I feel like doesn’t mean everyone who plays video games, it’s the people that making “gaming” their personality. Not, I am someone who enjoys video games, I am a gamer. It’s that type that treats media consumption as identity that tend to be horrible people.

If the hobby develops its own subculture that poorly socialized children and manchildren base their entire identity around, and that subculture is incredibly reactionary and overall lame, then it is fair to shit on it.

Also even if gamers weren't reactionary people are still going to judge you for making consuming entertainment a hobby. Nobody considers watching TV a hobby, or scrolling tiktoks, or jerking off.

If shitting on gamers genuinely bothers you need to touch grass. Log off. Go outside.

Pretty much everyone in the developed world under 30 plays videos games a fair amount these days. Gamer doesn't really refer to anyone who plays video games, or even plays a lot of video games, or are somewhat passionate about the medium, but people who build a whole culture and identity around video games. And that culture is sadly really fucking cringe due to a number of reasons, the primary culprit I suspect being that the whole gamer sub culture really grew out of the shittiest parts of the early internet and was actively encouraged and courted by the games industry.

Gamer is a signifier for multiple concepts, one of which is simply "anyone who enjoys gaming as a hobby" but a more specific one is roughly "a demographic in the Western anglosphere, ages 14-35, largely male, being marketed to by gaming corporations and the military, who see themselves as a 'class' associated with their gaming identity, and participate in that culture". The usage of the term in reference to the latter, or something like it, has been common for over a decade now, which we can see with early gatekeeping of the term (supposedly fake gamers, a judgement especially targeted at women), as well as both ironic and unironic identification as a "gaming" class (they targeted gamers and gamers rise up and gamers are the most oppressed demographic etc).

So the essence we're trying to invoke with this signifier is the people who strongly identify as gamers, who were caught up in gamergate with all the vitriol and misogyny that came out of it. Gamer an adopted consumer identity rather than an inherent or socially-enforced identity, so if it doesn't describe you then you don't have to identify with it.

Most people play games, but only a subsection of those are obsessed with wokeness and rage at the thought of non-white or cishet representation in video games. But that subsection is the most active in consuming games, or at least particularly vocally represented in secondary media.