ON Aug 28, police station Banr in Swat came under a militant attack in which one policeman lost his life and two others were wounded. Investigations revealed that a tech-savvy group of young militants had used an online video game ‘Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds’, popularly known as PUBG, for this attack. The chat room of this gaming platform was adopted to dodge electronic surveillance and communicate with accomplices both in Pakistan and Afghanistan. In January 2022, militants had carried out a blast in Anarkali, Lahore, killing three persons and injuring dozens. One of the militants, involved in the blast, disclosed during investigations the use of PUBG for recruitment and coordination.

Today, more than three billion people play video games around the world and the global gaming industry is annually generating $200bn in revenues. At the same time, the gamification of violence, where extremists use gaming to encourage violence in non-gaming contexts, is becoming more prevalent in digital playgrounds. For extremist actors, gamification is a gateway for recruitment, propaganda, radicalisation, fundraising and nexus formation. This weaponisation of gaming spaces has become an important concern for multiple........

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