives in pursuit of political influence and power. I think in a way it seems to me, stepping back a bit, that some more, let's say radical, liberalist, or what they call themselves, progress, progressive political actors in the early years were doing the same thing. Now you might say doing it for more benign ends, if that's your politics, but just in terms of the strategy, they were harnessing kind of narratives that sometimes proved to be false or one sided and slogans and all of this stuff, and very successfully. And we had eight years of Obama and then Bannon has his own politics and he's doing the same, same thing, but in a whole world, an online social media world that is linked to video games, that the left, that the progressive opposition just does not employ or harness or understand at all. And maybe when the histories are written 50 years from now, they'll realize that this was the Achilles heel of the left. They had successfully employed social media media. And then when their opponents started to use social media, they began maybe to make moves towards controlling, censoring, regulating social media. You know, there's a whole debate about that, to maintain a certain hegemonic control over that, that means of communicating in the 21st century. But they had completely overlooked an even more powerful networking tool, video games, which until this day, is it safe to say, George, the Rock, right, still laps the left in its employment and, and use of video games.
- [89:06]
George Osborne
It does. And the way we can see this is via the White House's Instagram channel. Right. So this is so obviously, you know, we're speaking now in terms of the context of the war in Iran. Right. And as part of.
- [89:21]
Thomas Small
Oh, I know what you're going to talk about this ridiculous video.
- [89:25]
George Osborne
As of part, part of its messaging, the White House has been putting out a series of memes in which popular culture footage is interspersed with usually videos of explosions, targets being blown up. Now, I was looking at the past 50 videos for the White House's Instagram account, and there are three that are specifically very strongly video game coded. There is one which looks like you're playing Wii Sports. So you open up the Nintendo Wii, you click Operation Epic Fury and then it shows interspersing cuts of people playing things like bowling or golfing. But then there's an explosion of a tank in the middle that's got about 4.7 million views and about 164,000 likes.
- [90:05]
Thomas Small
Always sophisticated, those White House press people.
- [90:09]
George Osborne
Exactly. There's one which has got Call of Duty by Modern Warfare 3. It looks like you're keying in an airstrike and suddenly things are blowing up. It's got 4.6 million views. And then there's one which is a Grand Theft Auto meme, which is, you know, oh shit, here we go again. Which has become a very sort of popular Internet meme that's got about 3.6 million views. And the reason why I'm citing that is because if you look at the past 50 videos on the White House's Instagram channel, the average views on a video is about 1.7 million. Right. So these videos are generally speaking twice or potentially three times as effective in terms of reaching audiences. So interesting because they're funny, because they hit these connective things, because they shock, because it's ultimately a culture that the people who support the White House understand and therefore want to support. But who other people, they get drawn into it because of the memes, because of the sense of humor, and it's not present on anyone else's communications.
- [91:05]
Thomas Small
Well, what I don't understand is that even though, yes, it's right wing political actors that are harnessing this power, it's not like video gamers are all right wings wing, far from it. I mean, even like crazy, crazy left wing kind of people or whatever. I don't know if politics is the right, you know, way diagnostic to use, but like the the person who assassinated Charlie Kirk, I understand, was a big gamer and employed gaming symbols or gaming slogans in the attack, like written on the bullet casings and things. So it's not like members of the radical Gen Z, Gen X left hyper progressive LGBTQ thing, that whole world that the, that the anti wokesters despise, they're also playing video games and they're also in video games having I, I imagine quite siloed ecosystems where they say all sorts of stuff they say about their way of seeing the world. So why, I mean, is this ultimately just a symbol of where the center liberal left establishment has gone wrong? That they are literally just like what their opponents, opponents or even like their old school left wing kind of fellow travelers say about them, that they're just too up their own butts to recognize that video games are here, they're powerful, they're important. You can't just hold them in contempt in the same way that like the white working class is here. You can't just hold them in contempt. You must engage.
- [92:33]
George Osborne
Yeah, I, I would wholeheartedly agree because there is this enormous form of mass culture which reaches billions of people through hundreds of thousands, in some cases, like millions of games, they have formed communities which are central to their life. It is the culture that they love, it is the place they spend their time, it is where they develop their ideas and their thoughts. And for the most part, the traditional approach towards video games in those liberal audiences has been to disregard, push away, or actively say the whole thing is hostile. And so that means even someone like myself, who is quite frankly one of the wettest liberal Democrats you're ever going to find, feels slightly alienated.
- [93:16]
Thomas Small
I bet you do.
- [93:17]
George Osborne
Exactly. But it's that. And that is the thing is, it's about understanding. And particularly I think what the political right in the US has done spectacularly well, is that they have understood that, that alien alienation, especially amongst what kind of. I call in the book the traditional gamer audience of young men who are feeling more broadly disaffected with where the world is going, anywhere, this is speaking their language, they are meeting them where they are, and they are being rewarded. And if there's one thing that good Democratic campaigners really know and should know, is that if you are not speaking to the people who voted, vote on their terms, on their ground, and in the things that matter to them, you lose. And I feel like that is the central story of the book. The defeats that people are having within video games at the moment are largely self inflicted. And I feel like taking it seriously could reap huge benefits.
- [94:13]
Thomas Small
Well, maybe if that first progressive wave of the Obama era, in American traffic terms, maybe if it made some gamers, some male gamers particularly, feel whatever, alienated, attacked, held in contempt. And then through outlets like Gamergate and ultimately MAGA and all that stuff, they kind of exploded into the public sphere and contributed to changing our world. Maybe now it's going to be the other way. And the George Osbornes of the world, the left wing liberal gang gamers, feel that. Come on, you've gotta take us seriously. Stop treating us like we're troglodytes. We're serious people with brains and we have good ideas. And you're gonna burst out and change the world.
- [94:55]
George Osborne
I would say a perfect summary. Apart from assuming I have brains, Thomas, I've just got lots of research and a work ethic.
- [95:02]
Thomas Small
George, don't be so damn English. You have brains and you've written a great book. Everyone buy the book. Read the book. It's called. What's it called? It's called Power Play, Video Games, Politics and the Battle for Global Influence. Gosh, you know, these conflicted conversations, they get longer and longer. Goodness. George Osborne, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been great having you.
- [95:20]
George Osborne
Thank you so much for having me.
- [95:22]
Thomas Small
That was George Osborne. His excellent and illuminating new book, Power Play, Video Games, Politics and the Battle for Global Influence is out now with Wildfire in hardback, ebook and audio. And remember, for deeper dives into the ideas we explore on this show, including extended conversations and Q&As with my CO host, Eamon Dean. Check the show notes for details on how to join the conflicted community. I'm Thomas Small. Conflicted is a message Heard Production Our executive producers are Jake Warren and Max Warren. This episode was produced and edited by Thomas Small. Shop the Sherwin Williams sale and get
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Thomas Small
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Thomas Small
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