I am not a gamer by any means. I do some city-build­ing in Cities: Skylines every once in a while, and I build out my massive under­ground base in Minecraft when­ever I have the time. Some­times I’ll even play a game or two of Stick Fight: The Game with my sibling.

When I finished my last piece about online gaming in Fair­fax County Public Schools, I didn’t expect to have to do a ton more research. I already had a list of more than 100 active websites, the names of over 10 people involved, and a few inter­views with some of the creators; that’s prob­a­bly where I should have stopped. I could have writ­ten an arti­cle about how teach­ers hate the sites, and how the admin­is­tra­tors suppos­edly discover and block almost every new one that comes out. I wanted to write this one about meet­ing a few of the people behind it.

Maybe I would have enjoyed writ­ing this arti­cle more if that were the case — because I didn’t just meet some of the creators who make the game sites. I stum­bled across the commu­ni­ties where they all get together.

There is a stereo­type about gamers that depicts them as potty-mouthed. They use foul language, they constantly insult other people, and they say slurs a lot. I am not here to prove that wrong, because there is an over­whelm­ing amount of evidence that backs up that stereotype.

In a way that’s strik­ingly simi­lar to early 2000s “gamer culture,” a smoky layer of insults and gaso­line-fueled argu­ments kind of hides a deeper, more human side to every inter­ac­tion. They find each other annoy­ing, but they’re also on the same team. They fight, they make up, they create new alliances and they complain about a lot of things. Like a stereo­typ­i­cal old married couple, they also have some outdated opin­ions… to say the least.

It should not come as a surprise that the general toxi­c­ity of these commu­nity spaces is not a fun expe­ri­ence. Racism, Islam­o­pho­bia, even outright Nazism are all present. People post things that I legally can’t talk about here, in aban­doned Discord servers that have been deserted since school-run inves­ti­ga­tions purged and punished the game site publish­ers who moder­ated them. For my own sanity, I hadn’t even viewed the content — I trusted Discord to blur what­ever it viewed as unsafe.

A source inter­viewed by The Verdict believes that all of the drama “[…] is caused mostly by a couple or three[sic] bad people who like stir­ring up chaos.” This source, who will be referred to as Vera at her request, spends a lot of time with game site creators, though she’s never made more than a personal infor­ma­tional website herself.

Here’s the thing that’s made this arti­cle so hard to write: Vera gets accused of being a Nazi pretty often. And I don’t have the evidence to tell whether she is or not, so I won’t answer that ques­tion myself.

It was certainly surpris­ing to learn, espe­cially consid­er­ing that Vera is a trans person who intro­duced herself to me using the “:3” emoji.

I honestly can’t tell whether she is a [neo-]Nazi sympa­thizer or not. She calls people the F‑slur, jokes about Auschwitz (for those who don’t know, it’s the most well-known Nazi exter­mi­na­tion camp), has allegedly called people the N‑slur, made swastikas in Minecraft, and drawn cari­ca­tures of other people saying Nazi things. She’s joked about “Harry Potter and the Cham­ber of Gas,” made a tier list of wars (World War II is S‑tier on her list, ranked only below World War I), posted jokes about famous domes­tic terror­ist Ted Kaczyn­ski, also known as the Unabomber, and screamed “AUSCHWITZ AWAITS” in response to another meme.

The issue with creat­ing an envi­ron­ment online where people can do things like that iron­i­cally is that some people aren’t good at irony. It isn’t my place to say what slurs people can reclaim or not. However, espe­cially consid­er­ing that Vera is white, I don’t think there’s a valid argu­ment that can be made for a lot of the stuff she says.

Servers like the ones she’s in have a culture entirely based on being cool and edgy, and being a kind of anti-Gen X rebel­lion. But it’s also pretty hypo­crit­i­cal in that the culture isn’t one of liber­at­ing anyone from anything. It’s a lot like Joe Rogan’s podcast, in my opin­ion: a status quo insti­tu­tion that pretends to be coun­ter­cul­ture. They share a lot of the same beliefs with the Gen X folks, except that it’s some­how more socially accept­able to joke about geno­cide now.

There is a partic­u­lar Discord server that I will call Popsi­cle. Popsi­cle is kind of a friend group, kind of part of the wider “unblock­ing” commu­nity. From the two or three months that I’ve been in it, watch­ing people talk and occa­sion­ally join­ing in on conver­sa­tions, I can’t tell whether its members are friends or enemies. The people there are constantly argu­ing, and it’s usually the same people every single time. Some­times one of the members posts adult content to the server… and often, they get yelled at, removed, and added back at a later date. I have not been there to witness this, as I only check the server every few days. They had a chan­nel called “the-corner,” which I thank­fully have never had the misfor­tune of having access to.

A lot of the server’s discourse revolves around Vera, who is a senior staff member of the server. Some people defend her, others accuse her of being a Nazi. One member, an aspir­ing YouTu­ber, says, “[…] look, Vera has prob­lems, but she’s my friend,” as another member of the server accused her of being a Nazi.

Vera doesn’t appear to have ever gotten banned for anything she has said or done. It isn’t my job to say whether she should be, espe­cially because it isn’t my server, so I won’t take a stance on that. The admin­is­tra­tors of Popsi­cle seem to be fine with her, though.

Even with the endless infight­ing, the Popsi­cle members are still largely on the same side on one key issue: Getting FCPS’ hands off of their precious Chrome­books. Never mind that they are tech­ni­cally school prop­erty, because that doesn’t really matter to them, but some people in the server have come up with creative meth­ods of getting around the restric­tions on inter­net access. They aren’t partic­u­larly impres­sive, but seeing kids continue to carry the torch of gaming in schools is heart­en­ing to see.

Most of the time the “bypasses” are just “prox­ies” that forward students’ inter­net traf­fic to another loca­tion before request­ing the website. One of them used Chrome’s built-in “Sign In” page to get unre­stricted access to the internet.

I thought that I wouldn’t find anything more impressive.

That is, until I stum­bled upon what appears to be by far the most impres­sive student-run cyber­se­cu­rity and reverse-engi­neer­ing outfit in FCPS that I know of. And it’s run by a bunch of fresh­men and middle-schoolers.

I’m talk­ing about a group that I call “Mach­ery”: a group of 15 or so active students in FCPS schools (and a few other school districts around the coun­try) that have thor­oughly reverse-engi­neered Light­speed Filter, have figured out how to bypass several key Chrome­book secu­rity mech­a­nisms, and are the people driving devel­op­ment of most new bypasses these days.

They’ll get their own arti­cle, and it’ll be a good one.

Honestly, this is prob­a­bly the most deeply-researched series of arti­cles I’ve ever writ­ten, by far. I have talked to dozens of people, de-anonymized every single person mentioned in this arti­cle, and searched through months of public chat logs. I want to empha­size that even though this report­ing is incred­i­bly in-depth consid­er­ing the topic, every­thing here is public infor­ma­tion, and every­one named in this arti­cle gave their consent to be inter­viewed by me. In every single intro­duc­tion I have made it clear that I am a student journalist.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this article.