A 500kg Bomb for Charlie Kirk - Redux
The third issue of Letter to a Gamer will feature a slightly longer opening segment, born from a collaboration with Rights Now, the weekly magazine of Italy's Human Rights Foundation. It's a detailed look at the connection between the messages engraved on the bullets of Charlie Kirk's alleged killer and the world of video games, aiming to shed some light on a topic where so many outlets only created more confusion. If you've arrived here from the Human Rights Foundation's channels, welcome to Letter to a Gamer, the ad-free, non sponsored, and AI-free gaming newsletter. As always, my deepest gratitude goes to subscribers: it's with your contributions that I can continue this project (and pay the bills). If you'd like to support me, to get access to the full version of this newsletter (with Henry Halfhead's review, suggestions for what to play this weekend, and an editorial on the all-too-wrong return of Skate), all it takes is 4,5$ a month to help me keep this corner of independent gaming journalism alive.
News index
+ A 500kg bomb for Charlie Kirk
- Steal a Brainrot dominates Fortnite
+ Get some pr training to Randy Pitchford
- Paradox gives in on Bloodlines 2
To understand the true meaning of the phrases engraved on the bullets intended for Charlie Kirk, the far-right influencer murdered at a college rally in Utah, it's essential to engage in memetic archaeology: we need to delve into the origins of those memes hailing from the internet or video game culture and understand how they were bent and distorted by the American far-right. The alleged killer of the conservative mega-influencer is most likely a Groyper, a soldier of the internet (and more often than not of the real world) of Nick Fuentes, an even more extreme conservative than Kirk who isn't afraid to associate himself with openly racist and pro-Nazi ideas.
As these ideologies were labled as toxic by traditional media companies, up until last year at least, Fuentes and his followers have found their hunting grounds in obscure corners of the internet like 4chan and 8chan, messaging boards famous for their lack of restrictions on content. It is on these message boards that the far right, in addition to discussing the ethnic cleansing of non-whites, has exchanged advice and recommendations on which video games allow one to live out the fantasy of driving or serving in an ethnostate for white people with the goal of dominating all others.
Among these recommendations there's Hearts of Iron 4, a real-time strategy game (where you take on the role of an entire nation) set in World War II where you can lead Hitler's Germany and conquer all of Europe. This game is famous in far-right circles for being "clean," meaning free of progressive frameworks and "woke" messages, and is therefore recommended for new recruits to get a sense of what Nick Fuentes and his Groypers' movement are aiming for.
In one of the add-ons for Hearts of Iron 4 (By Blood Alone, released in 2022), the Italian resistance's "anthem" "Bella Ciao" was added to the soundtrack, but this isn't simply a co-optation or an attempt to mislead the public. Given its anti-fascist connotations, "Bella Ciao" has been adopted by those further to the right than Charlie Kirk as a "fighting song" against Kirk and his MAGA (Make America Great Again) and Trump-aligned movement, which they consider not extreme enough.
Another one of the video game messages engraved on the alleged assassin's shell casings should be seen within the context of a far-right civil war: "Hey, fascist! Catch ↑ → ↓↓↓". The second part of this message, the sequence of arrows, is the code used in the video game Helldivers 2 to launch the 500-kilogram bomb, one of the game's strongest power-ups.
Helldivers 2 draws direct inspiration from Starship Troopers and is a video game in which you play a soldier sent to the front lines at the edge of the galaxy to exterminate large, evil insects to "protect the freedom and safety of the Earth." In reality, the player is nothing more than a cog in a militaristic and unscrupulous expansion machine for the very Earth these soldiers are supposed to protect.
Since the game's release, it's become very popular to throw this bomb at enemies, even when your teammates are very close to the target, to "troll" them (mock them and make them suffer) and cause their death, since the large bomb doesn't care about friends or foes; it simply explodes. The reference could be to the Groyper Wars, campaigns launched by Nick Fuentes himself against Kirk, in which his loyalists would attend his events to waste his time with stupid questions, insult him, and sabotage him because they were considered not right-wing enough or white nationalist enough.
It's not just video game-related clues that point to an internal motive for the ongoing war among the American far right, but understanding the culture these individuals are immersed in is crucial. Since there are no cultural products aligned with their extreme ideas, they distort (as in the case of Helldivers 2) or co-opt (as in the case of Bella Ciao) what criticizes them or what is dear to their adversaries.
This creates a universe of seemingly meaningless or out-of-context memes, yet those within the circles find them perfectly understandable. And so the messages engraved on the bullets intended for Charlie Kirk cease to be the ravings of a madman and become a manifesto. A relentless battle is underway within the American right for the hearts and minds of the very young, and Nick Fuentes has just become the most influential figure in a political sphere that enjoys the (often unspoken) favor and approval of the presidency.
Steal a Brainrot has a clone on Fortnite and has reached a peak of 542,000 concurrent players, 45,000 shi than Silksong's 582,000. For those unfamiliar, Steal a Brainrot is one of Roblox's most popular experiences where players collect Italian brainrots (yes, those AI-generated memes that were all the rage on TikTok), trade them (each one generates a certain amount of in-game currency based on its rarity), and can steal the most precious ones from other players. The formula is addictive and a very clear symptom of the Robloxification of Fortnite, a phenomenon we'll analyze in detail in next week's letter.
Get Randy Pitchford some media training, because it's unacceptable that, with every controversy surrounding Gearbox and Borderlands, the company's CEO starts insulting and denigrating fans who complain about the game's poor optimization on PC. Borderlands 4 debuted with massive problems on Steam: without "helpers" like DLSS, the game couldn't reach 60 fps on next-gen hardware, sparking endless controversy and justified resentment toward the developer. After an initial period of composure, Pitchford began demeaning anyone who complained, saying things like "Borderlands 4 is a premium game for premium users" or "make your own game engine, then." The decision whether to support a company with this kind of leadership with your money by purchasing Borderlands 4 is entirely your own.
After weeks of pressure, ire from fans, and threats of boycott, Paradox has announced that the Lasombra and Toreador clans will also be included in the base version of Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2. Putting two entire classes of a big role-playing game only in the deluxe version, as initially proposed, is one of the most unfair business practices imaginable, and it's always nice to see that community pressure still manages to curb corporate greed.
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See you at the next letter,
Riccardo "Tropic" Lichene