Gamer Impact Lab
Mobilizing gaming communities against anti-democratic speech.
Working with Porticus, we created the Gamer Impact Lab to occupy social spaces within gamer culture to promote the value of social participation and fight extremist speech.
Key Takeaways
21 streamers engaged directly
+170,000 livestream viewers on 09/07
Challenge
The global gaming industry has experienced huge growth, with Brazil alone accounting for over 75M players. As a result, the political world has become more attentive to this universe. Recently, the gaming world has seen an explosion of fake news and the creation of extremist groups such as the alt-right and Hatred Cabinets. These have appropriated the narrative in forums and promoted coordinated attacks on individuals, institutions and democratic principles in Brazil and around the world.
Strategy
Our strategy was to be active in the social spaces of gamers with innovative campaigns designed to engage youth and create communities that promote behaviors to fight extremism and anti-democratic speech. We did this by researching these communities and identifying the narratives, messages, channels, and behavioral influence points necessary to reach and influence them.
Creative
We created a brand that aided conversations and raised awareness about politics and democracy in the gamer community. The logo was developed to allow flexible usage and so included variations and usage rules. The Lab’s visual system also encompassed stickers with expressions and illustrations which related to the gaming universe. This helped to escalate the brand’s expansion.
Campaign
Through campaigns that brought together gaming communities, we helped raise awareness about democracy and politics. We talked about politics in a playful way, promoted debates on social rights in message channels, and fought extremist visions in geek culture. This facilitated connections between content creators, video game companies and NGOs to launch and support democratic initiatives and pro-democracy campaigns that cut through the space.
Impact
As a result of the campaign, content creators learned to talk about politics in new and interesting (but nonpolitical) ways, and gamers gained a new understanding of the relevance of elections to their lives, while having fun. This helped bring political participation to a wider, more engaged audience. In addition, by devoting ourselves to the unprecedented political engagement of influencers and audiences in the gaming universe, we could consider new approaches to political participation for Brazilian youth more broadly, which in turn allowed us to explore how to fight the far right and strengthen minority groups.
“"Understanding a bit more about gamer ethics and the way the community interacts with games was very useful to get a better sense of the opportunities and risks associated with the gaming universe."”
