In conversation with Leftist Gamer Memes

If you hang out in lefty spaces online, it's likely you've come across a post created by Leftist Gamer Memes. The account, run by an individual with whom I traded direct messages on Bluesky for this story, has more than 200,000 followers across social media platforms with posts regularly exceeding 1 million views. The conceit is simple: put leftist messaging into recognizable iconography from video games.

LGM, who prefers to use a moniker online, has always made memes like this for the love of it — she's a leftist who games, and she's passionate about waking others up to the injustices of our societal and governmental systems. What better way to get the word out than making the word look like a piece of dialogue from a beloved video game franchise? That work includes taking lots of screenshots of games, but LGM said it also sometimes looks like placing individual pixels or creating new sprites to add lefty elements to the images she posts.

In our conversation, LGM and I talked about the goals of the page, the tenuous issue of crediting (and getting credit for) memes, and the LGM-themed game she's working on with other volunteers.

The following interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Please excuse our in-DMs grammar.

Zoë Hannah: When did you start the Leftist Gamer Memes account on IG and Bsky? Did it grow quickly, and did you have an early post that went viral or that you could attribute to your account's early growth? I'd love to know more about how you came up with the name.

Leftist Gamer Memes: In 2019 I got very sick and ended up unemployed and agoraphobic after covid happened. I spent a lot of time online in shitposting groups on Facebook. Nasty places, wouldn't recommend. 

Around this time, I discovered a site called The Death Generator where you can make dialogue boxes from old games, and started creating some and posting them in different groups, some of which kicked me for "posting political content" even though others would post pro-fash content quite often.

After leaving these toxic groups behind, I decided to make my own page on Facebook as an outlet, not with the goal of going viral at all. I blame the name "Leftist Gamer Memes" on autism, because i couldn't think of something in that moment i just decided to go with essentially a definition of the page; a place for my leftist gaming memes.

My page went somewhat viral after creating the dialogue box image of the character Wiegraf from Final Fantasy Tactics, saying "If the penalty for a crime is a fine, then that law only exists for the lower class". The image fooled a lot of people into thinking it was actually from the game and so sparked a lot of discussion online, argument, and political debate.