Over Christmas, when the turkey and mince pies had settled, I – like many others – came together with my friends and family to show off and play with our new and shiny toys. My boyfriend’s younger brother – an eager gamer – had got lots of new titles for his Xbox and PC and was super-duper excited to try them out. In a fervour, all of the men suddenly disappeared into a back room to play. I was invited to join, the only girl among boys, and not being one for Doctor Who, I accepted. A couple of hours later, I had emerged runner-up. The men were surprised, near shocked, even, that I was as good as I was. I was left baffled by their reactions – why was it so implausible that I’d be good at an online game simply because I was born with different reproductive organs?
It got me thinking, and researching, and I came across similar sentiment towards women wherever I looked – from casual gaming situations like my Christmas night to the big-money world of competitive gaming, where women are gender pariahs.
Competitive gaming, or, to those in the know, e-sports, is one of the fastest growing sports in the world, expanding at a furious pace as the developed world advances in both interactive technology and graphics capabilities. With a regular global audience of over 200 million people, the specialist firm Deloitte has estimated that revenue from e-sports has risen 25% in 2016 alone, and is now worth over £400m.
A sport without physical advantages or limitations, competitive gaming benefits from having an almost-unique even platform between the sexes, so you would think that it would be an environment within which female gamers would thrive, right? Wrong. Despite the elimination of a physical disadvantage, the most popular e-games are still overwhelmingly played by men. In fact, I didn’t have to look very far into the topic to discover that very few women actually enter the world of professional gaming in the first place, and many who do face the challenges of sexual and mental harassment and a pay-gap of epic proportions.
I found an extremely revealing interview on the BBC website with Steph Harvey, one of the most successful e-gamers in the world from either the female or male gender. In the interview, she spoke about how as little as 5% of professional gamers were women, despite the gaming rate in the general public being almost equal between the sexes. She states: “It’s still a ‘boy’s club’ so as a woman you’re automatically judged for being different,” Steph goes on to describe the sickening abuse she’s suffered from her colleagues and viewers, including frequent rape threats – simply because she’s female: “The way I get harassed is about what they would do to my body, about why I don’t deserve to be there because I use my sexuality – it’s all extremely graphic.” Despite being one of the world’s elite, the abuse and ill-attitude has began to make her think twice about her work, and the effort she puts in to improving ideologies in the community: “Why do I do this if my community hate me? Because I am a feminist, because I believe women have a place in gaming.”
But for women like Steph, the harassment is only the first hurdle towards a seemingly impregnable glass ceiling. The prize money offered in female-only tournaments = competitions that are extremely desirable environments to women gamers because of the eradication of condescension and harassment – highlights an incredible disparity in potential earnings. As a base example, my research showed that the recent Paris e-sport World tournament had a winning prize of £60,000 in the mixed competition – where there are very few women – while the female-only competition had a winning prize of just £12,000. It’s a vicious cycle where women earn less because nobody watches the secondary competition over the main event, but in turn women find themselves strongly discouraged to compete in that main event. Less money made by female teams leads to fewer sponsors, which leads to reduced coverage. In her interview, Steph acknowledges this: “… in the end you need money to compete but ultimately the goal is that these female tournaments don’t exist any more because there’s no need for it.”
But Steph, and many others, are hopeful for a more equal future. Twitch, the première online gaming livestreaming and interaction site, and its partners have taken huge steps this year on trying to tackle the rampant misogyny on its own site. Steph herself has founded Misscliks, which promotes and encourages female presences and heroes in the gaming community. She finishes: “We’ll see mainstream gamers becoming more diverse and if I can inspire one person then it would have been worth it.”
If my experience on Christmas night is anything to go by, we can only hope she’s right.
Comments are closed.