“A Place Where I Could Breathe Easily”: LGBTQ + Youth on Gaming Worlds as Digital Shelters

This article investigates how LGBTQ + youth cultivate enduring relationships through the cross-platform ecologies surrounding digital games, arguing that these environments function as affective infrastructures of dwelling. Drawing on qualitative interviews with LGBTQ + participants aged 17–25, the study demonstrates that relationships initiated in multiplayer games deepen as they circulate across Discord, Twitch, voice channels, and private messaging networks. Combining Heidegger's notion of dwelling with Sara Ahmed's theory of affective circulation, the article conceptualizes these relational formations as sticky intimacies: Affectively adhesive ties that emerge through repetitive encounters, shared rituals, and collective rhythms of online co-presence. Findings reveal four interlinked dynamics, existential significance, expressive plasticity, collective spatiality, and negotiated safety, through which participants fashion livable digital environments amid offline precarity, heteronormative surveillance, and identity-based risk. Digital platforms become spaces where visibility can be modulated, emotional breathing room is achievable, and continuity of self is sustained. Rather than treating gaming spaces as inherently protective, the study highlights the labor, moderation practices, and boundary-work that make such ecologies inhabitable. By theorizing cross-platform circulation as an affective-spatial process, this research expands digital games scholarship and offers a nuanced account of how LGBTQ + youth craft durable, meaningful intimacies within increasingly interconnected digital worlds.