Not a gamer* but as an open source participant IRC is the main chat room technology my distro uses. All of the conversations are easily archivable and searchable due to the pure text format. Main devs can use tools like quassel to make sure they never miss an @.

*multiplayer gamer. I do play single player games.

In the book Anton is a personification of human evil as a natural force a bit like The Judge in Blood Meridian. The film is more ambiguous I think mainly due to the medium making the character more human by being played by an actor.