Following the 2019 Christchurch massacre, 4chan users allegedly showcased their efforts to replicate and roleplay the terrorist attack in Arma 3, a 2013 commercially available military simulation (Milsim) released by Czech video game developer Bohemia Interactive (hereafter Bohemia). This misuse of the game was not unique. Indeed, observers documented an earlier instance in late 2016 of jihadist sympathisers sharing Arma 3 ‘machinimas’ (short films made from in-game footage) on YouTube and Telegram.
This Insight explores one challenge emanating from Arma. Community-building through the creation of squads, clans, or units is a staple of Arma and similar games. Many players create, advertise, and join informal groups (i.e., units) with friends or like-minded players. Alongside playing games together, members of a unit may engage with each other on gaming-adjacent platforms, whether that is conversing over Discord or creating a ‘Community Group’ page on Steam, the leading gaming platform. This community-building aspect is an intrinsic and highly positive feature of such games. Yet, it is one that can be – in conjunction with the capacity to modify or ‘mod’ the game – led astray by hateful or extremist actors. This Insight explores this challenge, first turning towards the diffusion of problematic content on the Bohemia website itself, before surveying a range of social media and gaming-adjacent platforms.
The purpose of this Insight is not to posit a direct link between playing Arma and radicalisation. However, it seeks to highlight how extremist rhetoric has permeated spaces linked to Amra 3, and how violent extremists may use the game. As Bohemia prepares for the release of its much-anticipated Arma 4 in 2027—promising enhanced graphics and even greater modding potential—adopting practicable steps to mitigate existing problems on its website and contemplating prospective challenges around the misuse of its product is necessary.
Bohemia Website
Several sites publicise Arma units. Clanlist, a gaming-adjacent website to help users find active gamer communities, features upwards of 3700 units. A subreddit (r/FindAUnit) dedicated to advertising Arma groups has accrued 31,000 members and features many posts daily. ArmAsquads.com hosts more than 87,000 XML files, allowing the iconography of users (such as military emblems) to appear in-game. One notable platform advertising such units is the official Bohemia website. Its ‘Units’ page features over 157,000 groups, each created by individuals who have established a Bohemia account.
On the one hand, this website provides a potentially valuable means through which users may link with like-minded individuals to play their desired game modes. However, keyword searches reveal hundreds of groups using hate symbols and extremist terminology. For example, numerous units make explicit reference to the Black Sun, a hallmark of neo-fascist iconography. Others adopt similar visuals—including the flash and circle associated with the interwar British Union of Fascists or the swastika—and made recourse to commonplace terminology of the extreme right, including 1488 and the namesake of various historical fascist organisations, from the Spanish Falange to the Waffen SS. The ‘Remove Kebab’ meme, associated with the ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims and violent Islamophobia, featured across at least a dozen units, one of which professed to be affiliated with 4chan’s weapons board. Other units were also named after proscribed far-right terrorist organisations—such as Atomwaffen Division and Combat 18—or hate groups, including the Goyim Defence League, White Aryan Resistance, the Boogaloo Movement, and the Aryan Brotherhood (Fig. 1).
Fig. 1: Examples of far-right iconography found on the Arma 3 unit page.
Conversely, some units adopted the namesake and/or black flags of proscribed jihadist organisations and Islamist paramilitaries, such as the Quds Force, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and the Islamic State. One unit, with no less than 73 listed members, was simply named Hamas (Fig. 2). Another unit, named after the Syrian jihadist group Ansar Al-Islam, even embedded an unlisted YouTube video that depicted the detonation of an improvised explosive device within the popular MilSim Squad, a superimposed Ansar Al-Islam emblem, and a nasheed playing in the background (Fig. 3).
Fig. 2: Examples of jihadist iconography found on the Arma 3 unit page.
Fig. 3: Arma 3 unit featuring a machinima made in Squad that contains jihadist iconography.
While the Bohemia website contains many dubious accounts, hyperbole should be avoided. Arma has confronted unhelpful threat inflation before. In 2014, gamers uploaded an Arma 3 mod granting users the ability to play as, or fight against, ISIS militants. A Vocativ article revealed that jihadist sympathisers posted on an ISIS forum lauding the user-generated mod and expressing their intent to repurpose it. In characteristic tone, the Daily Mail reported this development, leading with the subtitle ‘Islamists give away combat simulator in a bid to recruit children and young men’. While not entirely wrong, such language is pointlessly sensationalist, and its factual basis is predicated on discrete ‘anecdotal evidence’.
Three caveats should therefore be added. First, many of the questionable units maintain a minuscule membership; in some cases, they are confined to the unit’s creator. Second, the active status or even tangible existence of most groups is unclear. A number include a standard clause disclosing that the unit is ‘closed’ and ‘currently not accepting applications to join’. In fact, it is not unreasonable to assume that a vast number—if not the majority—were created simply because this allows users to show off their unit tag whilst in-game, a feature established by Bohemia. Third, numerous units using hate symbols are clearly trolls or, as in the case of several nominally jihadist units, players potentially engaged in immersive role-play rather than bona fide sympathisers. While this is not to obfuscate the toxicity that such content can pose for amicable and hate-free gaming spaces, one should not necessarily conflate such users with bona fide violent extremists.
With that said, these qualifications ought to be tempered by three countervailing considerations. First, the website may not adequately capture the size and nature of many of the questionable units. Indeed, membership numbers are often not disclosed. Moreover, even if the intent behind creating a unit is simply to gain an in-game tag, the display of such a tag may constitute a ‘projection of extreme-right identity’. This raises pertinent questions about the platforming of hateful in-game content.
Second, while flagged groups are unlikely to harbour violent extremist beliefs, the presence of even one unit holding such intent presents a serious risk. The game is, after all, a military simulator. The most alarming threat is one where an individual or clique use the game as a training platform for acts of real-world violence. While distant, this is not a fantastical threat. Researchers have linked the 18-year-old far-right accelerationist behind a 2024 mass stabbing in Turkey to a Steam account, which allegedly reviewed the First-Person Shooter video game Receiver the day prior to the attack. In the opinion of the attacker, the game was ‘good for practicing gun handling virtually’. In his manifesto, the perpetrator of the 2011 Oslo attacks also lauded the First-Person Shooter Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 for its ability to ‘more or less completely simulate actual operations’, viewing it as part of his ‘training-simulation [more] than anything else’. Meanwhile, the terrorist behind the Christchurch massacre quipped that Fortnite ‘trained me to be a killer and to floss on the corpses of my enemies’. It is not difficult to imagine Arma offering a more realistic and, thereby, tactically useful alternative. Indeed, Arma 3 was reportedly played by the 2022 Buffalo shooter.
Third, and despite my comments above, trolls should not be viewed as a harmless nuisance. Such accounts may fuel toxic gaming ecosystems, while the language deployed by the ‘shitposting’ troll relative to the political extremist is often disturbingly similar. In the manifesto of the Christchurch terrorist, for example, the shooter proclaimed himself to be ‘working part time as a kebab removalist’. In an uncomfortable echo, one defunct Arma unit described themselves as ‘a group of friends playing games together. We also tend to remove lots of kebab, which is quite obvious’.
Gaming Adjacent Platforms
There are a range of other social media and gaming-adjacent platforms on which Arma-related extremist discourse has been shared. For instance, one Reddit user recreated a visual of the ‘Serbia Strong’ music video using Arma, from which the ‘Remove Kebab’ meme was derived (Fig. 4). Certain mods may also be found online. The edgy ‘Basedmod’ website, which hosts dubious content like a Columbine shooter and Payton Gendron mod for Grand Theft Auto IV, also allows users to download a mod permitting gamers to play as ISIS terrorists. Alternatively, on Steam, users may download mods that enable them to adorn the garb of, amongst an array of other factions, Atomwaffen Division, while another introduces German foreign legions as playable in-game factions (Fig. 5). That said, not all mods that introduce terrorist or extremist factions are necessarily created by those sympathetic to extremist groups. For instance, modifications on the Bohemia forum page introduce such groups as Azov Battalion and Right Sector as playable in-game factions, yet there is no indication that those who created this mod harbour any such far-right views. Regardless, the presence of these mods raises concerns about content moderation, particularly on Steam which has already attracted the attention of researchers.
Fig. 4: Recreation of ‘Serbia Strong’ video using Arma 3.
Arma also points to pertinent questions around community moderation in game servers and adjacent websites where the developers themselves hold scant influence. While many may play Arma in small, closed groups, one alternative is to join a server hosted by a larger gaming community, such as Gaming Asylum and CodeFourGaming. There is typically no expectation that one must engage with such communities beyond simply clicking into, and playing on, a server whilst in-game. Yet such communities also host websites that afford opportunities for greater involvement: one may post in their forums, organise smaller groups to play on their servers, or join community Discord channels. On both external websites and in-game servers, content and gameplay are typically moderated by group administrators per community guidelines. Inevitably, it is difficult to gauge the efficacy of such efforts. There are naturally both slippages and variations across servers and platforms. In one case from 2016, for example, a user on the Gaming Asylum forum posted a call for members to join their in-game gang, ‘Waffen SS’, to which a moderator responded within 24 hours: ‘Not going to happen. Change your gang name’. On a different occasion in 2021, a user was belatedly banned after an extensive period of posting fascist iconography, fashwave clips, and videos expressing a perverse nostalgia for Rhodesia. This ban, while welcome, only occurred after a moderator seemed to have become personally fed-up with the user.
Fig. 5: Examples of Arma 3 mods on Steam, which introduce, respectively, the Atwomwaffen logo and German foreign legions.
Implications
While harmful Arma content sporadically appears across varied platforms, I will focus specifically on the Bohemia website in concluding this Insight, least because this case carries implications for game developers and publishers regarding the risks of implementing a comparable unit-system without sufficient moderation safeguards.
Bohemia’s failure to moderate its website is unfortunate, given it has, in other respects, exhibited a commendable level of corporate social responsibility. The developers have regularly assisted fact-checkers in debunking the spread of Arma 3 gameplay that has been either mistaken or deliberately misused as real combat footage. Bohemia has also collaborated with the International Committee of the Red Cross in 2017 to produce its Laws of War DLC (downloadable content). As Neil Renic and Sebastian Kaempf note: “Collaborations of this type have real value, elevating a medium that too often indulges in and perpetuates a ‘war is hell’ narrative [i.e., war as bereft of legal limits] that is as destructive as it is false.” Bohemia has likewise announced its Make Arma Not War 2025 (MANW2025) initiative. As a sequel to Bohemia’s similarly named 2014 campaign, MANW2025 is a modding competition, which includes a “special cash prize… awarded to a mod that fosters positive communication and reduces toxicity in the gaming environment.” Moreover, through its ‘Don’t Fight Alone’ initiative, Bohemia has partnered with Stack Up, a charity focused on improving the mental health of active and veteran service members through gaming.
In line with this ethos, it is recommended that Bohemia undertake steps to address content on its website that constitutes a flagrant violation of its terms and conditions. The website indeed features an option to report units. However, a user-generated approach is unlikely to yield results. Accordingly, it is first necessary to remove those existing violative units at scale, cross-referencing all groups against lists of extremist-related keywords and images in order to flag offending accounts. The second step is to implement an ongoing moderation system. Developers may be squeamish at this prospect: their mission is to create games, not moderate online content. Yet, this need not be an onerous task. Beyond automating the process, even a regular, yet brief, manual perusal of newly established units is likely sufficient, given that only approximately 27 units are created per day. Adopting viable steps to resolve existing problems on its Units page, and contemplating prospective challenges around the misuse of its product more broadly, is necessary as Bohemia prepares for its much-anticipated Arma 4 release in 2027.
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Kye Allen is a doctoral candidate in International Relations at the University of Oxford. His dissertation explores the history of Anglophone fascist international thought during the twentieth century.
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