Donald Trump’s claim, in the aftermath of the Florida school shooting, that these events are the result of violent video games, resurrects old arguments about whether young people emulate the games they play. The World Health Organisation’s (WHO) recent decision to consider video game addiction an official illness shows comparable concern. However, these responses demonstrate anxiety about the right things for the wrong reasons.

Gaming cultures are connected to violence – but should be considered in terms of the rise of far right political discourse and the prominence of “alt-right” misogyny and racism. While Trump is firmly on the right and the WHO may embody normative centrism, there is an aspect of gaming that should worry the progressive left.

The white male supremacy in gaming has been discussed in the context of the harassment campaign Gamergate and via the link between Trump and gamer message board threads on the 4chan website. Yet it’s not simply that many gamers are right wing, or that the right recruits gamers, but that the logic and pleasure of gaming itself has served and continues to serve the political right.

Games are ideological constructions which push a set of values on the user. Like television and film, they often support the ideologies of their context: in the Bush years, American games endorsed aggressive foreign policy; since Brexit, British games advocate isolationism or nostalgia for empire – and the prominence of anti-Islam games in the 2000s tells it all.

However, video games have at least two unique features compared to other media.

First, rightwing ideologies have been overrepresented and dominant throughout the history of video games. Although affected by context, video games have long focused on the expulsion of “aliens” (Space Invaders to XCOM), fear of impure infection (Half-Life to The Last of Us), border control (Missile Commander to Plants vs Zombies), territory acquisition (Command & Conquer to Splatoon), empire building (Civilization to Tropico), princess recovery (Mario to Zelda), and restoration of natural harmony (Sonic to FarmVille).

Second, video games put the user to work on an instinctual level, making the gamer feel impulsive agreement with these ideologies. Playing Resident Evil is not equivalent to watching the movie, because the controller-wielding gamer experiences the desires of the game as their own desires – not as the desires of another.

In the Bush years, US games endorsed aggressive foreign policy; since Brexit, British games advocate isolationism

The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan distinguished between “drives” and “instincts”. While instincts come from within us, drives occur when political forces propel us in certain directions. In these terms, video games are drives masquerading as instincts, naturalising rightwing ideologies in a way other media cannot by offering its users the chance to experience them on a personal level.

In this way, the rationale of gaming is to unite pleasurable impulse with political ideology, a process which renders gamers susceptible to discourses that urge people to follow their instincts while also prescribing what those instincts ought to be. Trump’s discourse on his proposed US-Mexico wall and appeals to ethno-nationalism are cases in point: supporters are not merely expected to agree logically but to impulsively feel the political desire – the very logic of gaming.

Angela Nagle’s book Kill All Normies showed how disparate rightwing and apolitical troll communities coalesced into the alt-right, but the link between gaming and the right wing runs deeper and goes back further. Games attracted rightwing players because they carried rightwing messages and produced rightwing pleasures, and, even more worryingly, they prepared apolitical gamers for the later embrace of rightwing values. When game makers like Oculus VR creator Palmer Luckey support righwing and right-libertarian causes, we’re not seeing a new trend of gamers turning to the right, but a clue to the structure of gaming and its historical role in incubating such ideologies.

In the 1990s, another theoretical response to gaming emerged which has recently been reasserted. New commentators argued that games provide a channel for frustrations that might otherwise be unleashed on to society, making games a protection from violence rather than a cause of it. The two positions make different mistakes.

Trump’s recourse to the old argument about gaming overstates the role of games – and places culture over legal and economic conditions. He goes after the gamers to deflect attention from the gun laws underlying mass shootings. On the other hand, the idea that games prevent violence downplays their role, implying that violent and misogynistic desires exist in all of us and games do no more than provide an outlet for such impulses. This position ignores the fact that games can have a concrete ideological effect on us – and make us desire politically charged things on a personal level.

In the 1960s, 70s and 80s, Hollywood cinema transformed the desires, empathies and emotions of a global population (even for those who never went to the movies), but it’s harder to recognise the pattern in your own context – and we may need to consider whether we are in the midst of a comparable revolution with video games today. Currently, the new desires incubated by games lean far to the right, and without more progressive games on the market (though some are emerging), the future may be even bleaker than the political present.

• Alfie Bown is the author of The Playstation Dreamworld, a philosophy of games and politics.