It really is ironic, but it also makes perfect sense since, for these guys, they're more interested in forcing the world to conform to their expectations than they are in facts. They have a perverse incentive to keep women out of gaming spaces, because they (for some reason) believe that it's gaming that stops people from liking them rather than the fact they're genuinely unpalatable to be around.

So, I've seen them change the benchmark of what a real 'game' is, or create a threshold to be crossed on frequency or amount or type. Then you need a kind of attitude - towards games, towards a certain kind of exploitation, towards a certain type of allowance towards objectification. All things I know you already know, but stuff I'm just trying to articulate in order to get it straight in my own head.

Also ironic, then, that no matter how much of their criteria are gaming related, very little of their identity is cohesive in anything besides a desire to feel marginalized. This is the 'dark side' of identity politics, though. Once these guys have managed to un-stick the identity of white and male as not permanently a social default, but identities that experience privilege, they become invested in simultaneously retaining systemic privilege and denying they have it.