Tokyogurl: The star who faked her career and set women’s esports back
To say fake gamer girls don’t exist is a braindumb statement. Just because gatekeeping incels exist doesn’t mean that fake gamer girls don’t exist. Like, a large majority of Twitch is “gamer girl fantasy lets chat” streams. Anyone can see how it’s great from a marketing standpoint to be the novel and fetishized “gamer girl”. It does well for a target audience.
How are you gonna say fake gamer girls don’t exist, like SSSniperwolf is right there. Belle Delphine exists.
I don’t know why more girls aren’t represented in pro level play. It’s probably because of the toxic nature of gamers (probably). Because everyone of them will be compared to Tokyogurl, to SSSniperwolf, to Pokemane. Girls who sold out being good at playing for being sexy while playing.
I was also literally going to say SSSniperWolf lol.
Yeah, being a pick me by way of pretending to love all the video games, to put on a show for the boys, … while in actuality just being a cut throat sociopathic narcissist…
pretty big niche.
Literally cosplaying as female video game characters is a substantial niche in male targeted porn now, … its a way of appealing to an audience.
The roughly equivalent counterpart would be the performatively feminist nice guy ally type dude. Apparently another term for this is ‘matcha male’.
They share in common that they superficially adopt the aesthic/performance of what their target demo seems to like. It’s cynical, not genuine; affect as strategy and tactics, not authentic.
Obviously there are plenty of women who really do love video games, obviously there are plenty of men who are real feminists.
But there are plenty of fakes as well.
Do you know about any other “fakes”?
Pokimane comes to mind?
Amouranth?
I mean, I literally quit using or visiting Twitch years ago, because… a huge chunk of it was women obviously leveraging their sex appeal, while playing video games, or enaging with the culture around video games, to literally grow a cult following.
Of course… I’d say there were a fair number of guys that did the male version of this too… Dr Disrespect comes to mind.
The male version being ‘bro I’m so cool and badass and awesome and everyone else sucks because I’m sooo good at video games’.
These people are in love with themselves far more than they are with video games.
Pirate Software, there’s another male one!
Question: does “leveraging their sex appeal while playing video games” as you put it, make them “fake gamers”?
Like, I see the occasional clip from OfflineTV (the org that Pokimane was (is?) a part of) and it seems that a lot of the time, they’re just playing games and enjoying playing games and being part of a community like any other gamer. Of course streaming is their job and these people make their millions by doing what they can to get views and encourage donations or whatever - but does that make them fake gamers? At what point does a “fake gamer” play enough games or be “genuine” enough to be a “real gamer” or vice versa? Are all game streamers fake gamers because they’re trying to get views instead of just enjoying the game?
Also at what point do you think being attractive and dressing nice becomes “leveraging sex appeal” because trying to put a definitive line on that feels like a slippery slope into sexism and if you say it’s a matter of intent, well then only they themselves know that unless they’ve outright admitted that intent publicly.
I mean, would you ask me to describe the precise criteria and boundary points that would or would not make someone into or not into a chud, a nerd, a goober, a shit disturber, a crunchy mom, a baddie, a hipster?
These boundaries are fuzzy and permeable when you try to drill down to minute, specific criteria thresholds.
What they actually are, are labels that exist more as spectrums of traits that begin to solidify into a type, a category, as more of those traits are more prominent and present.
The amount to which someone leverages their sex appeal, or any other personality or physical trait or what not, is part of that spectrum, not a yes/no flipped bit.
I already gave my best attempt at my own definition of a fake gamer: Someone who is cynically and obnoxiously performing the identity of ‘gamer’ for some purpose beyond just expressing their true self.
Probably there is just some overlap there with me being an autistic introvert and being easily exhausted by the antics of hyper extraverts, which I tend to just interpret as inauthenticity.
The word order is important. Fake is the first word for a reason.
I just don’t like ‘fake’, overly performative and dramatic people. ‘fake gamer’ is just a subtype of this, ‘fake gamer girl’, ‘fake gamer dudebro’ would be further subtypes… hell i could probably go even further with even more specific subniches within those.
Maybe a contrast could be somebody like Emiru.
She comes across to me as far, far less ‘fake’, in general, to me. She comes across as very authentic to me, so I would not categorize her as a ‘fake gamer girl’.
Likewise, Charlie/MoistCritical is, to me at least, very authentic seeming… he’s not performing an obnoxious caricature of himself. So, not a ‘fake gamer dudebro’.
Pokimane is not the best example because she does seem to like playing games. If there is a line between “dressing nice and being attractive” and “leveraging sex appeal” she is definitely way over it though lol. It’s like putting on eyeliner and foundation compared to the perfectly styling their hair and putting on makeup and wearing revealing clothes to make themselves look as generally attractive as possible. Also leaning in to parasocial relationships like saying omg you’re so sweet!! To donations saying im in love with you. It’s usually pretty obvious when someone just wants to look good / attractive vs when they’re thirst baiting.
Probably bc of how toxic the industry is from both management and the players. I’ve seen so many accounts of harassment, abuse, and exploitation.
The guitar world has those phony women, too. They dress real sexy, and play a solo on the guitar or bass. A few are pretty good, some are awful, but most are just faking it.
Grace Bowers is the lone exception. She started posting when she was about 14, and since was pretty good, and really cute, she was strongly encouraged. When she hit 18, she went pro in a big way, even though she still had a long way to go to be a true pro level player.
She’s gotten a lot better, probably because she’s met and played with EVERYBODY by now. Imagine how good you’d get if every day you got another guitar lesson from another legend.
Sir, I fear you are forgetting that you are not as Cool As Kim Deal.
IE, such a cool bassist that other bands write songs about how cool she is.
EDIT:
Or maybe I misunderstood and you meant uh, confined within the realm of online personalities.
Dude, one of my favorite bands is Talking Heads, with the inimitable Tina Weymouth.
Here’s another great female bass player from the 70s - Suzi Quatro
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tons of good research
I’m taking a HUGE grain of salt on that. Not saying there isn’t research, but “good”? That’s questionable. And I’m not even saying wrong… just extremely suspect. This reeks of misusing science to justify sexism. Giving every stinky gamer incel something to pull up as their proof.
I would need to see a HUGE amount of independent research on this.
Only thing I’ve ever seen that indicates a substantial sex disparity when it comes to gaming is that women, significantly more than men, commonly tend to get disoriented more quickly and to a more substantial degree, from VR gameplay sessions.
That this is a thing, is well documented, but explanations are not widedly agreed on, or well understood, afaik.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10805816/
https://gitnux.org/vr-motion-sickness-statistics/
https://motionsicklab.com/blog/vr-motion-sickness-women
The second link there has it as a 2:1 ratio that women are more likely to get VR motion sick than men.
Proposed explanations include:
VR headsets don’t fit women’s heads as well, and getting a precise IPD config that remains stable is critical.
Hormonal cycles influence the vesitublar system, the ability to maintain and regulate balance.
Generally higher rates of anxiety from other kinds of motion sickness inducing activities being carried forward to VR, as previous indications of significant motion sickness well predict VR simulator disorientation.
Counter point… maybe men are better at gaming because we normalize that gaming is a men’s space. And we allow them to explore the hobby and practice it from a much younger age.
Like, women are pushed out of the space, whereas boys playing and becoming familiar with gaming, its controls, 3D environments, mechanics, spacial reasoning, puzzle tropes, menus systems… are all very normative experiences. Women not so much. Much like how women tend to be better communicators and empathetic. Because that’s the gender norms we push as a culture.
Saying men are better at gaming while ignoring the fact that we make it extremely uncomfortable for women to develop those same gaming skills is a huge bias.
Suffice to say, if your argument doesn’t address that, then its a bullshit argument. I’m not gonna hear “maybe it’s wOmEn hOrMoNeS” as anything other than casual misogyny.
It’s like saying “hmmm maybe men are bad at showing their feelings because their brain is dumb” while ignoring the fact that society routinely ridicules and mocks men who are emotional.
Mind you, sp3ctr4l pointed out that an observed lower compatibility with VR games is the only relevant difference (with scientific backing) they’re aware of. The hormone stuff is a proposed explanation that might be from one of the papers they cited, which I’m too tired to look into right now.
“The only difference I am aware of is more frequent motion sickness in VR games and here’s three possible explanations, one of which involves hormones” is a much different statement than “women are worse at video games because of hormones”. Almost diametrically so.
Sure, they could’ve spelled out the implication that there is no relevant difference in skill between sexes. But they definitely didn’t make the statement you responded to.
I mean, I don’t disagree that that’s possible as well.
I’m just summarizing the literature on this, there are many more studies that indicate the effect difference exists, and as I said… nobody that I am aware of has sort of cleared the field with a broadly accepted explanation for why the observable effect does actually exist.
It’s an open question in the published papers on this, afaik.
But yeah!
I agree with you, it would interesting to see a paper that actually takes into account essentially experience with different kinds of games with different kinds of practiced skillsets…
…and yeah definitely for quite a long time, video gaming was marketed as primarily ‘male’… you’d get ‘girl’ games like Barbie’s Horse Adventure, things that were some 90s marketing exec’s idea of what a girl would want in a video game, and then the rest was John Romero’s about to make you his BITCH, SUCK IT DOWN… etc.
Yeah, I remember ‘GIRL = Guy In Real Life’, I was in Ventrilo servers where a girl would join, and half the boys there would just immediately assume they’re not actually a girl. There was a great deal of misogyny in video gaming, that has only somewhat lessened fairly recently.
It is indeed highly plausible to me that none of the eggheads who have studied this so far have gotten far into the science of how… yeah, video gaming? Being able to play video games?
Yeah thats actually a complex suite or combo of different mental and physical skills, like how a martial artist will tell you there’s a lot more to unarmed combat than ‘be fast and strong’.
I agree with that. I’m a girl. I was a computer kid who gamed with my guy friends growing up. For years I sucked at expressing my emotions but ruled at games and fixing computers.
Why is it that the people I see most often talking about women’s hormonal cycles usually have little understanding of hormones? Women don’t have any more hormones than men. Hell, eating a peach will change anyone’s hormone levels. Living for full twenty four hours changes your hormone levels.
Just summarizing the literature.
Here’s the full section:
The vestibular system doesn’t operate in a hormonal vacuum. Estrogen receptors are present in the inner ear, and estrogen plays a role in regulating the fluid dynamics and blood flow in the vestibular apparatus. When estrogen is low — as it is in the days before menstruation, during pregnancy and lactation, and throughout perimenopause — vestibular function can become destabilized.
Research on motion sickness susceptibility across the menstrual cycle has found that susceptibility fluctuates with hormonal state, with this fluctuation accounting for roughly one-third of the overall difference between men and women in motion sickness rates. This isn’t a trivial contributor.
Progesterone, which has a broadly calming effect on the nervous system, also drops during the luteal phase and perimenopause. Its reduction increases sensory reactivity and reduces resilience to stimuli that challenge the vestibular system — which is precisely what VR does.
This creates meaningful variability: the same woman using the same headset playing the same game may have very different responses depending on where she is in her cycle. It’s one layer of the broader pattern that makes VR motion sickness worse on some days without any change in the VR experience itself.
Forgive my skepticism. My life has been full of people blaming everything from a disagreement to chronic depression on hormones. While technically correct, there is a mountain of literature on the fact that women don’t experience more emotionality than men. But that’s beside the point.
When hormones come up I’m immediately skeptical. That said, I acquiesce that hormones have an effect on female biology, that’s obvious. However, as I researched this further I found that while women reported more motion sickness, actual tests done to record symptoms showed little difference between men and women. I’m open to hormone fluctuations affecting motion sickness, but I’m not convinced it’s a cause.
I understand your … well I’m not sure whether to call it ‘well placed skepticism’ or ‘trauma response’… yeah, there are a lot of assholes who basically just hand wave away anything ‘weird’ in female/woman’s behavior as ‘must be starting her period’ or something like that.
Yeah, I’ve not thoroughly researched this myself, like I said ‘only thing I’ve even heard of’ that seems to have at least some actual body of published literature.
The observed effect, the sex based difference in VR motion sickness … that seems to be well observed and documented.
But, the proposed explanations are just that, proposed, not conclusive. The rest of that page that I cited, it essentially says that they think its a confluence of their proposed explanations, that all play some role in explaining the 2:1 difference… basically if you add them all up, that’s how you get the 2:1 ratio.
But, as uh, SailorFuzz says, I think a big thing they are missing is that they’re not taking into account just… actual previous experience with video games, playing different kinds of video games.
If you take a person whose never played like a PC FPS game before, they’ll often be just totally baffled and disoriented by the concept of moving and also looking around at the same time.
I’ve got to imagine that VR is like that, but magnified, and the more time you’ve spent learning how to pilot an avatar character in a traditional PC FPS set up… thats got to build mental skills and neurokinetic pathways or patterns as a kind of muscle memory.
Soo, given that gals have for a long time been stigmatized out of the gaming space… less time or likelihood to develop those skills.
I think that’s actually a very compelling explanation, or at least part of the explanation, but I’m not aware of anyone whose actually studied that.
Ok now lets see your actual papers here…
The first one says that broadly, men and women have roughly the same actual amounts of motion sickness, its just that women report it more often, essentially because that’s socially acceptable/expected.
Yeah, sure, I believe that. But, it doesn’t specifically go into… what stage of their cycle they were in. They didn’t ask about or track that.
The thing that I referenced said that basically at a certain point in a womans cycle, vestibular system is more unbalanced than otherwise.
So, both these things could be true at the same time. Take a random sample of women at random stages in their cycle, vs random sample of men, on average, similar amounts of actual motion sickness, because during most of a woman’s cycle, there is no difference in susceptability to motion sickness.
I can’t actually access the second paper because my security settings on my web browser are telling Google’s recapcha/redirect to go fuck itself…
Third link/paper unfortunately only displays for me the Abstract, so I can’t actually read the full paper for methodology.
It does say more studies need to be done, taking ‘susceptibility’ into account… I’d suggest to them that maybe actually tracking what stage of her cycle a woman is in could be a mechanistic, explanatory factor, and that you might end up with: on average, men and women have broadly similar rates of actual (vs reported) motion sickness, but more women tend to get more motion sick during a certain brief stage of their cycle.
Of course, maybe… motion sickness susceptibility has something like a genetic or epigenetic component… and maybe there is some kind of inheritance kind of thing going on. Maybe its more likely to be carried on or expressed by the X chromosome, maybe not.
Lots of possible mechanisms could be at play, but yeah again, I don’t know that there is something approaching a solid ‘theory of precisely why some people get more motion sick than others’.
I mean, that just sounds like you’re unwilling to accept information that goes against your worldview.
But there is actually a ton of research on this, not too sure what criteria you define for independent though, as all of it is published in journals. And from general population samples to elite sprinters at the Olympics.
The other interesting thing about it, is that some retrospective meta analysis shows the gap appears to be decreasing with one study speculating it’s because more women drive and play sports now compared to the 60s when the first studies looking at this happened.
If there wasn’t rampant sexism in the industry, your “tons of good research” wouldn’t exist
And what exactly are you basing that on? Just that you dont like the results?
On you not providing any credible sources
If I gave you sources would it actually change your mind? Or would you just find arbitrary reasons to dismiss it outright?
The fact that you still haven’t provided any says very clearly you’re making shit up
Im not, he’ll you could look it up yourself if you actually cared, but you clearly don’t,nhence why you dodged the question I asked you.
So why should I go through the effort of reading and reviewing these papers in order to provide them to you if you have no intention of engaging with me in good faith?
If you answer my question from my last comment I can give you half a dozen good sources, but i know it won’t make you change your mind.
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Yeah the goal was misinterpreted. Its not to “impress” them its to get them to donate money, because sex sells when your target audience is gooners.
Also this user just outed themselves as a fucking idiot by just calling gaming in general a “loser nerd hobby” as if they werent posting on tumblr…
this user just outed themselves as a fucking idiot by just calling gaming in general a “loser nerd hobby”
It’s Bait
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So many people discovered you can get more attention complaining about other gamers than actually playing the damned things.
Doesn’t help that gaming itself has been stuffed with AI slop and GACHA crap.
You can’t play Pong without going through ten pay walls and a hundred scams.
As I recall the reason it seems like it’s only dudes online is because women gamers hide or stay in safe spaces, as they are used to attacks from incels and other haters.
Can confirm. I love video games, but I don’t care for online games. I know the moment I speak (or dare to have a feminine username), there’ll be a deluge of comments making a big deal about there being a girl in the chat and I’d be unable to play without either dumb comments or questions of if I’m single. No thanks, I’d rather game alone.
Video games are a pretty hard thing to fake being into. It’s just downstream of imbeciles who can’t imagine people are into their “space” without liking exactly the same objects in that space as them (same thing happens with fitness folk, history people, filmbros)
So this goes two ways I think. There are dumbasses who think that any girl who isn’t amazing at games is just faking it, rather than them just being a normal casual+ player. Then there are some egirl weird cultural-appropriation style gamergirl stolen valor thing when a girl borrows the aesthetics and online lingo (and memes etc) without actually playing at all… Idk. It’s definitely a thing.
With that said, I’ve never heard the term gamergirl be used derogatory, personally; most of the guys I heard talk about a gamergirl were talking like they just got an SSS tier gacha pull just by meeting someone of the opposite gender who shared their interests…
So maybe this is some fake gamerboy chudding or the incels who use it that way, and I just haven’t been exposed much? But it’s not hard to imagine since girls take a lot of shit for just existing. The spaces I’m in are pretty chill these days and MMORPGs were always better than FPS,… The “no girls on the internet” thing persists (with some understandable reasons) but haven’t heard anything about sandwiches or kitchens in a while which is nice.
Gamer girl was more of an insult in the 90s-2010s. Gaming is still full of misogyny but the gatekeeping is a lot less prominent. It was really bad back then.
I’m a girl who plays games. It’s still pretty bad. If I said I was a girl, I wasn’t. If I got on voice, someone was playing for me. I refused to use video. Now, apparently, I’m a dude playing with a voice mod.
Sorry if it sounded like I was downplaying how it is now, I swear that wasn’t my intent! There is certainly no shortage of assholes.
I was just saying that early on it was like EVERY girl got dogpiled EVERY time they spoke. I’ve had women in my gaming group since TFC was current and it wasn’t until maybe 2016 (overwatch) when they felt comfortable openly speaking in game.
Oh no worries, I didn’t take it like that. Just saying in my experience it’s just a different kind of bad. People can be more subtle, but it’s still there.
To your point - maybe what has changed is the amount of assholes but the amount of people willing to call out that behavior. Losers are a lot less likely to get on their soapbox when attempts at sexism sometime result in half the lobby turning on them.
Manchildren are happy to shit talk someone they think is “lesser” but tremble in their boots when a man stands up to them.
This doesn’t affect the ones with inflated egos but a good portion of them are insecure as hell.
I agree. The open dialogue about sexism makes it a less safe space for those kinds of people. Unfortunately the subtle sexism can be a lot more frustrating. It’s just less in open chat and more in dms.
Then there are some egirl weird cultural-appropriation style gamergirl stolen valor thing when a girl borrows the aesthetics and online lingo (and memes etc) without actually playing at all… Idk. It’s definitely a thing
It is definitely a thing tbh, I’m glad that people have called it out. It’s not a thing that’s affected my dating life, however much that counts for
Junglejim is the kind of guy who thinks hookers actually like him.
I think SsniperWolf on YouTube was also a fake gamer girl.
I believe at the height of her popularity she was having her boyfriend or manager or whoever actually play the game while she would just sit and watch and act like she was playing it.
To be fair it was absolutely a thing but it was for porn advertising.
There have been fake gamers - they aren’t common though. I didn’t even know if they’re still out there streaming. They’re the ones who would put on games, typically idle or paused, just to technically be gaming while just jiggling their tits for subs.
ITT: Lemmite G*mers being weird
