How Video Games Took Over Politics

The Atlantic

25-04-2025

When Representative Al Green of Texas started shouting and waving his cane around during Donald Trump's address to Congress last month, pundits described the Democrat as causing a disruption, pulling a stunt, or peacefully protesting. In the wilds of online alternative media, another term was being used: malding.
Mald is a blend of mad and bald. It's video-gamer slang for getting so angry after suffering a loss that you pull your hair out. I learned the word by watching Twitch, the streaming platform that is famous for turning video games into a spectator sport—and that has, of late, become an important forum for political commentary. One of the most popular Twitch streamers right now is a 35-year-old World of Warcraft expert who goes by the name Asmongold and primarily streams under the handle zackrawrr. On the day after Trump's congressional address, Asmongold kicked off his stream by telling his viewers he was excited to finish playing the new game Monster Hunter Wilds— and to sort through the fallout from Trump's speech.
He pulled up a TV-news interview in which Green explained that he'd interrupted the president to object to potential Medicaid cuts. Asmongold offered his view: Interrupting Trump was tantamount to 'malding out,' which makes 'people think you're a fucking retard.'
Asmongold, whose real name is Zack Hoyt, is a prominent member of a class of influencers that has been helping remake the American electorate. With an average of more than 2.2 million people tuning in to Twitch at any given moment—and clips of the top streamers regularly going megaviral on the wider internet—the platform is, as the journalist Nathan Grayson points out in the new book Stream Big, comparable in reach to 'mainstream television networks like CNN and Fox during prime-time slots and major events.' (And that's without counting other streaming venues, such as Kick and YouTube.) During last year's campaign, the Trump camp courted the streamer Adin Ross in order to reach a young, largely male constituency that ended up helping decide the election.
Trump's second administration has made it even clearer how the culture of gaming—a pastime enjoyed weekly by 61 percent of adults, age 36 on average—is bleeding into American politics. The avowed Diablo 4 player Elon Musk explains DOGE's activities with gaming terms such as speedrunning (beating a game way more quickly than its creators intended—or slashing government at a far faster rate than previously seemed possible). Musk recently beefed with Hasan Piker, the popular leftist Twitch streamer who has been enlisted by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to help rally opposition to Trump. He has also publicly feuded with Asmongold—after Asmongold criticized Musk for exaggerating his own gaming accomplishments (which is kind of like the 2020s equivalent of a politician fudging their golf handicap or war-zone experience).
I've been dipping in and out of Asmongold's channel for the past month to understand what it means for politics to be processed through the lens of video games. After all, how a society amuses itself tends to affect how it governs itself. The rise of TV, the media theorist Neil Postman famously argued, remade politics into visual entertainment, ruled by optics. Professional sports, it's often said, primes people to view elections as a contest between rivals. The internet has inflated the importance of identity and authenticity, inviting campaigners to act like just another face in the social-media scroll. Gaming seems to be intensifying the effects of those three media and adding in something else: cynicism.
Asmongold's hair is scraggly and brown; his build is stringy; his eyebrows are given to vigorous wiggling. He likes to brag about not showering for months. Most of his streams start with him taking questions from his viewers, who provide a continuous river of comments in his Twitch chat room. The topics might include what he ate last night (possibly Taco Cabana), what he thinks of puzzle games (not a fan: 'The reason why is I don't want to think '), and whether he's ever going to stream from the White House ('We'll see what happens'). He then starts browsing the internet, sharing his screen with viewers while clicking among memes and news clips shared on Reddit and X. He'll watch speeches and news segments in full, pausing every so often to add an 'uh oh' or a 'Let's go!' or a longer bit of analysis.
Before I started tuning in to Twitch—keeping it on in the background while sending emails or cleaning the house—I wondered whether its practitioners were just updated versions of old-media archetypes, such as the talk-radio host, football commentator, and news anchor. But Asmongold is less energetic and polished than those kinds of professionals; the feeling one gets is not of watching him but of watching with him. I sometimes felt a pang of nostalgia for middle-school hangouts with friends. A specific form of communication arises from a group of guys staring at the same screen: You murmur nonsense back and forth in a knowingly Neanderthal manner; it's bracketed in irony, based less in thinking than reacting. He's playing the role of a buddy on the couch.
That said, he's a buddy with a lot of opinions. Last year, he was temporarily banned from Twitch for saying that Palestinians were part of an 'inferior culture' whose destruction he doesn't mourn (he apologized); earlier this month, he attracted controversy for saying that transgender kids exist only because of adults' mental illness (he doubled down on that one). But his style is far from the stridency of provocateurs such as Candace Owens and Newsmax's Trump apologists. Instead, he's detached or wryly amused. He comes off like a burned-out tutor hired to translate current events into gamerspeak for distracted teens. (For example, he said Trump's tariffs were fixing 'the loot council,' equating global capital to gold or treasures earned in a World of Warcraft raid.)
Indeed, Asmongold's foray into political commentary often seems to have been undertaken half-heartedly. The gaming world's rightward drift can be traced back to the 'Gamergate' controversy of a decade ago, when a vocal slice of gamers organized an angry backlash to game designers and journalists who had been trying to make the art form more diverse and inclusive. 'All we wanted to do was play video games,' Asmongold said in a recent stream. 'And then they had to put girls in video games. And so now we have to elect Donald Trump to stop that.' He was speaking in a sarcastic deadpan, but he was suggesting a truth about the particular brand of conservatism that has taken hold of numerous men lately: In many cases, it's driven not by a committed belief system but by a tribal vendetta against, to use one of his favorite terms, the 'retards' of the identity-focused left.
That particular slur actually says a lot about Asmongold's outlook. He presents himself as standing for opinions that are so widely shared, and so obvious, that disagreeing with him means you're intellectually disabled (and, the logic of his usage would suggest he thinks, pitiful). He'll often reiterate that he's no partisan hack; unlike many elected Republicans, he's in favor of universal basic income and a constitutional right to an abortion. 'I place pretty much no values in principles or morality,' he said in one stream. 'I think that these are top-down ideas that are given to you by the elites.' The professed disregard for ideology is, of course, hardly rare these days. Joe Rogan's entire brand is freethinking. Even Trump likes to justify his decisions as being 'common sense.'
This sort of logic is perhaps why the term NPC, or non-player character, has become trendy on the right. In video games, an NPC is a computer-controlled ally or opponent, such as a blacksmith who sells the player gear and a goblin whom the player must slay. Their pool of dialogue is limited and their characterization thin; they have no real identity beyond how the player sees them. In recent years, Musk and many others have taken to calling their liberal opponents NPCs. Ironically enough, the diss suggests its own ideology: Politics isn't a dispute among philosophical visions for a better world, or even a contest among constituencies for resources; it's a quest for certain humans who matter to defeat people-shaped obstacles that don't.
In this schema, Trump is simply the man who's rescuing the country from the rule of the brainless. Asmongold's commentary about the president usually focuses not on whether any given decision by Trump is wise in its own right but rather on how the 'average' or 'normal' person is going to react. Asmongold has, for example, little particular insight about the economy: 'I don't really care about whether the tariffs are good or bad—I don't give a fuck,' he said in one stream. But he seems to have schadenfreude about the distress the tariffs have caused. Over and over, he's hammered at the idea that 'normal people' don't care about the stock market in the same way that the elites who are criticizing Trump's policies do. Asmongold doesn't agree with everything Trump does—but he clearly thinks that the president is scaring the right people.
Sometimes I'd start to wonder what I was doing spending time listening to Asmongold at all. Then I'd notice that 60,000 people were watching live, or I'd go to his YouTube page and see that the viewership for any given clip from his streams ranges from the hundreds of thousands to the millions. He may sound like just some guy on the couch—but now he, and many other guys on the couch, have captured a slice of the voting public, and have ties to political figures of influence. Not all gaming streamers are alike; Piker, who's been hyped as the potential 'Joe Rogan of the left' in news coverage since the election, delivers heady Marxist theory and wonkish research on geopolitics in a tone of frat-boy exuberance. But Asmongold is the more popular figure, and he's one member of a larger, right-leaning ecosystem.
Often while watching Asmongold, I thought about the video-game concept of 'the meta.' It refers to shared knowledge among dedicated players about the best practices for succeeding in a game. Understanding the meta means approaching video games with a moneyball mentality; it means knowing, say, the optimal sword to use against a particular boss. Gamers play games for all sorts of reasons: to role-play, to challenge themselves, to kill time with friends. But digging into the meta means looking beneath a fantastical veneer—story, graphics, so on—to exploit the rules. To see the world in this way means discounting the ideas that ostensibly govern our society—ethics, beliefs, norms—and instead processing life as a struggle for dominance.
The strangest thing about this view of politics is that it's seductive enough, perhaps even addictive enough, to pull people away from the greatest distraction on Earth: video games. On the first day I tuned in to Asmongold, I was amazed to find that it took him a full five hours of chitchatting before he finally fired up Monster Hunter Wilds, a game about, well, hunting monsters. In combat, he frantically mashed buttons, hooting 'Big dick!' whenever he was doing well. During cutscenes—videos advancing the game's narrative—he talked over the dialogue, issuing summaries like, 'So I have to kill the big thing, right?'
I recognize his hypnotized, single-minded mentality from my own gaming experiences. After a certain amount of playtime, what's on-screen stops looking like a coherent world and starts looking like inputs and outputs, challenges and rewards. And when you look up, reality feels like the screen.