Seen in this context, the Zoepost can be understood as acting as a flashpoint around which an intimate male public could mobilise resistance against the challenge posed by women’s presence as gamers and workers to its exclusive and protected status. It presented a narrative that has been traditionally used against women’s participation in public space, including employment, that was able to be mobilised around the idea that the core public for video gaming should be protected from both women and socio-cultural critique. Quinn’s personal life could be used as a launching pad for a broader attack on the changing culture of the ‘gamer community’ precisely because women’s work in this sector is mediated by the interweaving of personal and public life, in part because of the employment practices that dominate the industry. Likewise, the challenges to the idea of an exclusionary masculine gamer community, posed by Quinn and others targeted by Gamergate, were seen as incendiary precisely because the industry had spent years fostering the idea that only men were gamers.