Watched the video of the Capitol seige.

What struck me the most was the banter.

I’m a gamer. I’ve been part of many guilds, many raids (in game).

Gamer voice chat sounds like that. The yelling, hooting, bravado.

The insurrectionists really approached this like a game.

I cannot stress enough how completely it played out AS IF THEY WERE IN A GAMING RAID TAKING TARGET POINTS TO GET TO THE FINAL BOSS.

This doesn’t make their crimes less real, their actions less premeditated, purposeful, grotesque.

But ... I dunno. Lots of feels.

Let me state first and foremost that I do not think the games are inherently bad.

But for many years it has been abundantly obvious that folks in MMO‘s have been targeted and radicalized. It happens in the channels you automatically encounter in the world.

Breitbart’s Steve Bannon knew enough about World of Warcraft to have a gold farm.

For those not familiar with the term, it’s a way of making real money by providing currency within the game.

It is also an effective way of harvesting peoples’ data.

In every game I’ve ever played, there are always gold farmers spamming the channels. These are people with basic accounts who logon explicitly to sell their wares & try to suck people into their schemes.

There are also those who spam channels with slurs: racist, sexist, etc.,

Veteran players learn to block & report those people pretty quickly. And, on the surface, you might think that these are isolated individuals who have no better place to vent their poison.

Harmless kids. Screwed up, but certainly not coordinated.

Years ago I recognized a pattern. These weren’t kids. They weren’t even there to play the game. The accounts that regularly started political, racial, sexist conversations in the open world chats? They were accounts made just for access to those channels.

Block 5, 10 sprang up.

Something was going on. It wasn’t only gold farmers seeking to steal data.

Consider the age range of people who play MMOs. There are a lot of kids on there. Early teens. Eager & impressionable.

And their games, a refuge from their parents. These chat channels? No oversight.

And that takes me back to the fact that Steve Bannon had a gold farm.

He understood enough about World of Warcraft to profit off of it.

But money is certainly not that man’s only motivation.

Conversion motivates him more.

So… who exactly has been talking to the gamers in the open world channels all these years?