Today’s article was just a short one, and engaging in what makes everyone roll their eyes: seeing something happen on Reddit and writing an article about it.
To cut it short:
- Billie Eilish (famous singer) uploaded a picture of her old Nintendo DSi in gallery of images, to her Instagram account
- Someone shared that on Reddit
- Half of the comment section slid straight into shitty gamer dude Hell (the other half did not)
- Some man on Mastodon attacked me
- Post removed from Reddit when moderators spotted the comments
…this is a fast-forward of the oddness, but if you want to read over my ramble here, and see some shittiness, the link will help:
https://gardinerbryant.com/you-dont-look-like-a-gamer/
I see this shit all the time, and it is not only exhausting, but something no one should see (no matter their identity) should be subjected to. Anyway, read on if you’d like!
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.
anime girl PFPs are the new ‘xXx_420_BLAZE_IT_xXx’
…it’s the same dude who had a ar15/skull/COD Ghost PFP 10 years ago…
Anime avatars have been a thing for much longer than that but these are clearly not anime girls, it’s the thing where people customize the reddit logo to look like themselves. I might be wrong but I’m under the impression that the culture with these isn’t one where toxic masculinity will mesh with presenting as female.
One of them has a trans balloon, this seems to further ratify what you are saying, trying to validate a stereotype to fit in better. This is sad from humanity :(
Remember kids you can be who you are without needing external validation. Especially not external validation gotten by being against your “own group “
Remember kids you can be who you are without needing external validation. Especially not external validation gotten by being against your “own group “
I don’t think it’s quite that straightforward, because they’re doing this because they’re also perceiving gamers as their own group and feeling like being a part of two groups at odds with one another demands that a choice be made. Their version of not being against their own group begins with asking themselves “which group do I identify more with”, rather than asking whether the two have to be at odds with each other in the first place. The lesson is that your immutable characteristics are not character failures, and if you’re starting to feel like they are it’s really important to introspect on where that’s coming from.
I know people generally look at this kind of gatekeeping from the outside and write it off as a repressed self-hatred, but I’m kind of inclined to think of it the opposite way. If your immutable characteristics are a handicap to being a part of something important to you, then actually being accepted into that group is a triumph that most people with the same handicap can’t achieve. If gamers are cool and I don’t question the premise that girls aren’t fit to be gamers, then if I can kind of sort of be accepted in this space that’s still better than most other girls. The boys fit in better here of course, but it’s not impressive it’s just normal. This other girl is just larping because she wants to be like me.
We should strive to identify cultures of looking down on others. We should strive not to participate in that. Don’t just find comfort in being who you are, but allow others to find the same comfort with more ease than you had.
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The you don’t look like a gamer line has always been so tired. If someone plays games, they’re a gamer — no gatekeeping DLC required.
Yes and no. I’m sorry I refuse to count someone who exclusively plays Candy Crush on their phone as a “gamer”. I mean I’m not acting like it’s a exclusive title, but there is a reasonable minimum. You wouldn’t call someone an artist because they drew a stick figure doodle on their school notes.
By the logic everyone would be everything.
I mean what does a gamer look like? 35 year old neck beard? I mean I’m a 55 year old dude that’s been playing games since I was 6 years old. Do I look like a gamer?
Find somebody playing a game. Look at them. That’s what a gamer looks like. FFS it ain’t that hard.
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.
Guys, guys, it’s 2026, gamers don’t need to look like unhygienic basement dwellers anymore, get on with the times!
What if I like it?
You don’t need to be like that, but if you do, go nuts!
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.
It has been a strange and long ride for me in gaming, one of my fondest early memories of gaming is playing coop Diablo 1 on a PS1 late at night with (the horror) a girl.
Then we had a healthy CSGO server with several women/girls who played with us. One of them married one of the lads.
WoW was nearly half populated by women from the start. Two of the women I raided with married blokes they met in our raids.
Yet somehow the myth that women don’t game has persisted.
It’s almost like the people who believe that are so hostile to women that any women in online spaces will avoid outing themselves to avoid the inevitable harassment.
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’.
This is a really good point and it makes me realize that “casual” as a genre translates pretty well to “games stereotyped towards women”. I’d go as far as to say most modern video games can be played casually, but if we actually put the bar at games that aren’t intended to be played otherwise we’re looking at freecell.
Growing up, that whole stereotype was actually accurate in my class at least, which of course caused me to also believe it was this way until later in life. Girls here would at most play sims. Most boys would play various iterations of Need for Speed, Runescape and Counter Strike (1.6 of course), with the nerdier ones (me included) playing a bunch of other things too. Pretty much every boy played something.
I’ve since gotten to know several gamer girls, but literally all of them from other towns in my later life, none from my old school days. Which makes me think there was some localized girl gamer shaming going on, but I’m not sure it was from the boys in this case, it always felt like some of the more popular girls in school saw gaming as something infantile and therefore their clique just didn’t do it, or didn’t talk about it. Wouldn’t be surprised if some of the more quiet girls played a bunch of vidya and just never talked about it though.
Now it’s CoD bros thinking anything else isn’t real gaming.
Perhaps they just did not share their hobbies and interests with you at the time. Were any of them actually close friends with you?
None of the girls and women I know who are into gaming are really ‘obvious’ about it to strangers, partly because of the stigma and the resulting interactions you’d get, and partly because there just isn’t too much to talk about that you can’t already talk about online in your communities. Especially if most reactions to your gaming hobby you’d get from boys would be ridicule, weird creepiness and/or condescension. We usually kept it to ourselves.
Besides, if they played games like The Sims, it’s pretty obvious they were really into gaming. Sims is an incredibly complex and time-consuming hobby for most people – modding, worldbuilding projects, family legacies that take hundreds of hours of playtime. I know not a single Sims-playing woman who is not at least temporarily obsessed with that game, hasn’t modded it to shreds and hasn’t spent a three-digit amount of money on its expansions.
I’d say that the average Need for Speed gamer is a much more casual gamer than a Sims player. But because the latter are mostly women, we were treated with the same condescending “it’s a kid’s toy” type attitude boys actually thought we had toward their games.
Yeah the Sims is a game that the older I get the more I see it as serious gaming. The people who were into it were so much more into it than the people who played standard fpses were. And people of all genders were playing shit like bioshock and skyrim when I was in high school.
The only reason the Sims isn’t treated as a serious game is because it was significantly more popular with girls than boys.
Were any of them actually close friends with you?
Only a few of the more quiet ones, since I was the unpopular nerdy bullied guy the rest of them didn’t really want to be seen talking to. Later on as my bully dropped out in 8th grade, I gained a lot of confidence and got closer to the others too.
None of the girls and women I know who are into gaming are really ‘obvious’ about it to strangers, partly because of the stigma and the resulting interactions you’d get, and partly because there just isn’t too much to talk about that you can’t already talk about online in your communities. Especially if most reactions to your gaming hobby you’d get from boys would be ridicule, weird creepiness and/or condescension. We usually kept it to ourselves.
I mean yes, that’s all true, stigma and all, I’m just saying that over here in particular, it was mostly the girls who’d ridicule gaming as a childish hobby (especially if you played Runescape which was seen as particularly childish for some reason), which I’ve since found out is not common everywhere (and in fact of the people I know who still play Runescape, half are women. They’re just all from other towns/cities).
Besides, if they played games like The Sims, it’s pretty obvious they were really into gaming. Sims is an incredibly complex and time-consuming hobby for most people – modding, worldbuilding projects, family legacies that take hundreds of hours of playtime.
I wouldn’t say it’s that obvious. I know plenty who have played it very casually, but not many who have gotten that deep into it. It was like one of the default games everyone dabbled in as a kid. And yes, I know you can spend thousands of hours in it. I’ve got a couple hundred in it myself over the years (have played 1, 3, 4 and Medieval). I would doubt most got that deep into it back then. For one, that would require understanding the language the game was in, which most didn’t. Like 5 kids out of 25 in our class understood the language. I sometimes made money doing important Runescape quests (like Lost City or Monkey Madness to unlock dragon longsword and dragon scimmy) for others because they couldn’t do it themselves.
hasn’t spent a three-digit amount of money on its expansions.
I on the other hand don’t think I know anyone who’s spent a cent on it. Estonia wasn’t particularly rich in the mid 00s, so we pirated games. If you didn’t know how to, you knew someone else who did. Most kids had older siblings or friends who’d help. This has carried on. I’ve bought many games over the years now, but never The Sims. Always pirated that.
Gaming gatekeeping is just the old tribalism rearing its nasty mug. It’s all over the place in all sorts of environments.
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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.
I thought it was PoE he was caught paying to farm. Still a bitch move no matter the game though.
I love billie so much, she’s such an icon
I remember when I used to play video games. Yea, I was your typical window masturbator with kilobytes of child porn and may have killed a dog. Then I got MKULTRA’d and got taken advantage of by a cult that reprogrammed my dopaminergic potential with oil changes n cheese cloths to then escape by cutting into my arm to do acid again to realize I was a woman to spiral into homelessness while traveling the country and creating a sex cult built around incestuous necrophilia that would get me v& by the FBI for accidentally advertising it on the Roblox subreddit. And also obscene terroristic threats to a prominent US senator. Obviously, I just talked my way outta it, and thank God I got taken advantage of by that cult cuz I woulda still had them kilobytes while playing Dragon Age or some shit for the sex scenes, cuz that’s what mattered when I played video games.
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.
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?
My favorite bit is how Billie somehow ‘larped’ so hard she managed to invent time travel, went back to when she was a kid, took a selfie of herself with that DSi, used it as the image on the screen…then went back to now
I fucking hate this ‘larp’ shit, it is so, so, so tiring to see in these communities. I figure it has to be kids.
I think the trick for that sort of thing is rather than trying to circumvent or silence those voices, you just gotta ignore them until they eventually snowball into cringe lol
Kind of like how it used to be considered cool to dunk on people for being religious online, but now it’s pretty much the opposite
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It can’t be larp if it’s real
I removed their comment and warned a ban for the future. I’m not putting up with that word being used as a casual put-down, that is not on for this community.
Thank you for looking out for your community’s health ❤️
So apparently Nazis 1) have infiltrated threadiverse, 2) and are using that word to be misogynistic .
Thank you, letting our teams know. CC @Deceptichum@quokk.au @recursive_recursion@lemmy.ca @Quokka@quokk.au
Thank you for sharing names. Easy blocks and reports. The irony was clearly lost with this guy and his concept of “compassion”.
Must still be practicing.
He said the concept of compassion for a reason though.
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.
This but unironically.
A lot of this behavior is actually outlined in the lesser discussed Fearful-Avoidant aka Disorganized Attachment Style. From my understanding, people with this style of attachment are more likely to lash out even when presented with the ideal safe relationship environment due to past abandonment trauma.
The way I specifically heard it described once is even after a caregiver returns to a child who needs emotional consolement after separation anxiety, unlike the other children who will immediately calm down, the child with a Fearful-Avoidant style will continue to cry, almost as if perceiving the sense of danger or emotional upset as permanent.
Yeah, it’s not a clever or new observation to point out that the men who are mad they can’t meet women are the same ones who make being a woman in nerdy spaces suck, especially online gaming (but also plenty of irl spaces, my ex was a female magic the gathering judge and oh boy did she get treated poorly). But it is something still worth mentioning.
This also gets worse when genuinely nerdy women are anything other than the equivalent of the worst stereotypes of nerds. When you ask the question why wouldn’t some women of all sorts have been Tolkien heads or been playing ttrpgs since they were teenagers (or have always wanted to try), or been gaming since they were kids, then this behavior gets even more absurd.
If led Zeppelin could be super into Tolkien, why can’t Billie Eilish be a gamer? If Henry Caville can be as nerdy as he is, why can’t a similarly attractive actress be equally nerdy? If some of the guys at the game shop grew into their face and got into working out, why should you assume that that’s not a possible story behind a pretty woman who decides to come in?
Yeah, it’s not a clever or new observation to point out that the men…
Eh, thanks. I mean, that’s a bit of a harsh way to start a reply to a comment you then go on to agree with.
Ope sorry if it came off critical, I meant it in a form of “this has been said many times and yet it continues to bear the repetition that you engaged in and I’m about to”
Ah, my bad, no harm done and thank you for explaining that, it really is appreciated.
I find so much online discourse has become performative contrarianism that I’m probably a little over sensitive to it.
I like this place precisely cause of people like you two!
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.
Fyi I am your friend and I support your personal, self found flavour of games 🤙🏾
