Nude Gamer, a porn website, does exactly what it says on the tin: these women are gamers, and they're often nude. It capitalizes on the fantasy of a female streamer—one where video games are a prelude to being sexually available. Unfortunately, for some, that fantasy has already eclipsed the reality.
Female gamers being a fetish is at least as old as my early teenage years, when I could impress my nerdy male peers by saying that I owned a PlayStation 2. Motherboard's Samantha Cole wrote in 2018 that the allure of girl gamers is a bit girl-next-door and a little bit about being able to explain something to a woman. Janice Griffith, a porn performer who's done gamer girl scenes, told Cole that even though she explicitly stated that she was pretending to game for a porn scene, people still chastised her for not being a "real gamer."
“I think it honestly has to do with the age-old idea that women don't play video games, and then hyper-sexualizing that,” Griffith said “Men who are really into video games see this extreme fantasy of someone they're attracted to sharing an interest with them, similar to other tropes we see in porno and media in general.”
Nude Gamer hones in on a very specific kind of girl gamer: the streamer. The site is basically Twitch if it was also a cam site. Girls stream and play games (or just talk with their audience), interspersed with taking off their clothes or masturbating themselves. Except for the nudity, which is expressly banned on Twitch, the vibe is pretty similar. In preview videos, girls play Just Dance in workout clothes, just like the controversial streamer Amouranth, or sit in their gamer chairs talking to their audience. The site's color scheme is even a deeper, more red purple—a riff on Twitch's signature cool blue purple logo.
If you listen to a certain subculture of Twitch, the platform is plagued by thots. According to these (mostly) men, half naked women, with their breasts hanging out of their shirts and their buttcheeks poking out from their shorts, are ruining Twitch, gaining followers by manipulating men with their bodies. It's as much of a jerk off fantasy as it is a regular one.
Nude Gamer's facsimile of Twitch is so complete that I found myself wanting to watch these women's streams. If you don't want to sign up for the site, you can see select clips from their archives. In my pre-coffee, week-five-of-quarantine state this morning, I found myself being drawn into one model's stream archive, where she described how going hiking gave her a sense of fulfillment that made her feel more peaceful than anything else. She was resting on her couch, D.Va stripes painted on her face, snuggling a Grookey plush. I almost tricked myself into believing Nude Gamer was Twitch until I saw that this streamer's shirt was revealing the underside of her breasts. Underboob is specifically banned on Twitch.
I respect and understand the hustle of Nude Gamer—if people are already fetishizing women in this way, might as well get them paid. But its existence reveals something about Twitch's thot police—this is what they think Twitch already is. When I watch the women on Nude Gamer, sexuality is part of the fun. It's porn; if it's not sexy then what's the point? But it would be inappropriate to see and treat women on Twitch in ways identical to porn performers: Twitch streamers are not choosing to be sexualized in the same fashion as porn performers. Some people have convinced themselves that women have no value beyond their aesthetic appeal long before they got on Twitch. For those people, seeing a streamer as being a different job with different job requirements than a cam girl is nigh impossible. From that vantage point, one kind of female performance is identical to any other, and so all women should be looked at, spoken to, and treated the same across contexts.
The streamers on Nude Gamer are actually using their body to attract viewers, on purpose. It's their job. The women on Twitch who get chastised by strangers and penalized by Twitch itself for allegedly wearing clothing that's too revealing or sexual are wearing athletic clothes, cosplay, and sometimes are brigaded by people who just want to hurt them. For those women, playing games is not the preamble for taking their clothes off, but sometimes they're accused of behaving pornographically, manipulating their audience with their bodies or even (gasp) being cam girls. I want to be clear: it's perfectly fine to want to watch cam girls. It's just important to not confuse the fantasy of a woman for the reality of her. Nude Gamers is a place where the fantasy is explicitly part of the bargain, Twitch is one where it is imposed.
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