Yet again, I have left and returned after aiming to produce regular content, and doing exactly not that. I wish I could say I had been doing some fun shit, like traveling, or starting salaried employment somewhere, but no, I’ve just been goofing off like usual. I guess this these breaks are what was meant by the ‘artist’s passion’, though I’d be hesitant to call any of this ‘art’, outside of its very apt legal definition.

Anyways, it’s stupidly late, and having sat through multiple graphics drivers errors leading into blue screens, forcing me to research a new GPU to add into my budget for an ‘in the near future’ purchase, we’ll do something short that won’t keep me up for the next half of a day. Our victim du jour is from somewhere in Ireland going by the name Ash Gomez; I’m assuming pen name because I know exactly zero about Ireland other than they drink a ton, eat potatoes and cabbage, it rains there constantly, and that’s a horrible name that I believe exactly zero laddies or lasses would ever want to be saddled with as their real name. From what I can gather, she’s probably an intern or brand new, because she has very little work, and it is all criminally boring and decidedly full of uneducated hot takes (as if there was any other kind). She’s also a Fortnite player and adamant defender, so if it wasn’t sure she and I would never get along, that coffin has now been sealed. Since this allows me to segue into a shot across the bow at the Fortnite community: Your game is terrible. It looks like they ran Borderlands’ graphics engine through a pastel filter, while adding in more unnecessary layers to Deathmatch that forces players to care more about inane bullshit than killing people. I fondly hope Apex Legends kills your community, only for Quake to be rebooted like the rest of the id library to remind us that just killing each other with pixels is the only fun we need. Also, you’re all squeakers; calm the fuck down, it’s just a game.

[Side note: I didn’t realize that the ad-space Ash is writing on, University Observer, uses one of those templates that gets eaten when archived, so unfortunately, you have to give this donk free traffic if you want to follow along. I can’t believe in 2019 there are websites designed to be read that don’t have a no-script version. Really shows that ‘we don’t give a shit about our content, just click our ads’ hand, huh?]

According to the Pew Research Center, in a 2015 survey, 33% of young men identified as “gamers”, while only 9% of young women felt comfortable with the label. Yet the same survey found that there wasn’t a huge difference between the overall number of men and women who actually play games – 50% and 48% respectively. Why are women almost four times as hesitant to embrace the label for what they enjoy doing?

What survey, where?

The reason is, as just about anyone who knows the breakdown of modern gaming demographics, because males play console and computer games by the majority, whereas women make up the majority of the mobile gaming market, and do not classify themselves as ‘gamers’ since mobile games do not require much in-depth investment, and are designed so that a brain-dead chimp could figure them out. If you want women to identify as gamers, then you need to either push them into the existing market by highlighting what is great about the male-dominated sector, or make games that appeal to them on the same platforms like a gateway drug. However, I doubt any of this will be considered, and the path we’re going to be walking down will be the ‘men are toxic, gaming is toxic, GamerGate is bad, blah’ path, adding more evidence to my claim that people who are a *insert specific label here* don’t say they are a *insert specific label here*, because they don’t need that label in order to simply exist.

I can’t speak for all those women who were surveyed, but I can offer my own thoughts. I am a woman who loves video games. I love video games so much that I spend time in which I can’t play video games thinking about exactly what I’m going to play once I get home. I waste roughly half of my day fantasizing about my favourite game at the moment. 

Young lass confirmed. This is stuff mature people don’t do, because mature people have lives to live and responsibilities to be responsibilitied. I’m not knocking her on her age because she can’t have a valid opinion, I’m knocking her because she’s framing herself as what is stereotypically known as a ‘gamer’, when she’s really someone with nothing else to do and games to fill that space of time for the specific purpose of alleviating boredom, not necessarily because of enjoyment. Anecdotal experience it may be, but I have met countless people who don’t have their shit together (myself included) who dump hours into frivolous stuff, including video games, as a very obvious coping mechanism. I have met countless people who do have their shit together, and those who game do not daydream about shooting people in Fortnite (or doing whatever in whatever game they play), whereas the perpetually procrastinating do. Young folks also tend to do this, precisely because they don’t have other shit to worry about. Again, the age doesn’t matter, the mentality does.

Constantly entering my dreams, gaming is a large part of what makes me happy and is a significant of who I am as a person. But I do not identify as a “gamer”.

The cloak has been draped, and the shield donned, and the poser is now untouchable, at least in their thoughts. Seriously though, who would’ve guessed the introduction to this text block would’ve ended any other way?

There is nothing inherently wrong with the word, and I often must succumb to using it because saying “people who play video games” can be so clunky. The truth is that the word has a bad reputation; it represents everything about the gaming industry that I don’t like.

‘Succumb’, ha. I can only imagine the mental gymnastics and battles she’s going through. The word is fine, has been fine, and will continue to be fine when you loser posers parading as ‘fellow *insert subculture patron here*’ grow up mentally and emotionally and create your own self, instead of grifting it from people who already figured this out.

For many, the term immediately serves as a reminder of Gamergate, the 2014 raid encouraging violence and harassment toward women for criticising the gaming industry.

If the word ‘gamer’ reminds someone of GamerGate and the mass media’s depiction of it being a ‘harassment campaign’ towards women for ‘criticizing’ (read: claiming everything was sexist, gamers were ‘dead’, women were always right, and a decades-old hobby was ‘toxic), then they aren’t part of the gaming subculture. They are, however, wolves in sheep’s clothing, trying to co-opt shit because they’re fucking dumb, vapid, and live through peer validation rather than self-validation. It’s four years, give up on dropping GamerGate; the only people who care are fucking spergs on the opposite side of the field who are exactly like you nutters in every other way, save for being in favor of GamerGate. The rest of us would like you all to go jump into a big spike pit and bleed out, that, or have you just shut the fuck up and go play games like a normal-ass gamer would.

It was a momentous occasion for gaming, and not in a good way. Suddenly, gaming communities were featured in mainstream news articles scrutinizing gaming culture. The already commonly-held-belief that video games can cause aggression gained momentum, as gamers made headlines for their death threats toward women.

I love how there are never sources to this. I’ll never outright doubt these claims, because it’s the Internet and being a hateful prick is the norm, but you’d think a fucking journalist would, you know, substantiate their work somehow to avoid being hit for LIBEL AND SLANDER. Not that you could really sue, since GamerGate was a faceless entity like Anonymous, but even so, claim substantiation is Writing 101 shit from grade school. Also, the commonly-held belief is that games turn people violent, not games cause aggression. I also like that you gloss over the ethics portion, but of course you would, because addressing that undercurrent would shoot your argument in the foot. That, and since then, mass media has gone out of its way to be as unethical as possible, and as transparent with those lost scruples.

That was four years ago. The culture of gaming has changed since then by taking the smallest baby steps. Discussions were sparked about online harassment and ways to prevent another controversy of the same magnitude. Gamergate was defeated for the moment, but women did not win. They simply learned to be silent.

No, the core of GamerGate, which was focused on ethics and showcasing that gaming journalism was full of hack dipshits who didn’t care about their audience, didn’t care about the subject matter, and were generally failed political op-ed writers not able to find work elsewhere, yet too cowardly to take a loss and move on to other pastures, won. As much as the media twists things, it’s always done that, and big click-bait media took a massive hit when the Hulkster leg-dropped Gawker, something that should’ve been done ages ago. I don’t get how you folks keep thinking you won when every day, sixty different articles from three hundred new ‘media sites’ (read: content stealers and article aggregators) come out bitching about GamerGate, like it’s the fucking boogeyman still in your closet, when the people who cared about its core took it, left the husk for the carrion birds to pick at, and have been holding themselves to higher standards along with whatever content/products they make. If your side had won, gaming would’ve actually collapsed, and billions of people would be jobless, not that you guys would ever win, because the people who actually move the world figured out you were a penniless market, and simply used you dipshits as a shield to gain goodwill from morons while keeping on keeping on.

And no, you haven’t ‘learned to be silent’. Shit, you’re bitching about this right now. Silence means shutting the hell up, and this is not that. You’re not intelligent.

I was only 11 years old, but I immediately adopted a behaviour that I still stand by to this day: never leave your mic on.

You should always leave your microphone off if you’re not communicating, because that’s how your whole Discord server hears you fighting with your parents about your gaming problems, like that awkward-ass streamer ChibiNekoDemyx. In fact, you should always unplug your headset and put tape over your webcams when you’re not using them so that if you actually get hacked or the government decides to PATRIOT Act its way into your shit when it’s got nothing better to do, you don’t get unwanted nudes being sold somewhere or passed around one more sea of government cubicles.

Those aside, this is the kind of behavior the perpetually thin-skinned employ, and it’s because they if you sniff in their general direction in a way they don’t like, they fall apart like a house of cards. You know, the opposite of what mentally stable, mature people do.

This is common practice for women who game. We prefer to use a text chat if we absolutely need to communicate, and our sentences are often punctuated by “dude” and “bro” in order to avoid suspicion. 

No, it’s not. I have met more dudes who don’t talk than women; the dudes still outnumber the gals simply because few gals play shit like 7 Days to Die, Rust, and World of Warcraft anymore. I love how she’s painting this tapestry, like she’s fucking Solid Snake, sneaking behind enemy lines, and using codewords like ‘dude’ and ‘bro’ to avoid being discovered. Ash, you’re not a gamer; that shit is really obvious. A gamer wouldn’t give a fuck about being found out as a girl, and a normal person wouldn’t either, so all this tells us is that you’re young, mentally unstable, irresponsible, and paranoid as fuck.  The fact you think that everyone will not only figure out you’re a chick, but will want to e-fuck you/trash you (because that’s the obvious underlying commentary here) once they find out is narcissism of the highest order. You are not the important. You are a faceless mook in a sea of faceless mooks that don’t matter. Get over yourself.

I once experienced a wholesome interaction when I realised that the person I was playing with was overusing these terms. I privately asked if they were a woman, and I ended up having the warmest conversation and friendship with this young woman from England.

This story is a lie, partially because it implies that only women can be wholesome and have wholesome interactions online with other women, but mostly because nobody is fucking wholesome playing Modern Warfare. If you’re going to make up a story, why not use fucking Maplestory or Minecraft to help make the lie more believable? Idiot.

But that’s a rare occurrence within gaming communication, and the wholesomeness stops there.

You know what this tells me? It tells me that Ash is fucking toxic as shit, and is probably the kind of person who complains about being killed by hackers when she dies, talks mad shit despite being fucking awful, and is just your run-of-the-mill boastful gaming cunt that gets chased out of lobbies and servers because they can’t back up the talk with the walk.

Wholesome moments happen when you combo enough goodwill with people around you in the gaming scene and game world; it’s not the fucking baseline. The baseline is the exact same as the Internet itself: sketchy, uneven, and islandic (the ‘I watch out for me and only me’ mentality’). If you don’t get this or don’t like it, then log off until you get thicker skin, or find other hobbies.

The verbal harassment I faced when I was 11 showed me that the world could be cruel. Even though I turned off my mic after that first game, I still received messages for months from men who asked me where I lived, how old I was, and if we could talk. I deleted all the messages before my siblings could see them. I was embarrassed. I somehow felt like it was my fault. It was my fault for using my voice, for sounding feminine, for being a woman.

Yeah, it wasn’t because you were bad and got called out for being a loud, annoying squeaker. That definitely isn’t the par for the course for any eleven year old online; no, all these men wanted to hit on you, and couldn’t figure out your age in between your constant voice cracks. Ash, stop fucking lying. I grew up during the birth of online gaming and the breakthrough of the Internet, and I know when some random nobody is slinging me some bullshit. You were a garbage player that made everyone else’s experience worse, and were rude as fuck. Own it, you loon.

JUST AS I LEARNED TO BE ASHAMED OF MY GENDER AS A CHILD, BOYS LEARNED THAT THEY COULD DO AS THEY PLEASED.

Your sex, not gender. And no, they didn’t, you just were too much of a beta to tell them to suck their mother’s dick. You’re still a beta, because you’re obviously lying in order for random people online and your peers to give you attention and sympathy that you don’t deserve. Quit it. It’s shit like this that drive parents to say to their friends ‘She was such a mistake’ when you’re out of earshot.

I’m 23 now. I exclusively use the name “Ash” as a gender-neutral shortening of my full name. Gaming has been a large part of that decision. Yet even with this protection in place, I will sometimes be harassed by men who ask if I am a woman. I think that the mere fact of the name being neutral can give it away; some men seem to be constantly searching for the women who hide in their gaming circles.

This is, by far, the most fagacious thing I’ve read in a while. Just use your full name, you whiny simp; we all know it’s Ashley. There’s no protection since Ashley is a stupidly common name, whereas Ashby or Ashton or Ashbury are all old names from when people died from sneezing too hard. Who cares if they ask if you’re a girl? You know, if you could just get out of your own head, then maybe you could actually be a gamer. Of course, if she could get out of her own head, she wouldn’t feel the need to write GamerGate-dropping, political-correctness-slanted, social justice infused tripe.

To be clear, I love the name I use now. But I was never given a chance to love “Ashley” because it was intrinsically connected to womanhood.

No, you don’t ‘love’ Ashley because you are too beta to nut the fuck up and play fucking games without having ‘panic attacks’ that people will find out you have a vagina. I hope your parents had other kids besides you, because if you were an essay, you’d be a big, fat F.

I have unfortunately gotten used to most harassment in voice chat, but I am always surprised by the very young boys who occasionally try to bother me. Their language isn’t as outright hateful as the men I have experienced, but it is clear that they want to make me uncomfortable.

It’s called ‘trolling’. You ignore trolls, especially squeaker trolls. Ash, you’re claiming to be a gamer, and yet you don’t know this. How new are you, seriously? Did you actually play Modern Warfare when it was relevant, or did you just pick up CS:GO yesterday?

These children are around the age I was when the harassment started. Just as I learned to be ashamed of my gender as a child, boys learned that they could do as they pleased. In fact, I would argue that these boys learned that they should harass women.

No, they’re doing this because you’re responding. Stop responding. Seriously, stop being super-tarded, stop being new, stop peddling this bullshit and stop lying.

I have never encountered a woman who does this, and I find it hard to imagine that the abuse one would receive for being a woman — and worse, a dumb woman — is something anyone would actively seek out. 

Confirmed that you aren’t a gamer and are a massive liar. The ‘gamer girl’ is the most common version of female gamer out there by a large margin, and it’s because gamer dudes are losers who are willing to give shit away for free just for hearing an ‘attractive voice’, whatever that is. You play Bejeweled and some other mobile game shit; there is no way you would ever be able to say you’ve never encountered a ‘gamer girl’ online by age 23 if you didn’t just smartphone-game like every basic donk out there.

The gamer girl myth is prevalent in most gaming communities, despite there being very little evidence that anyone acts this way. Search for the term, though, and you’ll find forums and animated videos in which men mock this kind of person relentlessly. Meanwhile, there is very little acknowledgement of the harassment that is so plentiful, that you can hear a personal anecdote of it from any woman who games.

You keep saying this is a myth, and the more you keep saying it, the more I become convinced that you are a ‘gamer girl’, or at least were one, and you don’t want peopleto come find out your ‘horrible secret’ of leading nerds on for free shit or to compensate for your poor play. Garbage is as garbage does.

How do we even begin to reclaim the term “gamer”? Firstly, women have to feel accepted into the community. But that’s a huge first step; mending years of abuse and cultural ethos cannot happen overnight. And how do we even start these conversations when this community has a history of silencing anyone who speaks out?

Here’s an idea: How about you just shut up, play games, and not be fucking bad? Is that too much to ask? I would say the same thing if Ash was a dude, too, for the few harpies reading this and thinking I’m a sexist cunt. The fact that Ashley thinks girls need to ‘reclaim’ gamer is more than enough proof on its own (outside of everything I’ve autistically detailed here) that Ash isn’t a gamer, she’s a fucking poser stirring the pot because she finally realized she’s a goddamned loser with no skills, no life, and no ambition, and she’s pissed and taking it out on an easy target. Fuck her.

[WE CAN’T] CEDE THE INTERNET TO WHOEVER SCREAMS THE LOUDEST AT THE MOST PEOPLE, AND JUST HAND OVER THIS AMAZING TECHNOLOGICAL ACHIEVEMENT TO THE NASTIEST PEOPLE.

I love that she used this quote, because all Chelsea did was scream loudly into the Internet until everyone accepted her bullshit, and those who didn’t were harassed, doxxed, and treated like fucking pariah until she torpedo’d her own existence. Zoe is a tool, and anyone who follows her ideas or quotes her is a massive knob.

Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist thinker who criticizes the portrayal of women in media, has continued her activism even after she was targeted.

She isn’t an activist, she’s a con artist that is sucking resources out of mongs like you. I may not like her as a person or her ideas, but hats off to her for making her millions successfully.

Imagine if gaming communities were spearheaded by women, and harassment was kept under check.

They are: Crash Override Network and Feminist Frequency. They’re irrelevant, because the women who spearheaded them thought they could con the world, and failed when they made it to the world stage and crumbled. Gaming communities need to be, and are, spearheaded by people who want to game. That’s it; that’s the only necessary qualification. If you weren’t so misandrist, you’d see how just fucking playing and getting good would be a success regarding equality of the sexes, races, and just about everything. You naturally won’t, though, because that runs counter to your bought ideology, and because you’re a moron.

To any girls/gals/females/ladies/moms/grandmas/aunts/nieces out there: Don’t listen to stupid people like Ashley Gomez. Don’t listen to stupid people like Chelsea Van Valkenburg or Anita Sarkeesian. These women don’t give a shit about gaming, about equality, or about you. They want your attention, your sympathy and, most importantly, your cash. I don’t. I don’t care about your sympathy, your attention, your cash, or even you. As rude as that may come across, I say it to give you a proper frame of reference to what I do care about, and what I care about is people leveling up mentally and emotionally, and ditching all this ‘he said, she said’ nonsense in favor of self-actualizing and doing shit you want to, because you want to do it.

Life is a load of bullshit, and nobody gets out alive, so stop looking to big names around you for validation. Do some soul-searching and figure out what you want in your life, what you want to have, and what you want to get out of life, and go fucking get it. You won’t get that by giving your time or funds to a grifter like Zoe Quinn.