A Mythology of Raids: How Raiding Persists as a Cultural Phenomenon of Torturous Play

This paper applies a critical semiological lens, drawing on Roland Barthes' Mythologies, to examine raiding as a practice in video game culture, particularly on live-streaming platforms such as Twitch and YouTube Gaming. It situates the platform's "raid" feature, which lets streamers send their audience to another channel, within a longer history of coordinated online attacks, including 4chan-led incursions into communities like World of Warcraft and Habbo Hotel. The central argument is that raiding functions as a cultural myth that naturalizes colonial, white supremacist, and microfascist power relations, and that the term carries connotations of violent military and policing practices that persist even when it is used as a benign platform function.

The analysis proceeds through intersectional and historical frames, building on the work of Aaron Trammell on the objectifying and painful dimensions of play for racialized communities, and on Kishonna Gray's account of Black users in digital gaming. It also draws on Jack Bratich's concept of microfascism, understood as a slow process of elimination through everyday sexism and attrition, to describe how raiding pushes marginalized players out of shared spaces. Judith Butler's notion of citationality is used to explain why the term cannot be detached from its past uses, so that a community-building feature still carries the weight of hostile histories.

The paper's findings are primarily qualitative and theoretical rather than empirical. It does not present survey data, sample sizes, or quantitative measurements of hate raid prevalence, and its claim that such attacks have surged after Gamergate is offered as a premise rather than a demonstrated result. Its scope is conceptual and centers on the Anglo-American streaming and online gaming context. The authors conclude that developers, platform owners, and players should critically examine the terminology they adopt, since the naming of raiding naturalizes social and power relations that marginalize players outside the dominant norm.