There is one undeniable fact I have encountered whilst researching this three-part series, one thing is clear no matter which perspective you look at this issue from. The fact that women do face more challenges than men when trying to make it in the world of competitive gaming. When I first started this series I was focusing only on Korea, and the view that women there face a far harder struggle to get into (and remain part of) the scene, with a focus on Geguri. Then I turned my focus to an American. Leah “Gllty” Hayes, a pro-player in Street Fighter V. My interview with her sparked a debate on Reddit that I was not expecting. I posted my link to the interview as I usually do, and left it, and by the end of the day, there were 80 comments on it, ranging from hating Gllty, to hating me, to hating one comment she said. I asked her if she felt a “women’s league” for esports would be something beneficial. Her response to this sparked a debate on the place of women in the current scene, and where it should be in the future. So with this third and final article, I aim to provide the best look at the issue I can and to hopefully find some form of conclusion.

A Brief History

To understand the issue of women in e-sports, I should first make sure that everyone is on the same page, and provide a brief history of esports as a whole. In Stamford University in October 1972, the first e-sport tournament was held. The game was Spacewar, the prize; a year-long subscription to Rolling Stone. This event led to what is officially considered to be the first proper e-sport tournament. Held in 1980, the Space Invaders Championship was attended by a total of 10,000 contestants across the US. Its winner was Rebecca Heineman, a transgender woman oft-considered to be one of the founders of the modern gaming scene. At the time, Heineman was male and called Bill.

One of the most major events in the development of e-sports, and the world as a whole, as the arrival of the world wide web in 1994. This era was defined by the rise of the first person shooter, with Doom, and more importantly: Quake, breaking down games into even more sub-genres than before. I mention Quake as being significant, as it led to the founding of QuakeCon, in 1996. This tournament/convention was one of the first events dedicated to allowing players of the game to meet and compete with one another. Just over 100 people attended this event, but that was still one of the largest gatherings of gamers in one place. This was quite possibly the first LAN event. Quakecon became an annual event and is still ongoing today.

Then, in 1998, we saw the birth of what is considered to be the e-sport scene of today. This was heralded by the release of Starcraft, a real-time strategy game. Following the Asian financial crisis in 1997, South Korea joined the fray of e-sports, with their high-speed broadband and high unemployment. Thus a perfect storm was created, with a gaming becoming a far-less taboo hobby in the west, and an entire country in the east with a huge unemployment rate, South Korea took the first steps to becoming the dominant power they are in the world of today’s esports.

At the turn of the millennium, gaming had fully moved from the arcade to the home, with computers getting better and better, allowing the rise of the so-called PC master race, and home consoles becoming more and more commonplace with the PlayStation 1, the recently released PlayStation 2, Sega had the Dreamcast, Nintendo had the Gamecube and Microsoft had the Xbox. Video games were everywhere, and the market had found just the right balance to prevent another crash, like the devastating one of 1983.

In 2002, Major League Gaming entered, and changed the way we view esports. Before, the main hurdle for the increase of viewership for the scene was that people needed to be at the events to watch them. With the arrival of MLG and similar services, events had a way to broadcast their contests to the whole world. With games themselves getting more competitive, with Call of Duty, League of Legends, Halo and Dota all debuting. This all served to make way for what we know e-sports to be now, which started in 2012.

At the end of 2012, the audience for e-sports was 58 million people. By 2017 it was 145 million. This exponential increase in the audience comes from the likes of the first dedicated game streaming website, Twitch, and the increase of YouTube gamers. Right now, gaming, and e-sports makes up a huge amount of the online entertainment market, and with even more LAN events and conventions, it seems like it’s only going to keep on growing. But this entire history has been mostly male-dominated.

Girl-Gamer Culture

41% of all gamers are women. There are around 1.2 billion gamers in the world. This means that there are approximately 492,000,000 (four hundred and ninety-two million), female gamers. So the question is, why does this not translate to esports? As I mentioned in my first article on this topic, there are 108 players in the Overwatch League, and only one is female (Geguri). In Counterstrike: Global Offensive, no team within the top ten rankings has a single female member, and when there was an all-female team back in 2016, they got dropped within a year. This team proved themselves by winning the women-only events at the Copenhagen games for 2 years running, and they were widely considered to be the gold standard for women in e-sports. The prize for first place in the 2017 CS:GO Ladies event at the Copenhagen Games was €7,500, won by Team Secret, which is tiny in comparison to the €35,000 on the table for the first place in the men’s events.

But the question is, why do these women feel like they aren’t able to compete alongside the men, or feel like it isn’t a safe environment? Could it be a product of the already sexist advertising industry at the time of release? An article by Digiday suggests it could be. There isn’t just active pressure against women to not partake in gaming, there’s blatant objectification and sexism taking place here, that seems almost endorsed by the companies themselves.

The view of video games as a so-called “boys-club” has been present for a long time, from the market crash leading to Toy’s R’ Us stocking the Nintendo Entertainment System in the boy’s toys section. The SEGA Saturn was released with an advert in ’94 that had an image of a nude woman on it, with the caption “(In case you didn’t notice), there’s a beautiful, naked woman on this page. When you’ve got the SEGA Saturn’s triple 32-bit processing power, nothing else matters”

Mario rescues Princess Peach, not the other way around. Despite gaming being presented as a family thing back in the 70s, by the 80s and 90s, the view that gaming was for boys had been firmly established. Even as recently as 2015, the mobile city building game Game of War used a scantily clad Kate Upton to promote the game in a Super Bowl spot, and later campaigns. When attempts were made to target women gamers and attempt to bring them back into the scene, they were often poorly handled or even seen as outright pandering, with standout examples being the bright pink PSP, or the recent Nintendo Girl’s Club YouTube channel, which spends more time talking about fashion than actual games.

So are the game companies actually more at fault in alienating women than other male gamers? Potentially. Or is it a product of gamers hating gamers?

The Gllty Feedback

In the last article, I interviewed Gllty, the Street Fighter player. In the article, she made a comment that drew a lot of attention and negative feedback on Reddit. When I asked her about the idea of women’s only leagues for games, she responded with the following:

“A separate division specifically designed to integrate into the main circuit is a good idea, but of course inane resistance is inevitable” Gllty (Discordia’s Soapbox, 2018)

I tend to always post a link to my articles to Reddit, most of my audience comes from there, and I can say already that much of the audience for this will come from there too. When I posted this article to Reddit, it spawned a storm of negativity I was not prepared for, with comments ranging from transphobic, to sexist, to outright bigoted. In part, I felt responsible. You can view all the comments in their entirety on this thread.

The general vibe I was getting, was that people don’t like Gllty for her past comments, and they don’t like the fact that she suggested women could have the option to play separately from men. However, a lot of the comments were personal in nature, and it began to feel like an attack on her. The very fact that many of the comments were going after Gllty herself, and not the comments she made in the article, was something that interested me.

One commenter started a thread about a comment Gllty once claiming that any man who would not have sex with her is gay, leading to replies such as “maybe dudes just like real women” and “Preferring real women as opposed to guys playing make believe its something wrong? What the fuck is wrong with you?”. Others did have a valid critique of her ideas, and that’s important in the debate, but the majority of comments were less friendly.

As per my most common research methods, I launched a survey of people on r/StreetFighter and r/Esports. This was to work out the kinds of people that would be interacting with the article and therefore partaking in the discussion on the topic. The full results can be found here. 59% of the people who responded to the survey were male, with the majority being aged 19-25. Statistically, when asked which e-sports stars they knew about, the results showed that fewer people were aware of the women than the men, which can be correlated to the lesser advertising offered to women’s e-sports events and women gamers as a whole.

98.7% of people thought that women should be allowed to compete in e-sports events, which, isn’t really a matter of opinion, I’d say there is a right and wrong opinion here. However, the real split came with the question of “Do you believe there should be an option for separate single gendered tournaments and events?” which, interestingly, was a near 50/50 split. The majority was not in favor of there being separate events for women, however, it was a close split.

So after all this, and the entire series of articles, I was left with one question. The facts are that women do face more troubles than men in getting into and staying in, the world of e-sports. However, who is responsible for this? There are a few main culprits, those being advertisers, male gamers and e-sport organizers. I don’t feel like I’m qualified to put the blame on one group in particular, as in the comments for articles I’ve seen evidence that male gamers can create an environment of toxic vitriol around women in the scene. The story of Geguri has shown that event organizers can often be extremely unwilling to facilitate the placement of a woman in their leagues and events. But perhaps the biggest culprit here could, in fact, be the advertising, which has non-stop nailed the idea into the heads of consumers that gaming is for men and men-only.

A Half-Assed Resolution

Spoiler alert, there is no resolution. Not yet at least. However, as I said before, the rise of Geguri in the OWL is a step forward. If work continues to progress in the way it is, then perhaps gaming could once again be something that everyone, regardless of gender can enjoy. Writing this series has been a really interesting journey for me, and the things I’ve learned speaking to really interesting people has helped me get a greater understanding of the issues that women in e-sports face and showcases how far things still have to come.

I want to thank all the people that have worked with me on this, including Gllty and the lovely people from her Discord, Lucas and Josh from G33k P0p, the people of r/StreetFighter and r/Esports. Thanks for reading, you can find the extensive sources for this article linked throughout, or down at the bottom of this article. Please tell me your thoughts in the comments below or on Reddit. Thanks for reading.

Sources which were not linked in the main text.

https://images.eurogamer.net/2014/dan.pearson/Newzoo_Preview_Images_Global_Growth_of_Esports_Report_V4.pdf#

https://newzoo.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Newzoo-eSports-Conference-Slides-2015.pdf

https://medium.com/@BountieGaming/the-history-and-evolution-of-esports-8ab6c1cf3257

https://copenhagengames.com/tournaments/counter-strike-global-offensive-ladies-tournament-2018

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-37992322

https://www.westpac.com.au/news/in-depth/2018/03/at-the-top-of-her-e-league/

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/17YskLPSFNbg-5Nrz2UAqdXO-G7UBGBFOvwRfzmIpCPs/edit#responses

http://www.denofgeek.com/us/games/female-gamers/237804/10-bad-attempts-at-marketing-to-female-gamers

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