Gaming's Secret Public: Nerdcore Porn and the In/Visible Body of the Female Gamer

Tom Apperley's short conference paper examines the relationship between nerdcore pornography, social media, and gaming culture, positioning it as a response to the "gamergate" controversy that began in mid-2014. Gamergate presents itself as a popular backlash against perceived ethical failings in game journalism, yet it has been widely characterized by anonymous, male-perpetrated harassment aimed at women. The paper does not claim a neat causal chain. Instead, it argues that tracing these connections reveals a libidinal circuitry within gaming culture that informs the harassment and the toxic masculinity surrounding it.

The analysis begins from the observation that contemporary life involves a politicization of visibility and invisibility, driven by the growing role of data and informatics. In gaming's social media spaces, visibility is dangerous for women, while men participating in harassment can remain anonymous unless they choose otherwise. Nerdcore pornography, a genre blending amateur and professional production and circulated largely on platforms such as Instagram and Tumblr, fetishizes this dynamic. It renders the female body an object of the male gaze while also exposing the particular desires of the men who produce and consume it. Drawing on scholarship about curation, the paper notes that everyday users shape the genre through collapsing distinctions between creation and curation, using it to construct self-identity in relation to games, nerd artifacts, sexuality, gender, and power.

The argument builds on earlier work suggesting that gaming offers young men excluded from traditional masculine pursuits an unsupervised space to explore alternative masculinities built on competition, skilled performance, and conventional masculine iconography. That sense of marginalization, combined with a predominantly white male culture, can foster exclusionary and sometimes illegal behavior toward women and minorities.

The paper concludes that while pornography is often described as a "public secret," nerdcore porn reveals gaming's "secret public": a network of men with a libidinal attachment to technology, used to control women's access to gaming spaces, social media, and even offline environments through anonymous harassment, while simultaneously imagining fantasies that sexualize and subordinate women within gaming culture and history. The work is conceptual and theoretical rather than empirical, with no stated sample or dataset.