Research into online forms of far-right, alt-right, populist, and supremacist politics has raised questions about the extent to which social media enables or constitutes extremist affects and ideologies. Building on this research and through a case study of how a pro-Trump community on Reddit made sense of news events and sought to contest their representation, this paper explores the relationship between games and politics, arguing that digital platforms encourage people to apprehend, interpret, and contest political ideas and information as if engaged in a kind of videogame. We show how the group sought to manipulate platform affordances, waging a kind of Info War rooted in an understanding of politics as a pure space of conflict. We show how social media orients people to politics, phenomenologically, through the logics, structures and narratives of online games and argue that this affects not only online behaviors but more general apprehensions of politics.

中文翻译：

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在 Reddit 上玩新闻：r/The_Donald 上的政治游戏


对极右翼、另类右翼、民粹主义和至上主义政治在线形式的研究提出了关于社交媒体在多大程度上促成或构成极端主义影响和意识形态的问题。基于这项研究，并通过 Reddit 上支持特朗普的社区如何理解新闻事件并试图质疑其代表性的案例研究，本文探讨了游戏与政治之间的关系，认为数字平台鼓励人们理解、解释，并像参与某种电子游戏一样争夺政治思想和信息。我们展示了该组织如何寻求操纵平台可供性，发动一场信息战，其根源在于将政治理解为纯粹的冲突空间。我们展示了社交媒体如何通过网络游戏的逻辑、结构和叙事，从现象学角度引导人们走向政治，并认为这不仅影响在线行为，还影响对政治的更普遍的理解。