How 'Roblox' Became a Playground for Virtual Fascists

The only three words he could say during training were “YES,” “NO,” and “SIR.” And “SIR” generally applied to one person, Malcolm, the domineering adolescent who ruled the group. “His thing was the winky face,” Ferguson says. “It very much was like being in a small military team,” Ferguson says. They funneled new followers into their own role-plays—one based on Star Wars, where they were the Sith; another based on Vietnam, where they were the Americans; and one based on World War II, where they were the Nazis.Ferguson says that Malcolm’s interest in Nazism began with his discovery of the edgelord messaging board 4chan. Like, he’d be crazy.” (Malcolm says it was “a little bit of typical trolling, nothing too serious.”)In 2014, according to Ferguson, Malcolm watched HBO’s Rome, which depicts the Roman Republic’s violent (and apparently very raunchy) transformation into an empire. Three former members of the Senate and People of Rome say the game still has a problem with far-right extremists. “It’s the same thing you see in relation to alt-right recruitment,” says Rachel Kowert, the director of research at Take This, a nonprofit that supports the mental health of game developers and players. “There’s a line of research talking about how games are socially reinforcing,” she says. “You’re supposed to be admiring yourself, your success, and looking down on the barbarians.” Romans would hang out, talk, collect social status, and, in Ferguson’s words, “smell their own farts all day.”One of the most exclusive cliques in Parthia was the Praetorian Guard, Malcolm’s personal army. Enforcing the group’s draconian rules was “a game-play function to them,” Ferguson says. The vectors, she says, were people like Malcolm.“Recruitment” isn’t always the right word, Ebner told me. “It’s often not really clear to the people who are recruited what they’re actually recruited into,” she says.Ebner does not believe that video games are radicalizing people on any large scale. “There is a big loneliness issue in parts of the gaming community,” she says. People write off entire communities as being “completely extremist, being alt, being radical,” she says. But extremists “lure individuals from those subcultures into their political networks.” It’s a complex, diffuse problem, and the conversation about it, she says, “isn’t nuanced enough.”The Senate and People of Rome fell in 2015. (Malcolm says that his “cult of personality is strictly built off of trolls.”)We were forced into an interrogation room. “Currently,” they wrote, “we have started a ‘Redpill’ the Youth project which is going on in ‘Roblox.’ We’ve created a clan in which we will operate Raids/Defences and expand on this project into other platforms.” (The clan was a “futuristic Roman legion,” though not necessarily modeled after Malcolm’s Rome or one of its many offshoots.)Ferguson still isn’t sure whether he participated in a fascist recruitment campaign. It’s indirect.” Ferguson pointed out a Roblox role-play of the US-Mexico border in which players are Border Patrol agents. “They’re just pretending to be a law enforcement agency that has a long history of extremely racist and xenophobic tendencies.” (A Roblox spokesperson said the company reviews “every single image, audio file, and video before it is uploaded.”)Members of Malcolm’s Praetorian Guard have gone on to join the military and the TSA and to become police officers, or what Ferguson calls “actual Nazis.” Malcolm himself now owns a Star Wars role-play group with 16,000 members. “Hail the Empire,” one winky-faced commenter wrote.Earlier this year, back in Roblox, Ferguson took me to the Group Recruiting Plaza. We’re at war with a USA Group.A Discord handle appeared below.When I approached, the avatar behind the booth explained to me that they role-play the Confederacy.“Why does your sign say ‘We’re not racist’?” I asked.“It’s just Southern pride, and a war group,” he responded. “You should hop in,” Ferguson said.On our way to federal prison, Ferguson explained that, like the Senate and People of Rome, this role-play had a strict hierarchy—senators, FBI and NSA agents, and so on. He says he’s closer to them than to his family.Ferguson is sorry, he says, for his role in connecting so many people to Malcolm, and for his own bigotry.