On Toxicity, Gatekeeping, and Women Who Share Their Gaming Lives Online

There’s often a reaction that appears whenever women publicly share that they play games. It’s not always overt hostility. Sometimes it’s framed as jokes, disbelief, or mild condescension. Other times it slips into something more direct: questioning authenticity, mocking interest, or redirecting attention away from the person entirely. You’ve all seen it, I know you have. It is there all the damn time.

A recent Reddit post in the r/NintendoDS community, titled “Billie Eilish via last Instagram post,” is a small but telling example of how these dynamics surface in otherwise ordinary gaming spaces. While the post itself is fairly innocuous: it just shows Billie Eilish and a Nintendo console associated with nostalgia. 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.

What stands out to me isn’t just disagreement or discussion. It’s the tone of dismissal that often follows when women are present in these spaces, even indirectly. Instead of engaging with the shared nostalgia of a Nintendo DSi, some responses drift toward sarcasm, gatekeeping, or reducing the post to something unworthy of attention. The implication is subtle but familiar: this isn’t a “real” gamer moment, or it isn’t being expressed in the “right” way.

This pattern isn’t unique to a single thread here. Across gaming communities, there’s a long history of women being treated as outsiders unless they conform to specific expectations, usually either downplaying their identity as a gamer or proving it through excessive validation. When they don’t, the reaction can range from skepticism (“name three games”) to derision (“you just like it for attention”), claiming they’re not actually gaming at all (“LARPing”) to outright hostility.

Even when the content is harmless like it is here, showing a handheld console or talking about nostalgia, the conversation can quickly shift away from the game itself and toward the perceived legitimacy of the person posting it.

This becomes especially visible in how quickly some discussions turn from shared interest into commentary about the poster. Rather than engaging with the DSi, the games, or the memories tied to them, the focus becomes the person’s presence in the space itself.

“Did you think anybody here wants to hear about Instagram?”

A similar dynamic appeared in a comment left for me on Mastodon after I shared the Reddit thread highlighting the negativity in Billie’s DSi post. The reply came from a user under the handle @falcennial

The reply reads:

“Complaining on fediverse about how your toxic celebrity worship corporate owned social media sucks so consistently hard is a like dumping a big wet turd on your bed to protest your backed up toilet.
did you think anybody here wants to hear about instagram”

It reflects a broader tendency seen across online spaces: the impulse to shut down or redirect women’s expression, especially when it mixes identity, nostalgia, and gaming culture. I like to think it also reflects a lack of brain cells.

This tone isn’t simply disagreement. It carries an underlying assumption that my post is misplaced, unnecessary, or inherently annoying. Just that familiar reframing that often appears when women occupy enthusiast spaces in visible ways.

And of course, I was blocked by that user without getting the chance to address his dragon spitting.

The broader pattern: gatekeeping through tone

Research into gaming communities has repeatedly shown that toxicity doesn’t always take the form of direct harassment. It can also appear as gatekeeping, exclusionary humor, or more subtle forms of de-legitimization. Studies on online gaming culture consistently note that women are more likely to have their identity as “real gamers” questioned, even in casual or non-competitive spaces, reflecting broader cultural assumptions about who gaming is for. In large, often male-dominated online environments, these behaviors operate less like explicit attacks and more like social signalling, reinforcing ideas about who belongs, who doesn’t, and who is expected to justify their presence.

Gatekeeping the “Gamer” Identity: Vicarious Consumption and the Exclusion of Women from American Video Game Subcultures | The Social Contract

Female Gamers’ Experience of Online Harassment and Social Support in Online Gaming: A Qualitative Study – International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction

Female gaming is a relatively under-researched area, and female gamers often report experiencing harassment whilst playing online. The present study explored female experiences of social support while playing online video games, because of the previous research suggesting that females often experience harassment and negative interactions during game play. Data were collected from an online discussion forum, and comprised posts drawn from 271 female gamers. Thematic analysis of the discussions suggested that a lack of social support and harassment frequently led to female gamers playing alone, playing anonymously, and moving groups regularly. The female gamers reported experiencing anxiety and loneliness due to this lack of social support, and for many, this was mirrored in their experiences of social support outside of gaming. The female gamers frequently accepted the incorporation into their gaming of specific coping strategies to mitigate online harassment, including actively hiding their identity and avoiding all forms of verbal communication with other players. These themes are discussed in relation to relevant research in the area, along with recommendations for future research and consideration of possible explanations for the themes observed.

What makes this difficult to pin down is that it often blends into the everyday culture of comment sections. Sarcasm gets mistaken for neutrality. Dismissiveness gets framed as “just being honest.” But the cumulative effect is still exclusionary, especially for women who are already hyper-visible when they participate in gaming spaces.

Why it matters

These moments might seem small in isolation, but together they form a pattern that shapes who feels comfortable participating in gaming culture publicly. While this post is just one example, and the negative comments were outnumbered by positive ones, it’s the tone they introduce that tends to linger: the shift in focus, the underlying assumptions, and the way they reframe who is seen as ‘belonging’ in the space.

The irony is that gaming has never been more mainstream, diverse, or socially embedded than it is now. Yet certain corners of online gaming culture still operate as if participation requires permission, and that permission is unevenly granted. Women who post about games are often not met with neutral engagement. They are met with evaluation.

And sometimes, as seen in both Reddit and Fediverse examples, that evaluation takes the form of dismissal disguised as commentary, a way of saying, consciously or not: you don’t quite belong here the way you are participating.

Naturally, one day later moderators removed the post, due to the comments:

About the Author:

dash

Dash is 𝘰𝘣𝘴𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘦𝘥 with gaming in all its forms. Opting for FOSS over everything else, you can follow along here for articles on handheld gaming, Android emulation, GOG, gaming retrospectives and the developers keeping open-source gaming alive.