Before we delve into the sociological implications of fetishizing women who game, let’s establish what we’re talking about here. Gamer girl porn is porn featuring female gamers, and all the tropes within that setting. Many of these involve multitasking—see Miss Banana’s clip where she plays God of War while giving a blowjob, videos where a man suddenly interrupts a woman gaming to fuck her, sitting on a man’s face while she plays a game, or the more voyeuristic “ she forgot to turn off the Twitch stream ” examples, where we see women engaging in sexual acts after they supposedly forgot to turn off their webcams.

In previous installments of Rule 34, we’ve stayed fairly straightforward and uncontroversial: People wank to Lego minifigures and extraterrestrials and gooey girls because they find them sexy. Simple. Everything we jerk off to has layers, but porn featuring “gamer girls” is a bit more complicated than these, because of the shit female gamers deal with in real life.

Welcome to Rule 34, a series in which Motherboard’s Samantha Cole lovingly explores the highly specific fetishes that can be found on the web.

“There's cultural value in any image that allows people to envision women in nontraditional roles, and there's always legitimate concern when the only 'valid' women in those roles are portrayed as sex objects,” Cross told me in an email. “I think this sort of porn lends itself to both interpretations... the ‘gamer girl’ as an almost mythical fetish object has long been enshrined among even the most virulent misogynistic men in gaming, at once lusted after and mythologised out of all proportion to reality.”

I asked Katherine Cross, a games writer, sociologist, and columnist for Gamasutra , to help unpack the genre of “gamer girls,” and what it might reflect about ourselves.

"I got yelled at by gamer bros about being fake, even though I disclosed it was for a scene and never pretended it was real."

Fetishizing female gamers, outside of any societal context, seems innocent enough. It’s a fantasy, like any other genre of pornography—nurses, firefighters, librarians—"gamer" is almost just another kind of uniform. But we live in a world where women who try to enter gaming fandoms are harassed and intimidated—and often driven out of something they love doing—because of gaming’s culture of gatekeeping.

To be clear, we’re not talking about 3D models of Overwatch characters having sex or even live-action parodies like Fortnut. We’re looking specifically at the genre of porn that involves women who game, and the sex that they have.

Early examples of how the “gamer girl” has been viewed by society is seen in gaming magazines from the early 2000s. “Getting girls to play games? Easy. We paid this model $200 an hour to pretend to play with us,” one section of a 2004 issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly reads. A letter to the editor in an issue of GAMEPRO magazine , also in 2004, waxes on breathlessly about nude codes for Lara Croft’s character.

Janice Griffith, a porn performer who has experience portraying a “gamer girl” in her videos, told me it’s all about the fantasy. “I think it honestly has to do with the age-old idea that women don't play video games, and then hyper-sexualizing that,” she told me in an email. “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.”

She said her fans love her “gamer girl” work, but many of them picked apart the scene: they wanted her to be playing Xbox instead of PS4, or the controller wasn’t in enough of the shots, or they called her a “fake” gamer because she wasn’t actually immersed in playing while fucking.

“A lot of people get worked up over the idea of 'fake' gamer girls to the point where they're pushing women who'd be interested out inadvertently,” she said. “I explicitly stated I was ‘pretending to play video games for porn’ and it didn't matter, people thought it was the hottest thing in the world. [But] I got yelled at by gamer bros about being fake, even though I disclosed it was for a scene and never pretended it was real.”

"The girl-next-door is somewhere in the neighborhood, whereas the gamer-next-door is at the other end of a network"

The toxicity Venn diagram of gatekeeping in gaming and harassment against adult performers meets in the middle at gamer porn. But it also represents a shift in how society views sexuality and games. Playboy’s 2013 “Gamer Next Door” series featuring Playboy bunny Pamela Horton is an example of the notion of girl gamers who are also multifaceted sexual beings going mainstream. When the series launched, Horton spoke with Engadget about being a performer who also games, and having to prove herself to both the adult industry and the gaming community. "Honey child, I was a gamer before I was ever a pretty girl," she said.