In 2005, Steve Bannon developed a keen interest in video games. The future Trump strategist joined Internet Gaming Entertainment, a Hong Kong-based company that developed a scheme to make money off of the popular online game World of Warcraft. IGE employed Chinese workers for poverty wages to log on to the game and complete repetitive tasks that earned small amounts of in-game gold. The company then sold this gold to Western gamers for real money. Bannon raised $60 million for IGE, much of that money coming from Goldman Sachs.

This “gold farming” operation did not last long. Considered cheaters by World of Warcraft’s creators and fans alike, IGE was banned from the game and sued out of existence. The experience, however, taught Bannon an important lesson. Bannon later told author Joshua Green that gaming is “populated by millions of intense young men [who are] smart, focused, relatively wealthy, and highly motivated about issues that mattered to them . . . These guys, these rootless white males, had monster power.”

Bannon and other right-wing intellectuals learned to utilize that “monster power,” within the world of video games and beyond. A politically mobilized sense of wounded white entitlement has lead to the Right dominating the popular discourse about video games. The paradigmatic gamer is one of Bannon’s intense, young, white men, someone who visits 4chan and bought into the unctuous outrage of Gamergate. Some people write games off as irretrievably lost to this demographic.