The Curious Misogyny of Gamer Culture

Why Geek Men See Themselves as the Victims of Toxic Masculinity, and Never the Perpetrators

DISCLAIMER: I’ve worked for Riot Games for 4 years, as a freelancer, as a contractor, and as an employee. This is not a reaction to the Kotaku article on sexism at Riot. For that, you can go here. It’s an article I’ve been writing for some time — and struggling with the wording — but now I feel it’s more important that I say it soon than that I say it perfectly.

I’m a big old nerd. Like “works at a computer game company, has a tattoo from a cartoon, started his college’s sci-fi/fantasy dorm” big old nerd. But over time, I’ve become pretty frustrated by a giant blindspot a lot of men in our community have, and it’s led me to slowly pull away.

It all started in high school (or even earlier in school). Many of us were pretty…different from everybody else in high school, and whether that led to bullying or isolation, it shaped our perception of social environments. It became all too easy to think we were being bullied “for being gamers”. After all, the people who bullied us called us “nerds”, so it must have been about that, right?

Our culture has always been about escapism, whether that escape was to Middle Earth, the ring world of HALO, or even just an academic textbook. And that same escapism yielded some pretty clear fantasies about how life could be one day: a world where we weren’t bullied for our interests.

But somewhere along the way, a huge swathe of geek culture lost its way. Instead of imagining a world where we weren’t bullied for our interests, some of us ended up striving to recreate the same culture, just with us on top.

(Sidenote: when tech jobs are among the best in our economy, comic-book movies are consistently the top performers, and Fortnite is a high school phenomenon the likes of which gaming has never seen, we’re fast-approaching or already in a world where geek culture *is* pop culture. It’s long past time we got the chip off of our shoulders)

But here’s the thing. We weren’t ever being bullied for “being gamers” or “being nerds”. Something much more simple was happening. We were being bullied for not being perceived as masculine enough. That whole toxic masculinity thing? We had a front row seat to its enforcement.

A lot of us who went through that experience quickly recognized that hyper-macho culture wasn’t a good thing. But plenty of us didn’t. The problem many gamers saw was not having access to the social capital of masculinity.

That’s why so much of gamer culture has become about “legitimacy”. It’s why talk of esports’ legitimacy gets so charged, because if esports are the same as physical sports, that means gamers get to be “masculine” in the same way that athletes are.

There are consequences to this misunderstanding. Many in our community identified toxic masculinity as somehow foreign to them. In their heads, sexism is the territory of different men, the men who bullied us. At its root, that’s the meaning behind every meme about women wanting “bad boys” instead of “nice guys”. It’s saying “they’re the sexists, not us”. And it’s completely untrue.

It has completely blinded far too many of us to the sexism of our own culture. But whether it’s the rejection of so many female gamers as “not real gamers” or harassment campaigns like GamerGate or gender disparities at tech companies like Uber or Riot, it’s time to admit the struggles of the other half of geek culture: women.