Polarized Pills vs. Gaming Thrills: Empirical Exploration of r/TheRedPill and r/TheBluePill Users in r/gaming

Giacomo Lauritano, Valeria Marina Borodi, Chien Lu, Jaakko Peltonen

Abstract: We examine the intersection between gaming and manosphere communities through a col- lective analysis of comments in the subreddit r/gaming by users of subreddits r/TheRedPill and r/TheBluePill representing two contrastive manosphere communities. We found a sig- nificant number of users of these subreddits who were not only participating in gaming discussions, but also exposing their views on gender and role of women in society. Through computational text analytics, we compare underlying themes of their comments in r/gaming to explore how they differ or are similar. Our results suggest: 1) Users of r/TheRedPill and r/TheBluePill both carry and extend gender-related discussions and claims to the gaming community. 2) The difference when they approach the gaming world is nuanced and am- biguous making it difficult to establish a clear-cut distinction between them. 3) Compared to r/TheBluePill users, r/TheRedPill users tend to deliver focused alt-right political discourse.