Activities don’t need to be inherently sexist for the culture surrounding them to be. Consider the ways things like healthcare, cooking, and hunting have been gendered in different times and places.

I feel like Puzzle Quest and Gyromancer are “real” games, but somehow Bejeweled and Candy Crush are silly things for little girls and bored housewives. Hell, I think Progress Quest would be considered more legitimate to the kinds of people with this mindset, and that’s not even a game.

I’m sure the solution to this problem has nothing to do with killing internet anonymity like fascist governments are currently trying to do…

Edit: wow it actually doesn’t say that, I was really expecting that to be the angle of this UK article.

Instead it says these feelings of gamer imposter syndrome women feel is most likely a symptom of culture, but not a cause for women to not play games. And suggests that gaming spaces being more inclusive would help women feel less like importers despite playing games and being gamers.

gotta love that you not only completely missed the point, but you quite perfectly encapsulate the kind of “gotcha” rhetoric that women hear every day in gaming spaces from these toxic men.

it’d be funny if it weren’t depressing.

what controller should she be holding? or is this you not realizing you can use a PS4 controller for an android device?

cause you can.

edit: did you just downvote me for telling you that you can use a controller on a mobile device?

it is not equal between men and women. toxicity toward women is usually much worse. and is much more frequent.

Maybe in more current MMOs, because back in my WoW days (2013 and earlier), misogyny was rampant

She should be holding a mobile phone. because that is what mobile gaming mostly looks like.

i use a controller for when I play my mobile games. did you know you can use controllers with bluetooth now?

you’re not limited to just touch screens like the first days of android apps.

we have come a long way since then. good luck!

edit: here for those interested.

It’s not a culture. Don’t play online.

just like in real life.

online there are the sexual guys who will buy you anything to be theirs.

And there are the annoying sexist ones. I think it often has to do with a primitive feeling in the guy of “there is a female right there that im interacting with but she isnt having sex with me. i am thus annoyed.” so the male does mean pokes at the female because it’s “her fault” they arent having sex. i’ve seen it a trillion times. “why arent you MY bitch?” pokes rudely

And lastly there is the good type of male who, just like the good type of female, can have fun with you while playing the game together and enjoying the play; simple as that.

True enough. I’ve steered clear of any games where you interact with other people, I stick with single player.

i am the same. if I play multiplayer games its only with friends I already know. i even play most MMOs solo.

It’s just one joke, over and over again. I’m a guy, but one of the reasons I stopped going to lan parties was hearing this same few jokes again and again whenever a woman showed up. If it wasn’t a woman, it would be something else from the limited number of topics and opinions they had. When it wasn’t frustrating, it was simply boring.

There’s plenty of mobile games you can sink thousand of hours in to.

Would you consider someone who has played Tetris for 10,000 hours a gamer?

Why would Candy Crush be different?

Genshin? There’s plenty of literal gamer communities for the gacha games.

I think it’s a black PS5 controller. No light.

What’s the one joke?

There is no difference between sinking 10k hours into tetris, candy crush or csgo. I’d consider all to be gamers. But sinking 10k hours isnt casual. Someone who plays candy crush every day and is active in candy crush communities would be a gamer. But someone who has candy crush on their phone and plays every now and then for short periods and doesnt engage in anything else related to candy crush or gaming i would not consider to be a gamer.

If someone wants to argue that the casual candy crush player is a gamer then I’ll let them have it and will need to make a new label because at that point its watered down beyond use. Gamer as a label is pretty cringe anyway so I doubt many are actually calling themself that.

There was that study that found that the men most aggressive towards women in gaming were those less skilled than them, I think about that one a lot