Bellingcat’s guide to misinformation and games, 30/05/2024
Eliot Higgins discusses misinformation, internet culture and Hypnospace Outlaw
Eliot Higgins from Bellingcat discusses how to tackle misinformation and games
Fortnite set to return to UK mobile devices in 2025 following UK Government wash-up
F1 24 lines up on the grid to lead the week’s releases
Why hello there,
As you may have seen, VGIM Insider launched earlier this week to offer a paid supplement to the core Video Games Industry Memo experience. I was both proud, and genuinely humbled, to see so many of you sign up to support my work and I am immensely grateful for it.
I’ll be kicking off the first subscriber perks from the beginning of next week. If you’d like to sign up as a paid Insider and join our merry little band, make sure to hit the button below to get a lifetime discount of 20% on all things VGIM.
Anyway, enough selling. Let’s get into the big read because I think that this one is a bit of a corker.
The big read - Bellingcat’s guide to misinformation and games
I don’t know if you remember what you were doing on 14th November 2017 (I certainly don’t) but it is fair to say that the Russian Ministry of Defence probably wishes it could forget what happened that day.
At 10:03am, the Ministry’s Twitter and Facebook accounts posted what it claimed was “irrefutable evidence that the US are actually covering ISIS combat units to recover their combat capabilities, redeploy and use them to promote American interests in [the] Middle East.”
To support its claim, the department posted images which were allegedly of an Isis convoy leaving Abu Kamal for the Syrian-Iraqi border less than a week earlier on 9th November.
There was, however, a bit of a problem. At 10:32am - barely half an hour after the Russian MOD had put up its post - Eliot Higgins, the Founder and Creative Director of Bellingcat, tweeted that there was something wrong with the third image.
Instead of showing the world a smoking gun, it had actually shared a screenshot cut from a work in progress video of a mobile game called AC-130 Gunship Simulator - seeking to pass it off along with historic images of ISIS convoys from 2016 as evidence of American supported action. The post, unsurprisingly, was deleted shortly afterwards.
It hasn’t, though, marked the end of video games footage and images being passed off as real imagery from conflict zones.
For example, footage created by players of games such as Arma 3 has been incorrectly passed off as evidence of Israel purportedly using a new ‘iron beam’ defense system in the Gaza conflict and to create false images depicting Russia’s entry into Ukraine at the start of the long running war in February 2022.
Given that the video games industry has been subject to a fair share of moral panics in its time, it’s far from ideal that popular military simulation games are being used for these purposes.
But what’s at the heart of it? How and why is it being created? And is there a way for us to solve the challenge constructively? I sat down with Eliot to try to get to the bottom of these questions.
Bellingcatch the eye
It’s hard to think of a person or organisation in the world that is more qualified to talk on the topic of how to ascertain what is true or not in the digital world.
Bellingcat is a collective of researchers, investigators and citizen journalists who collect, analyse and evaluate publicly available information - called open source intelligence or OSINT for short - to examine stories from around the world of public interest.
Since its foundation in 2014, Bellingcat’s impressive body of digital investigation work includes demonstrating Russia’s involvement in the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines flight MH-17 over Ukraine in 2014, identifying the men responsible for the botched poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury in 2018 and reporting on the motives of the Christchurch shooter in 2019.
As a result, Bellingcat has successfully influenced the public debate, shaped the practice of investigative journalism and bagged awards such as the Olof Palme Prize in the process.
But despite its society shaping influence, Eliot’s route - and by extension much of Bellingat’s - into investigative reporting wasn’t via a major broadcaster or a Fleet Street broadsheet. Instead, Eliot’s pathway has been shaped by being “online” in the vernacular sense of the word since the earliest days of the modern Internet.
“I was using the Internet from probably about 1995 onwards,” Eliot said. “I really saw it kind of develop from the pre Google search engine days. There were all kinds of Compuserve and dial up modems.”
As the dial up era ended and broadband took over, Eliot found himself becoming an active participant of some of the pioneering communities that shaped early online experiences. This included entering the Something Awful forums, which he credits as “a really big driver in early Internet culture.”
And it was these in these spaces where Eliot began to realise that being actively “online” could lead to influence in the world around it.
“My interest in doing more online I would say politically, or you know, around the edges of politics probably came from the 2008 campaign for the Obama versus McCain. That was the first really online election campaign. And I mean ‘online’ in not the best way.”
By this, Eliot means it was anarchic and chaotic. According to his description, the Something Awful forums descended into a proto version of the online debate we see today with rival political viewpoints exacerbated by, say, the presence of a Sarah Palin supporters group that became the focal point of “quite a lot of trolling.”
It was, however, also the place where Eliot first cut his teeth in using open source intel to lead the news agenda.
During the 2008 election campaign, Eliot discovered that a Republican candidate had been posting explicitly racist comments on a range of right wing forums, including comparing the noise of Muslim prayers to dogs sniffing rear ends. Eliot and other forum frequenters downloaded her posts, found the worst examples and flushed the story out to create a justified scandal.
But this one off story also acted as what Eliot described as a “first taste” of the process of gathering open source intelligence and telling stories with it.
This would become central to the methodology he applied to his citizen journalism work in the aftermath The Arab Spring, where his work researching the conflict in Syria under the alias of Brown Moses attracted international acclaim and put him on the path to founding Bellingcat.
And interestingly for those of us immersed in the world of video games, Eliot’s interest and understanding in the online world has been shaped in no small part by his personal interest in our humble medium.
Sparked initially by owning a Spectrum as a child, Eliot’s interest in games grew through playing popular online games such as Ultima Online and World of Warcraft on PC - developing his understanding of online dynamics, and how they can evolve through culture, in the process.
But perhaps even more intriguingly, games are a lens through which he views the way that Bellingcat currently works.
Its processes for sifting through vast quantities of openly available information, getting to the nub of a story and putting it out in the world (all supported by a 28,000 strong Discord community) was described to me by Eliot as being akin to popular indie game Hypnospace Outlaw.
And importantly, he wasn’t the only person to notice the parallel between the way Bellingcat works and the world of interactive entertainment.
“One of the things that has always stuck in my mind has been someone on the Something Awful Forum saying ‘you have found the best game in the world to play’. And I was like ‘yeah, kind of I have’. Because I was a really, really big gamer but then this game became my whole life.”
Video games therefore played a role in shaping Eliot’s view of the digital world that has, in turn, shaped Bellingcat. So it perhaps isn’t much of a surprise that when video games did start popping up in the context of digital misinformation that Eliot was one of the first on the scene to investigate what was going on.
Misinformation for the video game nation
So, how exactly have video games found themselves wrapped up in misinformation? For the most part, games have found themselves as the inadvertent victim of the collision between increasingly realistic video games - especially military simulation titles - and the immense viral power of clout chasing social media culture.
Let’s take Arma 3 - which, unfortunately, sits at the heart of a lot of these cases - as our example. Bohemia Interactive’s popular hyper-realistic FPS is a spiritual successor to a game series called Operation Flashpoint, which the company worked on back in the early 2000s.
Operation Flashpoint had the trappings of realism that Arma 3 would aim to build upon, adding many of the mundanities of war - such as tracking your location using a compass and map rather than an on screen radar - to begin to build a vastly more authentic combat experience than its rivals.
Operation Flashpoint, however, was made at a time when ‘realistic’ graphics were somewhat limited and when social media principally consisted of text chat forums that made spreading video footage comparatively impractical.
Arma 3, on the other hand, has been perceived by game critics as plausibly realistic since it launched in March 2013 and has evolved into a social media landscape where people can easily create - and share - video footage of the games they play to millions of people.
And with the game featuring user generated content and mod support to allow players to make their own custom conflicts, people - for mostly benign reasons - began to make and distribute videos of “genuine” conflicts to reflect their enthusiasm and enjoyment of the game.
“I think what you have are people who make Arma free videos that are intended to look real, but they aren't doing it for misinformation purposes - they're doing it because it looks cool,” Eliot said.
Unfortunately, this created fertile conditions for trouble making trolls. By cutting a chunk of footage out of these fan videos, applying distorting effects to it and distributing it online with a shocking current affairs led caption, it’s possible to turn gameplay footage into ‘convincing’ combat imagery - catching unsuspecting viewers unaware and generating short term viral buzz until the clip is debunked.
This happened earlier this year when Full Fact, a fact checking charity in the UK, proved that a video which purported to show a Houthi ballistic missile attack on the USS Laboon, a US Navy Vessel, was fake.
Instead of depicting a clash in the Red Sea, the 24 second clip was cut from a 25 minute long Arma 3 fan video that had sought to recreate the conflict and, somewhat unhelpfully, labelled itself as INSTANT REACTION FROM IRAN! Houthi Cruise Missile sinks US aircraft carrier near Yemen.”
It does, you’ll admit, look pretty realistic. But what actual impact does it have given that these clips do tend to be shot down fairly quickly?
Partly, there is a general concern regarding reach. The clip of the “attack” racked up a solid 1,400 reposts and 350,000 views on X, demonstrating - once again - that a lie can race around the world before the truth has laced its shoes up.
More profoundly though, the footage does run the risk of inadvertently finding its way into the public’s consciousness through figures of authority.
This is unlikely, and somewhat fortunately, to happen as a result of action from state actors. The Russian Defence Ministry’s botched effort to do so in 2017 was so egregious that Russia Today criticised them for it- something that Eliot says shows that “you know they really fucked up” and discourages others from considering pursuing it.
The bigger, and comparatively mundane, risk is that people in positions of authority who don’t “get games” are more easily duped into spreading it into the wider public consciousness.
For example, one of the first times Eliot saw video games footage being inadvertently passed off as real life footage was on an ITV documentary about the IRA. And then there’s the example of Four-star general Barry R. McCaffrey getting roasted online after reposting Arma 3 footage that purportedly showed a Ukrainian missile shooting down a Russian jet.
The problem therefore is not that video games are being used to author misinformation; it’s that the outputs of them are being projected through online spaces in a way that allows them to be repurposed, misused or misunderstood. The question is what to do about it.
Education, education, education
Refreshingly, Eliot’s proposed solution is not to reach for the imprecise regulatory ban hammer.
Instead, he believes that solving challenges like this in the long term requires a much wider plan to educate the population at large about ways to both spot and support the truth online.
“I think primarily it has to be education-led,” he said. “If you go out and look at the post 2016 Trump election reaction [where Russian misinformation raged online throughout the campaign], it has been framed at the policy maker level as ‘what has Russia done to us’. And that is bullshit because it’s really about what we’ve done to ourselves as a society and we need to understand what other dynamics are behind that.”
In particular, Eliot believes that the main dynamic that has shifted is the way modern audiences get information.
“We no longer have this top down model dominated by the media and the Government; we have a peer-to-peer relationship with information, especially through social media,” he said.
Tackling the challenges posed by misinformation surrounding games and the digital economy therefore requires education based interventions of varying complexity.
First, and most simply, we need to help people - and not just players - to spot when misinformation occurs. Eliot believes this is simple to do in the context of games, so long as you tell people what to look for.
“So often the camera movement looks quite unnatural because you’re dealing with the in-game camera. If you ever look at the footage, you’ll see the camera kind of pans in one direction and up in a different way. It’s quite stiff in the way it moves,” he explained.
Game footage can also be spotted by looking for explosions clipping through objects, spotting repeating 2D images and an absence of people in images (they’re tough to animate, y’know), as Bohemia Interactive’s welcome guide into the issue also explains,
Second, we need to support efforts to re-establish the importance of the concept of “truth” being distinct from the communities that people sit in. This, according to Eliot, includes understanding the perspective of those who spread misinformation and their motives for doing so.
“They’re not creating and spreading it thinking ‘Oh, I’m gonna create and spread misinformation.’ I would say in the vast majority of cases they think ‘oh, I’m a truth seeker and I’m going to seek the truth,’” Eliot said. “But often they’re doing it through a lens that is warped by their personal experiences and those experiences tend to be some form of social or political betrayal that they see the entire world through.”
It is, of course, impossible to expect video games companies to single handedly counter trends that have bolstered everything from flat Earthism, the anti-vax movement and QAnon.
But with organisations like Bellingcat running primary and secondary education programmes to teach young people the importance of objective truth in the modern world, contributing case studies from the industry and showing how processes like open source research are inherently ‘gamey’ could be a useful way to support the cause.
Finally, Eliot believes that many of the challenges we see online - including the issue outlined at length here - cannot be resolved without getting digital natives into positions of authority to guide policy makers, officials and opinion formers to outcomes that can actually stick in the online world.
“You need ‘unserious people’ to be able to talk about this stuff, the people who spent many hours playing video games and being part of online communities,” he says.
“You speak to someone who’s gone to Harvard and then immediately joined a think tank and, you know, is a very serious person. They’re looking at this anarchic, chaotic and immature community and trying to apply their logic onto it. So they never get the point that the reason people are spreading disinformation isn’t because they’re part of an organised campaign but it’s because they want to piss people off and be annoying…And when I’ve worked with think thank communities, that really comes across so, so much.”
At a basic level, it is an argument for having someone who actually genuinely understands video games in a room when decisions happen to prevent ‘authority’ figures from, say, popping footage of an FPS into a documentary show.
But at a deeper level, Eliot strikes at a much wider point about how we need to challenge our ‘business as usual’ approach to games and digital policy making.
Even as games, technology and social media increasingly influence and shape enormous parts of our lives - including our understanding of the ‘truth’ - there has been little effort to make sense of the spaces with the support of those who truly understand them.
And until we change that approach, it feels like we will always be fighting rearguard actions against the challenges we face in the digital world from a position of weakness - leaving us tackling the symptoms of those problems, such as misinformation created from games, rather than the underlying societal causes, such as our loss of trust in the world around us, that we really must address.
News in brief
Washed up: Epic has announced that Fortnite will come back to mobile devices in late 2025 following the passing of the UK’s Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill in the pre-election ‘wash-up’. Epic is technically jumping the gun a little bit - designate some strategic market status here, investigate the markets there ya da ya - but it is a handy way to nudge already sympathetic regulators in the company’s preferred direction.
COD in court: The families of children shot dead at Robb Elementary school in 2022 have filed lawsuits against Activision and Instagram accusing them of helping to train and equip the teenager who perpetrated the massacre. It is a truly terrible story but I agree with Activision’s position that the horrifying actions of one Call of Duty player is not reflective of the experience for the millions who manage to play it peacefully.
Job Simulator: A YouGov poll has found that jobs in video games are among those likely to be seen least positively amongst the public. 31% viewed roles in the industry positively, compared to 20% viewing them negatively. But the real winner is the uncertain middle ground, with 43% reporting neither a negative or positive perception of games and 4% saying they don’t know what they think: an important reminder that we still have plenty of hearts and minds to win.
Dungeon is Brighter: Tencent’s marquee mobile game Dungeon and Fighter is doing numbers, according to Bloomberg. The game has reportedly coined in $140m since its launch a week ago, with the boffins at Niko Partners suggesting that the title is on course to make a billion dollars by year end.
Dual wielding: Mel Stride, the UK’s Work and Pensions Secretary, has told a Parliamentary Select Committee that soaring levels of economic inactivity among young men can be blamed on pornography and gaming. Given how economically miserable things have been under the Tories in the past few years, you can hardly blame men for finding ways to carry on by keeping their hands busy can you?
On the move
Colm Larkin is the first ever Chief Executive of IMIRT - The Irish Game Makers Association…Dominic Wheatley has rolled in to become the new Chairman at Blaze Interactive…Sue Madden is the new Executive Director of The ESA Foundation…And over at Embracer Group, Johan Ekström is stepping down from his role as Chief Financial Officer and Deputy CEO. Phil Rogers is swallowing up the Deputy CEO parts of the role, with Müge Bouillon sliding on the CFO shoes…
Jobs, jobs, jobs
Fortis Games wants a Head of Market Intelligence…Or, if you prefer a different form of intelligence, you could go for Manager, Integrated Channel Intelligence at Electronic Arts…David Beckham approved Guild Esports is hiring an Esports Performance & Operations Lead…Playdemic is recruiting a Game Product Manager in Manchester…And if you fancy mixing games with good, Great Ormond Street is hiring a Senior Gaming Manager to bulk up its digital fundraising team…
Events and conferences
Games Mental Health Summit, London - 3rd June
Dev Play, Bucharest - 4th June
Games Growth Summit, London - 7th June
Summer Games Fest, Los Angeles - 8th June
Games for Change Festival, New York - 27th-28th June
Develop: Brighton, erm…Brighton - 9th-11th July
Games of the week
F1 24 - Latest entry in EA and Codemasters racing sim aims to be more fun than the Monaco Grand Prix was.
MultiVersus - Warner Bros Smash Bros returns to all platforms after brief hiatus to retool.
Construction Simulator 4 - Heavy duty construction game wheels its way onto lightly portable mobile devices.
Before you go…
Does Mario Kart’s Blue Shell actually work? For the many of us who have been consistently thwacked by the thorny little bugger the answer is “of course!”
But while it may technically work, Eurogamer’s Eli Cugini runs the rule over everyone’s least favourite item to find out whether it achieves its main goal of making races more competitive.