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The closed-door roundtable took place on 31 March 2025, and included both presentations across three sessions and participants from academia, civil society, advocacy groups, legal non-profit organisations and the private sector. The event provided a space to discuss online hate speech and discriminatory rhetoric – ranging from antisemitism, misogyny and anti-LGBTQI+ narratives to racism and xenophobia – as well as the implications of AI in their spread and amplification. Discussions centred around the complexities introduced by AI-generated and targeted hate speech, and explored potential responses, from regulatory measures and content moderation to educational initiatives promoting critical thinking skills. This conference report summarises key themes and points raised during the roundtable, none of which are attributable to individual participants and presenters.

The gaming ecosystem is increasingly observed with the concern that it could pose a threat to public safety, and research accumulates evidence for blatant extremism in the surrounding online space of games. Currently, a connection between gaming and extremism can be established through identity related processes, e.g., gaming-related radicalization elements, distal to gaming itself, such as gaming communities and culture. However, this also raises the question of what the precise function of proximal gaming factors, such as gameplay, mechanics, stories, or game-play motivations, is in the relationship between gaming and extremism. This article aims to shed light on the relation of gaming and extremism by identifying individual profiles of videogame playing based on gameplay motivations and linking them to indications of radical attitudes (here: xenophobia and violence acceptance) as well as conspiracy beliefs that can be associated with extremist beliefs. Further, we include marginalization and anomie as mediators to gain comparative and fine-grained information about the sole impact of gaming motives on radical attitudes. Our findings indicate that while few motivational profiles exhibit weak yet direct connections to radical attitudes, others display the opposite pattern, suggesting a more complex relationship. Marginalization and anomie strongly predict most radical outcome variables and mediate the relationship in most cases, however sometimes negatively. We only found one complex motivational profile that substantially leans toward late-stage radical attitudes, while for instance, dominant social motives clearly inhibit radical outcomes. The current study thus deflates any straightforward perspective on the becoming of a ‘radical gamer’.