You Don’t Look Like a Gamer: On Toxicity, Gatekeeping, and Women Who Share Their Gaming Lives Online (my article)

I think the telling thing is that these angry gamer dudes are awfully lonely and would kill to have a girlfriend who shared at least some of their interests.

This kind of self-face punching comes from such a low self esteem that they have to reject the idea for fear of rejection in reality.

And then they go looking for every other reason to explain their loneliness epidemic.

Okay I’ve read the article (although probably too fast) and the part where harassment can also be ‘exclusionary humour’ is like. Hit me in the brain.

I am female and visibly so. I use to frequent a local game store before it closed. And while I was mostly welcomed there (father would have raised hell if anything was overt, he knew the owner well) the amount of inside jokes, the “oh you wouldn’t understand”, “it’s fine” when I’d ask what they were talking about was just :<

But at least I meet my husband there. He’s cool. He loves sharing nerdy things with me.

I grew up hearing that what ever game I enjoyed, “was not a real video game.” And this was IRL, from people I knew and thought as my friends, at the time. If I tried to continue, it turned verbally abusive and my fave games got properly shitted on. So I learned to stay quiet and play only offline games, just play my lil games alone. These days I got real friends who’d like to play with me, but I’m too shy to go online… Like I want to, but just too afraid. It’s really fucking dumb.

Growing up, PCs and video games were very much a boys thing and every time I saw someone outed as a girl/woman playing games, I was like “Nice! A unicorn!”.
And every time they played better than me, I was like “Wow, that’s amazing! Carry me, mommy!”

So my toxicity went the other way, as in too enthusiastic. Or a simp as some might call it. “Don’t be mean to this rare, mythical creature or she might run away!”

Now that I’m older, I’ve been tempered somewhat. No longer do i simp biasedly. I can yell out both “Carry me, mommy/daddy!” shamelessly.

I fucking hate dudes like this. I’m someone who has “nerdy” interests and such and naturally they tend to be male dominated because people keep gatekeeping and being misogynistic for no reason. I’d love to have to partner with similar interests in this regard but it’s made harder by the fact that the men in the spaces are the way they are and it’s hard to engage in that way without making the person uncomfortable because there’s a precedent for all sorts of weird behavior. And then these same incels complain they are unsuccessful, well please stop ruining it for the rest of us as well. Even in a non dating context having a more diverse hobby means a more diverse experience.

Good read! Thanks for sharing your work.

The comment section (in part) quickly becomes less about the device or shared memories, and more about performance: who is “allowed” to be associated with gaming culture, and on what terms.

Yuck, disgusting reddit behaviour.

I’m glad to report that my experience here in the fediverse has been quite plesant as wimmin folk with an interest in discussing games. ! I have to give a shoutout to my favourite comm [email protected] and our wonderful overlord mod @[email protected] and the folks over at the community for creating a cool and welcoming environment for everyone.

That’s too bad people can’t behave.

Mind if I share where I’m grappling with the following from a privacy perspective?

I can imagine a privacy hawk making that comment with a deep concern for others and desire to force a very difficult social change.

I remember someone complained everyone in their life said “I’m not even really on Facebook! …I just use it for <thing everyone uses Facebook for>”

Maybe I am a bad person to judge because the underlying concern resonates with me, so I can be sympathetic and treat it as hyperbole. (edit: lol it’s so wrong on its face, IG like world’s most popular platform or almost)

Thank you for your analysis and reporting here!

What losers. This is why there are safe places online. All it takes is one weirdo too. Social media, Reddit, even here. Theres a reason you should never reveal your real name on the internet. And aparently gender jeez. Wtf. Gateeeping is strange people. Its a fun thing to do for everyone.

socially inept incel gamer boys feel threatened by girls and women entering “their” space, and communicate in the only way they know how: by lashing out with gamer shittalking. it’s barely a step above toddler temper tantrums. unfortunately no one can force anyone to grow tf up, especially when part of their core identity is as some kind of someone within the anti-woman circlejerk. best practice is to just block them and move on. angry reaction is what they want. fuck that.

also, wtf is this new “larping” business?

This guy had a great analysis video, complete with interviews with victims, of toxicity towards female entry into male spaces. He goes historically into how video games were first age-neutral, then Nintendo made them “toys”, and toys were for boys, slowly leading to the space having a toxic exclusivity problem.

One of the best bits (which I unfortunately don’t have a timestamp for right now) is when he talks about his own experience as a kid, and how he inadvertently tried to exclude a family member when she started playing the game better than him.

People on the internet discriminating around the most irrelevant details.

You know what grinds my gears? Tooling doesn’t help. In communities like reddit or lemmy, downvotes mean your content will be more hidden. When a dumb-wagon is formed the good content goes to hell. And people use the downvote as a disagree button. It’s annoying.

Hey dash! Cool article on an issue worth writing about. Thank you for sharing your own work here.

I have a question about something that surprised me: did you consider censoring user names of the people you used as examples of negative internet culture? From a perspective of journalistic best practice, I personally feel like this would have been better, mostly since you are making a point about general culture, not specific people. This became noticable to me with the reference to mastodon (less with reddit). Maybe because mastodon feels like more of a personal, less anonymous platform. Also, @f… (no thank you voyager, I won’t tag him here, even if you autocomplete the handle) is more singled out.

What I want to express is that I feel like that not censoring names detracts from your point of ‘online spaces are bad’ to ‘these people are bad’. This is especially true if the bad actor is a single person, as in the mastodon / ‘shut up about instagram’-section. This is the case in addition to the risk of people reaching out to the posters in question to worsen their day.

Dickheads like this are the reason I don’t like telling people I play games. People that attempt to put others in boxes are the worst

Gaming is one of those weird spaces; it mainstreamed in the smartphone era, with a lot of folks who previously mocked it embracing it.

It’s picked up the toxic manosphere infection as it transitioned (“casual gamers” Vs “real gamers” facilitated that boxing off). The onlyfans “egirl” revolution painted a skewed picture of girls as gamers in the worst possible way (doing it for attention to make money), and the manosphere has amplified this to the detriment of gamers everywhere.

Gaming also focuses a lot of moral outrage, and that hasn’t helped matters. It’s given some men a ghost to fight against (“the big bad feminist trying to ban waifus”), whereas the reality is far from that!

The reality is gaming is for everyone who wants to game; the best question to ask another gamer is what they’ve enjoyed playing (for the Ds, the Etrian Odyssey games are amazing!). Not every game is for every person, except for Super Smash on the GameCube, because that game was high art.