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.

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.

You know, growing up I always thought it was super odd for the 'gamer guys' I knew to talk about gaming as a hobby that boys and men are into by default and girls, and especially women, just wouldn't understand.

They mentioned or assumed it so casually in all kinds of contexts, as if it was just a fact about the world everyone knew or agreed upon.

Meanwhile, most of my girl (and later, women) friends played games. And not just the type of games the guys would look down upon, like mobile games, but established major gaming franchises like Final Fantasy, SimCity or Legend of Zelda. They wrote fan-fiction about Sephiroth, they snuck their little DS lite under the school desk to finish a section of Majora's Mask, or they spent weeks at a time meticulously crafting a storyboard in Sims 2. I never understood why the cultural image of gaming at the same time only included guys and maaybe one pick-me-esque 'gamer girl', when most girls and women around me actually were super into some games.

I eventually realised that these 'gamer guys' just never interacted with the girls I knew. Their entire world view came from the internet, from movies and other cultural sources. That was an eye-opener.

It makes me angry and sad to see games with a traditionally female userbase, such as The Sims, to be lumped into 'casual' genres, when I never knew a single Sims player who had a casual relationship with that game. They were typically much more intense about these games and fandoms than your average male FIFA/Call of Duty/Battlefield players, but the latter count as 'real gamers'. It's really just misogyny.

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.

ok forgive me for being old but they're saying "larp larp larp" like they're saying she's "Live Action Role Playing" being a "gamer" cause she took a photo of her old DS? am I right on that one?

Misery loves company.

Whenever I see stuff like this online that's the first thing I think of. These people are all miserable, depressed, and alone. The most basic and simplistic forms of joy from others sends them into a "woe is me" rage. They then MUST ensure said person or whomever defends said person be brought down into the same misery hole they dug for themselves.

And you can't just say "oh just ignore them" I'm sorry but no, you can't. I'm sure OP has tried taking that route several times but again these peoples entire lot in life is to ensure you become as miserable as they do. so you can't ignore them.

So what do you do? you keep living your life. Enjoy whatever the ever living fuck you want to enjoy, post about it online, let the miserable cunts try to knock you down, post more. post A LOT more. infuriate them, let them attack you. respond to their posts with a simple "k." or "cool story, bro" or "thank you for the feedback!" kell em with kindness or just an out right virtual pat on the head. "great post champ!" all that. Show them that you're happier then they are and will ever be.

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 !soulslike@lemmy.zip and our wonderful overlord mod @v4ld1z@lemmy.zip and the folks over at the community for creating a cool and welcoming environment for everyone.

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.

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.

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.

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

I think the only person posing as a gamer is Elon cause he pays people to farm his Diablo account. Everyone else gets a pass no matter what they play or how much they play.

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.

Obviously this is not a representative sample, but it's hard not to notice that the three redditors in these screenshots that are gatekeeping gaming all have female-presenting avatars. It makes me think of an article I read two or three years ago written by a black man saying he gave his son advice that in an emergency white cops were a significantly safer bet because institutionalized racism gives them a lot more leeway to show empathy towards minorities without being ostracized for it. A woman actually trying to fit into a misogynistic culture is going to feel more pressure to consistently prove her belonging, and can end up being more ruthless in enforcing the misogyny and more effective because her gender allows a cover of legitimacy.

Thank you for sharing names. Easy blocks and reports. The irony was clearly lost with this guy and his concept of “compassion”.

If this happens to a celebrity posting about a 20 year old Nintendo game system, I can only imagine what it's like for your average female logging into modern competitive shooter.

Gamergate never went away. It was the precursor to the youthful fadcisti, in many ways. We need women in these spaces to help diffuse the malignant culture. They'll remain targets of harassment tho, so it's up to everyone to police misogyny, and racism for that matter, too.

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.

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 ”

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!