eboy predator

women as prey in the gaming world

Imagine sharing a hobby space with the absolute worst bottom-of-the-barrel people. The kinda people that spend their days watching Destiny or Nick Fuentes on their second monitors while either clocking in their 10th hour playing exclusively Rainbow Six Siege or sitting in an 8 person Discord call hoping that the one girl there will talk to him privately if he just keeps funding her Arknights pulls. That is who makes up 90% of the online gaming community. Neither knows how to do his own laundry, nor how to cook more than 3 basic meals, yet feels he is qualified to post on Twitter about politics concerning...anything. That is who I have had the pleasure of knowing since I was a child and who have given me enough material to write 500 Substack essays about.

I played my first video game at the age of 5. It was The Fairly Odd Parents: Breakin' Da Rules game that I had been gifted alongside a new Gameboy Advance in 2002. My brother had been gifted Frogger's Adventures: Temple of the Frog, and our descent into the gaming world progressed rapidly from that moment forward. As we hopped (🐸) from console to console, my main gaming partner was always my little brother, but in 2007 my gaming world expanded with our introduction to online gaming: Runescape. Runescape was my first for a lot of things. First MMORPG. First realtime trading and economic system. First online chatting platform. First predator. As I grew up, the games would change, but one of the constants amongst them all was the presence of creeps, sleezebags, and weirdos. Predators.

While I cannot speak for every woman in the gaming space, every woman I have talked to about this has a similiar story: play a game, make a friend, grow closer to him under the assumption you are both just friends, get pressured about things sexual in nature, friendship ends. It is a tale as old as time, and the tale is once again getting the spotlight in a more mainstream way.

These past few weeks, many women have come forward with similiar stories about a popular gaming streamer after one woman in particular released her tell-all document about him titled "Exposing Sykkuno, a serial cheater, master manipulatior and dangerous predator." Sykkuno has been a well known streamer in the gaming space since 2020 and was beloved for his typical anime protagonist demeanor. He wasn't everyone's cup of tea due to his "uwu catboy :3c" personality, but he had acquired a large very active fan base comprised of mainly women. What wasn't known though was his proclivity for cheating on his girlfriend of 4 years with a variety of small Virtual YouTubers (vtubers). This came as a shock to many due to his prior comments about how "women didn't like him" or how he was "the type of person too busy for a partner." He really played into this angle of being innocent, naive, and harmless.

While I have never been a viewer or fan of his, I have consumed content by creators in the same realm as him and watched him through other creators on occassion, so the release of this tell-all was of interest to me. While the usual ways people excuse the despicable actions of men were present, there was also one criticism that I did not expect: the victim's use of the word "predator."

Across the circles I run in online, everyone had an opinion about this word being used and 90% of people I spoke to agreed that it was too harsh of a word. When probed, most of the people i talked to just decided he did some sleezy things, but he wasn't some "predator"--that was reserved for the really bad guys.

According to victim reports, Sykkuno was accused of lying about his relationship status before having sex with different women, speaking suggestively to a girl under the age of 18 (continuing to pursue her more explicitly after 18), and targeting women that existed in the same space as him, but on a MUCH smaller scale. And yet...a majority of people I spoke to were adamant that he was a fuckboy, but not a predator (as if they are not the same thing).

Its been weeks now since the news broke and online conversation has died down quite a bit, but the word "predator" and its meaning continue to lurk in the dark alleys of my mind.

Predator predator predator.

What is a predator if not a man who lies, grooms, and gains consent under false pretenses? While not every legal jurisdiction views lying in this capacity the same way...does it not violate sexual autonomy at the very least? Is intentionally violating multiple women's sexual autonomy not enough to get called a predator? Where do we draw the line? Have we all become desensitized to what a predator is due to the normalization of these actions? Is a fuckboy just a nicer way of saying "predator"? If so....why are we being nice to predators?

I was not shocked that he was defended so adamantly by men in a space ruled by men...But I was surprised by the amount of women I saw minimizing his actions.

While my gaming days are very much NOT behind me, my relationship with the space has evolved so much since I was young. I like to think that I have gone through every gamer girl phase you can think of, but the one constant was always that I was preyed upon. It didn't matter if I was the e-girl, discord kitten, or hyper-focused tomboy-esque player...I was always a woman first and, therefore, prey. It wasn't until I took some gender studies classes in college that I began to be able to label the things happening around me. Every man that I viewed as a gaming friend viewed me as a potential romantic conquest. So many invites to gaming lobbies, gifted games, and long discord calls were not markers of friendship, but were instead attempts to "win me over."

But..maybe they just didn't know! Maybe they too were just a product of their gender socialization and could be enlightened! So, I decided it was worth speaking to them about it directly, and, with my new revelations in hand, turned to the men around me and shared. I wanted them to open their eyes and also be shocked by their own behavior. I wanted them to disavow all other men who acted that way going forward. I wanted them to see me as a fellow gamer. As a person. I'm sure you can guess how well my perspective was received. A lot of men left my life in between then and now who I had previously considered very close friends.

I will not make the same mistake this time.

Instead, I would like to address the other non-men in the gaming space:

The usage of the word "predator" to describe Sykunno, as well as so many other men in gaming, is apt. Doing all of those things does make someone a predator by definition. Women are constantly being preyed on in the gaming space at an alarming rate. The guy 10 years older than you in your discord server does not actually think you are mature for your age. Most of the people who share this hobby with us do not view us as people. The alt-right pipeline definitely has a pit-stop in our hobby. We do not have to accept or tolerate this behavior, and the first step is calling a predator a predator.