Sons and True Sons

Part of “A MAZE. / Berlin 2025 – 14th International Games and Playful Media Festival”

Part of “IETM Berlin Plenary Meeting 2025”

In “Sons and True Sons,” the Viennese media guerrilla group Total Refusal examines the links between toxic masculinity, gaming culture and the 2021 US Capitol storming. In a live gaming lecture, they scrutinise the parallels between the video game “Tom Clancy's: The Division 2” (2016) and real-life extremist movements – and highlight the dangers of hyper-masculine self-empowerment.

Drawing upon their research into the connection between the game world and the digital manosphere, media guerrilla Total Refusal explores the entanglements of toxic masculinity, meritocracy, and the storming of the US Capitol in 2021. “Sons and True Sons” illuminates how the narrative of the video game “Tom Clancy’s: The Division 2” (2016) inadvertently anticipated the events on January 6, 2021, and the strategic engagement of Donald Trump’s former advisor Steve Bannon with cis male gamers. Briefly about the game: In 2010s Washington, D.C., shaken by a smallpox pandemic and chaos, players must free the city from rival groups and restore order. The parallels between the depiction of the civilian militia (True Sons) taking control over the digital seat of Congress in the game and the advent of paramilitary crypto fascist groups in 2021 are indeed remarkable. Inspired by these uncanny similarities, the live gaming lecture overwrites the game version of the Capitol storm, unmasking the narrative decay of liberal democracy and the hyper-masculinist self-empowerment inside and outside of gaming spaces.

With the live gaming lecture ‘Sons and True Sons’, HAU is represented for the second time at A MAZE. / Berlin, the international festival and platform for independent and arthouse games.  

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