E-sport "inclusiveness": you can do better :-/

General Discussion
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a place for women and other marginalized genders to compete and grow their skills in a safe environment.

“safe environment”? do you understand that this strongly communicates that it usually would not be in other well-known and widely publicized circles? Wouldn’t League and Contenders be?

Okay, Blizzard (or e-sports committee): I understand you started the plan to re-establish credibility on strong misogyny, but it’s happening in the most wrong way. Is it a War of Genders? If hatred should not be fought with other hatred, “machismo” should not be fought with “feminism”, because they nullify the ultimate goal that both (or mixed ones) are all on the same level. A “female” tournament MAYBE might be more relevant on International Women’s Day to commemorate their efforts in history, but certainly not a “specially” organized tournament to say “make yourself feel like women! There are no men or other privileged categories”.

This article summarizes well the problem of how women are excluded from the world of e-sports. : https://www.theguardian.com/games/2021/dec/02/why-do-female-pro-gamers-earn-less-than-men-esports

Really, if there is a developer or community moderators (Jodie? Andy?) reading this topic, kindly pass it on to someone who deals with “corporate inclusiveness.” :bowing_man:

  • difference in salaries and e-sports bonuses
  • Little accessibility to Tier 1s
  • Culture of misogyny not adequately punished in game
  • Gamer Houses that do not severely sanction all-male teams that place great difficulties on female presences.

Finally, I would like to point out that the announcement of this “Empowerment Cup” remained obscured for two days without advertising the tournament dates well in advance of February 26 and 27 (now outdated) and only today was it made available for viewing, testimony : user comments. Why doesn’t this happen to the “all-precious” OW League that dares to announce itself even before showing the progress of 5v5? Why was there a decent advance on the EXC cup and not here? You understand that in addition to giving a questionable message about feminism you are also treating it very superficially, as a formality and in which you say to yourself "oh, on the business register it says we did. We tried to. be inclusive, see? ". Well, no … you haven’t given the chance to practically anyone. Nor did you give him exposure in decent time.

other inclusion issues

Oh, but we could also include this in any kind of organizational “marginalization”: European tournaments earning less money than American ones (the latest Flash Ops Experimental cup, for first place: $ 10,000 US vs $ 6,000.

What about in-game chat vocabulary? there are a huge amount of offensive words that can be written about misogyny, racism, geographic offenses (you can imagine these days that happens when there is Cyrillic in chat) and all reports show a frightening amount of monitoring reports from pre-formatted messages. We need a minimum of human monitoring in the study of reports of this type, a more human touch different from cheat reports. THIS already would make the start of being inclusive more credible.

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Well said. The goal should be to bring men and women together. Not farther apart :sob:

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Especially in a video game where sex/gender has literally no impact on performance… (to my knowledge, if it does I’m sure it’s minimal)… :wink:

I do appreciate at the pro level teams generally live together and I’m sure a lone female is probably uncomfortable living with 5 random guys.

…but at t500 and below, we’re all just at our little pc’s, no barriers here… :wink:

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It does though, even cs go i think has women’s team now.

I don’t know if it’s physical limitation like in actual sport but women don’t break into comp seen at pro level even though there are many that grind as sweaty as their male counterparts.

In overwatch we had someone in owl.

The only few i remember are in rl karma and ravena.

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Ok, what is it?

Oh… :upside_down_face:

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Choosing players for your team based on gender is sexist. Why this is being advertised and celebrated is beyond my understanding.

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It’s only partly related, but there’s a funny quote from a male Olympic shooting champion. “They don’t split us from the women because the women are inferior, they do it because no man would ever win a medal if they were allowed to compete with us.”

I’ve heard there is some physiological advantages to fine motor skills that women possess, but it’s interesting that true or not, women are commonly considered better shooters than men are in real life. No reason they would be worse at video games, as far as I’ve ever heard.

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This is all just desperation to get public attention since the game is dead.

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Several pieces of research I found a while ago (looking up things exactly for this kind of discussion) did indicate that women, on average, have a tiny bit slower reactions than men - but that difference is in the order of thousandths of a second. A difference, true, but not one that’d account for everything. Individual variance is bound to be a lot greater.

I can see several legitimate reasons why there are far less women in pro-level e-sports than men. Smaller player pools to start with, possibly less willingness to put the effort and energy in to get to pro level (i. e. certain kind of competitiveness), and the mentioned difference in reflexes - or any other physiological things. Even taking all of those into account, I’d estimate there should be maybe one team’s worth of women competing in the top level of Overwatch (especially since OW seems to have attracted more female audience than most shooters or competitive games). Not as their own team, as parts of others.

The last reasons for the lack of women in the pro circles, I think, are kind of the most important, and the ones we should try to change - as they’re also the ones that we (as a community) can change. First, in addition to sufficient skill and willingness to put the work in, a prospective pro player needs to be willing to put themselves in the limelight. That can be a problem, especially with the on one hand misogynistic and on the other, women-glorifying attitudes in gaming circles. No matter what their merits, they’ll get extra attention just for who they are - and that’s not really good. They should be treated as any other player.

The other side is, the teams seem to be somewhat unwilling to get women on the team. It may be a real (silent) policy with some teams, it may be unconcious thing, just not looking at potential players because of their gender. The one reason I’ve seen cited was that the teams would need to arrange their accommodations differently, and that costs money. To which I say “What about all the other people in the team and associated with them besides the players? Are they all men too? Don’t they require similar setups?”

Now, to be honest, there is merit in this kind of special tournament. It does draw attention to the inequality in gaming pretty well. Or, well, it would, if we knew about it long enough beforehand (say, at least a couple of days before the actual tournament, preferably a week or so). It still doesn’t do anything to change that inequality, and attention isn’t enough.

(I think there was some sort of automation screw-up with the tournament announcement. It’s dated on Saturday (at least for me), but it only appeared on Monday. I believe it was posted before the actual tournament, but the automation normally doesn’t publish stuff on the weekend, so that was pushed to Monday - way too late. I don’t blame Blizzard or any person for that - it’s way more likely to be a mistake. What isn’t a mistake that the post was made on the same day the tournament was supposed to start and wouldn’t have given any sort of heads-up even if it was published right on time.)

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For the hundredth time BLIZZARD WAS NOT INVOLVED (am I shadow banned or what).

Regarding contenders several female players have stated it is not a welcoming environment for women by players or coaches and they faced constant harassment.

People here speak so confidently yet it’s the least informed platform I use.

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I wouldn’t be surprised if ethnic diversity would probably account for difference in video game performance more than gender. Asians for example, are said to score higher in VSI (Visual Spatial Index) compared to other ethic groups. Which could explain why so many Asians are good at gaming. But again, this is all just a generalization. Not all Asians are good at video games, just like not all women are worse at video games then men. Not all guys are 6ft tall and muscular, not all women are physically weak etc.

I’m not sure if this empowerment cup is a good thing, but if it makes women more comfortable in playing video games, why not?

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I didn’t even know this was a thing, to be honest, and honestly despite reading your post about three times I still don’t quite understand what you’re trying to say. But because this is an interesting topic…

There is definitely a level of misogyny in gaming culture that is common enough to, I can imagine, dissuade many women from really investing themselves in the hobby let alone trying to make it a career. Then, of course, you include the fact that even out of women who do play video games, most of them aren’t into shooters. Out of all the women I know personally, I am the only one who games at all lmao. And my “pool” is quite diverse.

That all said, I can’t think of anything less patronising than an “Empowerment Cup”. They couldn’t just have a Womens’ Cup and a Mens’ Cup? Personally if I joined the “Empowerment Cup” I’d have to cover my face.

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Even people supportive of the tournament (like myself) thought the name was bad. The team names were better.

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In practice, no, the environment provided by tendies is not safe.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Competitiveoverwatch/comments/rnvf7e/former_contenders_player_leveret_shares_her/

I’m trying to find a similar story I remember coming out of the league but it appears to have been deleted.

Separately, this is a chill tourney that doesn’t aim to be tier 1. I have irl friends in the tournament that are going in with a bunch of disorganized bronze players. It’s about getting the chance to play without stereotypes and performance anxiety hanging over your head. This tournament isn’t about feeding the path to pro and it certainly for you if you’re this butthurt about it.

Your other criticisms of blizzard in general are valid though.

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What were the team names?

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You’re right but it needed some seeding system or something because some games were more than one-sided and that couldn’t have been fun.

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The reason women aren’t seen in competitive e-sports a lot is because, culturally speaking, it’s far more acceptable for men to pour countless hours into videogames. Women get told to ‘grow up’ and focus on other things.

I’m confident this will change in the future. But, when I was growing up, it was very much a ‘boys thing’ to play video games. I’ve had interactions with other women my age where they say ‘oh no I don’t play video games, I leave that kind of thing up to my boyfriend.’

I grew up in a time where gaming magazines were on the ‘top shelf’ because they still contained soft pornographic images of naked women posing with consoles. Gaming was marketed at men almost exclusively.

This then reared it’s ugly head in gaming as misogyny. This is why so many women in gaming feel vaguely ill the moment a man says says ‘omg a girl’ in voice chat, because you know it’s one step away from another tirade of sexist abuse.

We don’t need a tournament to segregate women and other minorities from the gaming population, we need to take the scumbags who make them feel unwanted out of our games.

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https:///liquipedia.net/overwatch/Overwatch_Empowerment_Cup

Lil Hogchamps was my favorite name.

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