Video Games, White Supremacy, and the Aftermath of the Jakarta Explosions

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On 7 November, Jakarta was shaken by a series of explosions. Anti-terror police located seven explosives, of which four were said to have detonated, leading to the injury of 96 people at a mosque in the SMAN 72 state high school located in the city’s north. The alleged attacker has been reported as a 17-year-old student who, in an unusual turn, ostensibly idolised past acts of white nationalist terrorism. The individual in question was allegedly found in possession of a toy gun littered with inscriptions that make reference to white supremacist terminology and past extreme right-wing attackers. Indeed, strewn across the toy are express references to the perpetrator of the 2019 Christchurch massacre, alongside far-right terrorist Luca Traini, and the culprit behind the 2017 Quebec City mosque shooting, Alexandre Bissonnette.

In the aftermath, it has been widely reported in local media that Indonesian policymakers are contemplating the imposition of greater regulation over online video games, with this interpreted variously as implying some form of restriction, or even a ban, on particular games. After receiving updates on the investigation from National Police Chief General Listyo Sigit Prabowo, President Prabowo Subianto requested that his cabinet explore options on how to tackle the supposed negative impacts that online games have on youth. PUBG (previously PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds), an immensely popular game developed by South Korea’s Krafton Inc., has been singled out by minister of the state secretariat Prasetyo Hadi. Beyond PUBG, however, there remains no information about what other games may be considered for restrictions. In what shape this regulatory move will materialise, if at all, remains unclear. In any case, this simmering moral panic is, as I argue below, misplaced. It is grounded in a faulty logic and misdirects attention from the real drivers of radicalisation.

While information on the proposed move remains patchy, a number of policymakers have expressed support. Amelia Anggraini, Member of the Indonesian House of Representatives, has suggested that any such restrictions should not serve as a mere slogan, but be coupled with actual controls established through stakeholder engagement and, in a more fruitful addition, supplemented by digital literacy programmes. The proposed restriction of PUBG has likewise been welcomed by Margaret Aliyatul Maimunah, chairperson of the Indonesian Child Protection Commission (Komisi Perlindungan Anak Indonesia, KPAI). KPAI Commissioner Aris Adi Leksono has similarly indicated that such a move, while insufficient alone, is a positive step. For him, “[t]he impact [of online content for youth] has become increasingly evident. It’s not just what happened at SMAN 72 in Jakarta. There have been several incidents where exposure to what they watched in their games and on social media has had an impact”. Minister of the state secretariat Hadi has also endorsed the call, suggesting that it may be necessary because such games could negatively influence future generations of youth. With reference to PUBG, Hadi continued on to add that “[p]layers can easily learn the types of weapons. And they will start to normalize violence”.

It should be added that this is not the first occasion in which Indonesian authorities have contemplated banning a battle royale-style game like PUBG on similar grounds. In mid-2024, reports circulated that Indonesia’s minister of tourism and creative economy, Sandiaga Uno, threatened to prohibit Free Fire, another highly popular video game. While it seems that this ban did not materialise, the stated rationale for its consideration included vague claims about the game’s “negative effects” on children and alleged cases where the game caused “child violence”.

Of course, it is entirely within the sovereign prerogative of a government to restrict a game, and many reasons have been touted in past instances around the world. India, for example, notoriously banned PUBG on alleged data privacy grounds due to the game’s links to Chinese company Tencent Games. For some states, particular games may be prohibited because they are seemingly deemed ‘morally’ suspect. Indonesia, for one, banned Mortal Kombat 11, the 2019 addition to the classic, gore-laden ‘fighting’ game franchise. It was not alone in this decision: Japan and Ukraine have prohibited the game on similar grounds. Likewise, and while worlds-apart from the violence of Mortal Kombat, Jordan and Iraq banned PUBG due to alleged concerns about its impact on youth. Importantly, such decisions are ostensibly grounded in a normative supposition about the moral value of the content depicted in said games.

Crucially, though, the most recent policy debate in Indonesia does not readily fit into the above categories. The justification animating this scrutinising of online gaming is not based on a higher ethical appeal, such as religious sensibilities. Rather, it is predicated on claims to a causal logic that has scant factual grounding; that is a long-discredited myth. As scholars all-too-often remind journalists and policymakers, there is no sound evidence to suggest that violent video games increase the propensity for individuals to engage in violence. As summarised by Rachel Kowert, a psychologist and expert on the effects of video games, “people really just desperately want to hold on to an easy solution to all of the world’s complex problems like mass shootings, juvenile delinquency—they just want to blame something”. As Kowert adds: “We’ve been studying it for 20 years, and there’s been no consistent findings that would suggest at all that they’re in any way directly linked”. To therefore restrict games because it could “start to normalize violence”, as minister of the state secretariat Hadi suggests, lacks any basis in prevailing evidence.

Directing attention towards the content of a mainstream game, such as PUBG, is thus a red herring. However, that is not to say that there are not pertinent questions to be asked about the harms of online video games, including seemingly banal ones like Roblox or Minecraft, as it relates to radicalisation and violent extremism. As a swathe of scholarly literature and expert opinion indicates, it is not mainstream games themselves that cause violence. However, pursuant to existing scholarship, where practitioners and regulators may productively direct their attention is towards probing and addressing the ways in which extremists peddle harmful content and groom vulnerable individuals through games and gaming-adjacent spaces.

In this vein, rather than fixating on the non-existent link between real-world violence and the stylised violence displayed in PUBG, a game played by tens of millions daily, the pertinent question is what led an Indonesian youth to allegedly opt for mass violence and, crucially, why did they reportedly profess sympathies towards far-right terrorists? To put it bluntly, and if the inscriptions on the alleged perpetrator’s toy firearm are to be taken seriously, why did a lonely Indonesian teen profess a commitment to the oft-repeated white nationalist mantra of the 14 words (i.e., “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children”).

Such questions are harder to answer and undoubtedly more uncomfortable. Yet addressing them may well lead policymakers towards scrutinising the serious impact of online extremist communities and the content they promote (including through games and gaming-adjacent platforms), rather than the content of games themselves. In fact, if investigators confirm that this youth was drawn in by extreme-right wing ideologies, then this would be an unusual, yet not necessarily unique, case. It was only in February that an 18-year-old Singaporean, Nick Lee Xing Qiu, was detained after planning an anti-Muslim terrorist attack. As Sonia Sarkar explains: ‘Despite being a Singaporean of Chinese ethnicity, who believed in the superiority of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese ethnicities, he supported white supremacy as he considered Islam to be a threat to ‘white culture.’” As other researchers have shown too, extreme right-wing meme subcultures have demonstrated a ‘creeping’ online influence within Southeast Asia. Likewise, and to quote Munira Mustaffa, who has offered one of the earliest expositions on this phenomena,

[t]he idea that neo-Nazi thoughts, white-supremacist politics and red pill victimhood have been adopted by Asian youths who are active online users unbounded by geographical borders but are neither white nor Aryan themselves can be mystifying to outsiders. After all, the concept of neo-Nazism lies in the assertion that the white race, or the Aryan race, reigns supreme in the racial hierarchy. But these ideas are easily adaptable into local context, and the Internet has made them easier than ever for the latent fascist to access.

To impose an outright ban or restrict games liked PUBG would thus be misplaced: an exercise in missing the forest for the trees, except that the supposed trees in this case are nothing more than shrubs on the periphery of the real problem. Indeed, as an instrument in tackling extremism, restricting online video games are likely to be either ineffective insofar as there is no direct causal link between playing video games and perpetrating violence, or inadvertently useful only to the extent that a blanket ban of a game or otherwise restricting youth from accessing it may foreclose some opportunities for extremists to groom vulnerable individuals.

Ironically, then, such a move could plausibly have some mitigatory effect, albeit not for the reasons proffered by some policymakers in Indonesia. Yet any positive benefits should be weighed against several counterpoints. The first is the purely speculative nature of my comments immediately above (and such a ban, in any case, is not a course of policy that I would endorse). Furthermore, such an indiscriminate option would carry considerable collateral damage; that is, by banning or restricting access to first person shooters and battle royale games like PUBG, it is not only malign communities that may operate on said games that would be denied platform. So too would this banish the overwhelming majority who find enjoyment and positive community through online play. Moreover, I would be remiss not to add that such a policy course may risk hampering Indonesia’s gaming market, which is the largest in Southeast Asia. As one commentary also noted, “Indonesia is a major market for mobile games, particularly the likes of Free Fire, Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, and PUBG Mobile”. None of this is to mention the impact that such restrictions may have on the local esports community (in fact, the Alter Ego Ares team, an Indonesian esports organisation, qualified for the 2025 PUBG Mobile Global Championship no less, taking home $150,000 USD in prize money after securing 8th place in the grand final).

Additionally, if the government was to restrict PUBG on the false assumption that it normalises violence and therefore contributes to real-world violence, it would logically dictate that innumerable other games which are objectively more violent ought to suffer a similar fate. This may strike the reader as a sure route to either an overly blanket moratorium on shooting games or, more likely, an illogically inconsistent approach to regulating a national gaming market, essentially restricting one game but not a comparable product.

Ultimately, ongoing discussion amongst Indonesian policy circles is the most recent instance in which egregious violence, or attempts at its orchestration, have given rise to a blame game centred around video games. Unfortunately, it will not be last. As Anna Mahtani remarks, this is once again “an example of policymakers focusing too much on the content of games rather than the context of extreme communities that co-opt the medium. This leads to policies that are equivalent to suggesting that changing the offside rule would end football hooliganism.” To clarify, regulation of the gaming industry, particularly for the benefit of child safety, is paramount. But policy must be informed by evidence. If Indonesian policymakers can learn anything from past acts of extreme right-wing violence that have riven Western states, or America’s tragic modern history of preventable school shootings for that matter, it is that neither the causes of such acts nor sound policy are to be found in blaming the content of mainstream games.

Beyond faulting games, though, it should be said that some policymakers, including those listed above, have alluded to the potential role that bullying may have had in precipitating the bombing, and the consequent need for greater anti-bullying programmes in the schooling system. This points in a more productive direction. Yet so too should policymakers and authorities pay attention to the perverse influence that extreme right-wing views and meme subcultures may carry online. This could well necessitate exploring the nexus between radicalisation and gaming spaces, but the crucial takeaway is that any such inquiry must move beyond long-discredited myths.