Playful micro-geopolitics on Openfront.io

In online games, players’ limited expressivity is constantly positioned within social and political struggles, which often take the form of fascist slogans, and determine game situations by imposing emerging but inevitable stakes and norms. This study, as simple as the game on which it is based, examines the occurrences of these geopolitical jousts and outlines a few hypotheses in an attempt to understand them.

Openfront.io is a kind of flash game released in 2025 and currently enjoying great success. It has many of the same features as an almost identical game called territorial.io.

It’s a free online multiplayer game that takes the rules of wargames, strategy or 4X games and simplifies them to the extreme. Controlling a small nation at first, you have to conquer more and more territories, and in a few moments bring it to World Conquest, i.e. control 80% of the map. A game is played by between 50 and 150 players, and lasts an average of twenty minutes.

Iceland ravaged by a ruthless nuclear war

The mechanics are simple. From our nation, we can only control two very limited parameters:

The proportion of soldiers and workers in the population (these two categories are the only ones available).

The number of soldiers to send against an enemy nation.

Passively, population grows by a certain percentage of the existing population. It is nevertheless limited by a maximum quantity that a country can accommodate, set by the size of the nation’s territory.

Workers can passively earn money, and soldiers can conquer adjacent territories, whether occupied or not. Conquest is a click away, and any conflict is resolved by the clash of armies symbolized by quantities: the greater the number, the more victorious.

Money can be used to construct five types of building:

A city, which slightly increases the maximum population

A port, to trade with allies and earn money for each other

A defense post, which slows the advance of opposing troops and increases the number of soldiers needed to invade territory.

A missile silo for bombarding opponents with atomic warheads.

An anti-missile device to protect a small portion of territory from atomic bombs.

Expressive and proselytizing naming

All in all, Openfront.io is an easy-to-play wargame, whose depth lies above all in the interactions between players, in their countless successive alliances and betrayals, and in the interstitial and emergent expressivities embodied in the intertwining of political denominations, strategies and confrontations.

Because of the minimalist socialities it imposes and the strict framework of its rules, Openfront seemed destined to leave its players little freedom to express themselves. This was without counting what has become one of the game’s fundamental mechanics: the name.

Before each game, players christen their future conquering nation.

This name is the only little peculiarity of the country we control. It’s the only crumb of expressivity granted to the cheeky girls, apart from the multiple emojis we can send to each other over and over again.

But it’s a heavy responsibility to assign a name to this entity destined to dominate the world. The name of one of these countries is not simply a means of designating oneself: in this game without chat, without any means of in-game discussion, it constitutes the only form of communication. So the name chosen in Openfront often embodies our pride, our love, our demands. So, if I triumph, my ambitions will be laid bare for all to see!

Some display their cultural and artistic tastes.

Many of them display their origins, or territorial affiliations.

Aubervilliers, a French town, now located in Canada !

By far my favorite: a member of a tiny soccer club was determined to make it a worldwide triumph.

Territorial pride is often marked by demands. Some want to triumph over others, take revenge or gain independence.

Here, Wales claims independence from… Greenland.

“Our day will come” in Gaelic: the slogan proclaimed by Northern Ireland’s republicans and the IRA to demand independence.

But these aspirations soon become contradictory. Bands compete, countries clash or ally, politicians fight to the death. In some parts, there’s a whole geopolitics in a bottle, a bit like that episode of the cartoonishly edgy series Love, Death and Robots called “Ice Age” in which a couple discovers a forgotten civilization in their fridge. As the days go by, this civilization goes through its own history, with a series of conflicts that the scale shows us to be derisory, but which are nonetheless very important for all those involved.

Many a conflict breaks out because of a name chosen.

Here, a situation of deadly triple enmity: an Israeli nation advocates genocide in Palestine, but has engaged in an all-out war against a Belgian who advocates Nazism, who has himself been at loggerheads with a player defending the Palestinian cause from the start of the game. In the end, “Israel” and “Palestine” raze the Nazi to the ground together, before turning against each other. Their conflict weakens them to such an extent that all three end up being conquered by other players (notably the one named “Popi” below).

Sometimes, enmities are more emergent. Here, two nations have established their irrevocable antagonism because of a clear opposition in the values embodied by each.

Here too, the slogans don’t seem necessarily mutually exclusive. But each mobilizes irreconcilable values. War is immediate and irrevocable.

On the other hand, alliances are sometimes formed spontaneously:

Here, the Maghreb empire automatically allied itself with Palestine.

This time, two players called for the decolonization of Palestine. They joined forces and ended up dominating the whole playing field.

The nomenclature raises new issues. It overturns the original aims of the game: it’s no longer just a question of winning or losing, but of showing off one’s ideas, of representing them. Some of these emerging behaviours are completely useless, disabling, and often lead to the defeat of the players. Enmities, for example, trigger wars that quickly deplete resources and spell defeat for both sides in the long term. But as soon as a Ukrainian flag is flown a little too close to a pseudonym glorifying Putin, hundreds of players cease to exist: the map becomes the arena of a duel to the death, and victory goes to the last man standing.

Expressiveness takes precedence over rules, and social and geopolitical struggles drive multiplayer. The polarization of playful enmities is based on very real oppositions.

Conversely, this polarization is sometimes an advantage. While it very often leads to premature failure as a result of the confrontations provoked by enmities, this immediate allegiance brings players together and forges alliances that alone enable victory in these confrontations with countless opponents. What’s more, the alliances forged in this way are of a completely different order to those that bring together friends of circumstance, i.e. future adversaries always liable to betray us at the first sign of weakness. There’s nothing to stop an anonymous ally from betraying me when our good understanding is no longer to his advantage. On the other hand, the ally I join on the basis of shared values and common adversaries is loyal beyond the game: he or she is an adelphe, a friend, a comrade.

I wanted to check this statistically myself, alternating between a name that was as neutral as possible, and one with clear political claims.

In a sample of 48 games, I borrowed the name “Fleur” for 21 of them, and “Free Palestine” for the remaining 27.

My average survival time is roughly similar, surviving an average of 26 seconds longer as “Fleur”.

My failure rate in the first 5 minutes of play is much higher as “Free Palestine”: my nation has totally disappeared in 68% of cases, compared to 51% when I’m called “Fleur”.

On the other hand, my win rate is significantly higher as “Free Palestine”: I’ve won 4 times for Palestine, and I’ve never conquered the world to the glory of flowers.

The geopolitical issues at stake in Openfront are more than just an emergent peculiarity: they serve a playful strategy, prompted by the game’s reappropriated structure within the social space.

The polarization of ludic space into irreconcilable, gaseous factions serves ludic objectives, while filling the game with new stakes, new meanings. We stop fighting each other or embodying a warrior nation, and instead pursue ideas and values, or (fictitiously) fight enemy ideologies.

Naming strategies

As nomenclature has become a strategic mechanic, we’re seeing approaches other than those that seek to polarize around conflicting ideas.

Thus, names with pacifist, uniting and unifying accents are gradually appearing. The hope is to inspire as little resentment among players as possible, and thus avoid the first quarrels, or even inspire enough confidence to create alliances.

Here, all the attributes of benevolence are brought together in as cartoonish a fashion as possible. Trade” emphasizes the commercial interests of peaceful allies.

Such pacifism is completely at odds with the principle of the game, and is never truly embodied by the players. These players simply choose to show off their strategy, which starts out pacifist and aims for long-term development, eventually becoming hegemonic and eradicating all competition.

Drama in two acts:

Some people prefer to demonstrate their inexperience. In this way, they hope to diminish the threat they represent, so as to inspire greater, even reckless, confidence.

But the threat we pose to others is usually the only thing protecting us from invasion.

So this so-called beginner was quickly attacked.

Others, on the other hand, are as threatening as possible. Some promise deadly reprisals for the slightest betrayal, or compel alliance pacts. In a game where the slightest disproportionate war can turn a minor border dispute into mutual annihilation, these are very threatening promises.

It is even possible to combine neutrality and geopolitical issues. In this way, certain entities are regularly called upon, such as Switzerland, whose neutrality is sometimes caricatured, or the United Nations, as seen here.

Neutrality as presented in Openfront is nevertheless open to criticism. Its context is one of incessant confrontation between fascist, royalist, identitarian or colonial ideologies and their opponents. The juste-milieu approach exonerates us from taking a stand in situations that morally require us to do so. In Openfront as elsewhere, neutrality is never more than the bias of a supposedly moral elite that thrives on the rise of fascism and provokes it as much as possible.

Certain norms of play circulate and transform like little implicit conventions, underdetermined by the rules of the game and nurtured by the habits of the players.

As I write this article, it’s customary to leave Greenland to the peace-loving nations. This keeps them away from the more aggressive players. Greenland’s central position on the game’s maps makes it a hub of world trade. The location is therefore advantageous for those who want to focus on alliances and trade.

In truth, there are many other island locations that allow trade: this practice is mainly motivated by habit.

The outpouring of fascistic free expression

Openfront’s denomination is often caricatured, as exaggerated as possible. The pacifist demonstrates his attitude with a debauchery of attributes: “paix commerce amour” spares no excess. Such expressiveness, exaggerated to the extreme, could be the sign of a young population of players, which is probably the case, and immature, which is already more doubtful. But such hasty judgments would completely miss the diversity of expressiveness deployed within the game. Each name is a little bricolage that positions the game space, reinterprets its objectives and appropriates the rules.

The lack of subtlety is probably due to the modes of expression available and the contexts in which they are received. A name, for example, has to be understandable at a glance, as quickly as possible. Caricature guarantees legibility.

The extreme polarization of ideological positions is perhaps also due to this necessary visibility. The nationalist and fascist ravings of a whole faction of players cease to be draped in rhetorical artifice. They reveal their raw, concrete substance, if they can’t hide it.

“la Fr aux Francais”, a slogan of the French far right, combines here with “Baguettes”, a symbol reappropriated by French conservatives. The association is immediate, cartoonish by necessity.

But these nationalist themes soon reveal their fascist underpinnings. The “Bardella2027s” readily allied themselves with the multiple Reichs and Hitler tributes.

One might be surprised at the ease with which Nazi surnames circulate. The responsibility surely lies with the game’s creator, who at the same time may be struggling to carry out the necessary moderation on his own.

However, with such frequent occurrences, it’s hard not to deduce the obvious fascization of online gaming communities, which we know have been and still are places of radicalization for the far right.

“GwerLeader” uses a technique well known in fascist circles. He takes a name that most players won’t catch, but which his potential allies will recognize as meaning “The White Leader”.

His allegiance, concealed from some but blatantly obvious to others, guarantees him relative discretion.

Fascism flourishes without limit on Openfront, and is on full display for all to see.

It doesn’t come alone, however, as it is quickly accompanied by numerous sexist, LGBTphobic and racist references, as in the example presented at the start of this game in which a player caricatured pacifism by attributing derided feminine characteristics to it. The “female e-girl” is thus objectified to denote weakness and lack of aggression. Such sexist positioning guarantees the player the hybrid advantages of his or her declared “pacifism”, and of the reactionary, sexist and fascist faction to which he or she shows his or her allegiance. These hybridities are, in fact, the most effective in-game, and are deployed by transversally occupying the categories of ideology, politics, nation, and even aesthetics and culture in the case of nations named after Wagner, for example, or extreme right-wing influencers, such as a certain “Rapthor di Soudan” who had taken up residence in North-East Africa while referring to a french influencer as infamous as he was fascist.

The power of maps

The location of countries is also a means of expression, and even storytelling, whenever the territory is attached to a name. In Openfront, we play most of the time on very real maps, which give rise to roleplay attitudes. Nations are often in search of the territory that corresponds to them in reality.

Thus, “Napoleon Bonaparte” established himself in Europe in the hope of reconstituting his empire, and extending it beyond the limits he had encountered.

Conflict and the map are inseparable. Openfront is not the first to link the two; the map is even one of the hallmarks of territorial games such as war, strategy and management games. The systematics with which the map is mobilized in all the ludic exactions that lead to the genocidal and totalitarian annihilation of all that is different is surprising.

These territorial interactions give rise to conflicts that replay very real ones. The aspirations of different countries are contradictory.

Territoriality creates adversity by bringing irreconcilable enemies together in the same place.

To be surprised by the warlike uses of maps is to forget that they first appeared as tools of territorial and colonial appropriation, as means of domination and oppression. The map and the State are contemporaries, and it is the map that makes possible the homogeneity of the law, the continuity of the territory, that schematizes particularities and brings together, totalizing from the outset, the populations it objectifies. Human beings are always better bombarded when they are schematized, transformed into shapeless masses of numbers and statistics.

This kind of mapping does, however, allow for some surprising anomalies, which at least have the merit of reshuffling the deck a little.

Representations of maps in terms of proportionality and totality are biased. There are other ways of representing the world, subjectively, according to affects, sensations, localized thoughts and memories.

Here, a map of Paris by the situationist Bauhaus in 1957.

Map of Persona 5 : places with desires and activities attached to them

Similar cartographies can be found in games like Persona 5, which represent space according to the desires and activities attached to it.

We’ve lost a lot by forever delegating the power of the map to states and scientists.

Here, a sensitive map that situates the territory within what makes sense of it.

So there are many other ways of representing the world, in games and everywhere else. The scientific map objectifies, crushes and imposes conquering behaviors. In Openfront, the map is immediately understandable as a game object, because it uses well-known yet contingent concepts. Borders and nations are immediately linked to the behaviours they provoke, and to their very raison d’être: war.

The rule and the norm

To conclude this exploration of playful geopolitics in Openfront, I’d like to emphasize the malleability of game norms.

The rule determines a game context that is constantly appropriated by the players. All the issues we’ve discovered in the course of this article are not provided for by the rule, but have been constituted by players’ practices. What it means to “play well” in a game is therefore always under-determined by the rule. This is why some will engage with ideological and geopolitical conflicts, while others will not. But this choice is never truly individual; it is produced within collective dynamics that impose certain forms of play, and valorize or depreciate certain practices. As we’ve seen, even when I deliberately choose a neutral name like “Fleur”, my playing experience is disrupted by the permanent battlefield.

Here, a player uses his or her name to influence the rule of the game.

In turn, the rule is determined by the norm, and power struggles within the game find their continuity in the ongoing creation of the game.

As T.L. Taylor explains in his essay Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture, “the social rules within games are ‘contextual, contested, heterogeneous, ambiguous and contradictory’. The field of play is never isolated from the social field, nor does it form a magic circle outside the world. On the contrary, all the richness of the social interactions in a game like Openfront comes precisely from the porosities between the playful and the social, between political and playful conflicts, between two aspects of reality that are really only one.

I fear that by analyzing the fascization of g@mers as if it were an isolated phenomenon, specific to a marginal community and somehow harmless outside its milieu, we’re completely missing the role that online gaming communities have played in the radicalization of an entire generation.

Apolitical gaming has always been a mirage. While left-wing media and content creators continue to polish their words to avoid taking too strong a stance, while those who do speak out are silenced incessantly, the space left vacant is occupied, politicized with formidable efficiency.

Openfront is a symptom of this hegemony, and of the way in which social and political struggles “interfere” in games; or rather, this game bears witness to the extent to which these struggles have always been present on the Internet and in video games.