I play a game called League of Legends. It is an online multiplayer game requiring the use of good strategy, good reflexes, and good teamwork. It is one of the most-played video games in the world (see this 2012 infographic) with huge regional and international professional tournaments; the current North American League Championship Series is webcast live. It is a well-crafted game, featuring individual champions of all sexes (at least 30% of the playable characters are female, at my last count), ages, races, and even species.
Its playerbase is also extremely male-dominated.
The infographic cited earlier estimates about 90% of League players are male. This is borne out especially in the professional gaming scene. The recent All-Stars championship series, broadcast about a month ago from Shanghai on LoL ESports, featured the top players from around the world as voted on by the playerbase at large. All of these top gamers are twentysomething men. Of the eight teams currently competing in the North American LCS summer split, all eight five-man teams are composed of exactly that: men. I have heard one rumour of a girl who played on one of the pro Korean teams back in Season 2, but that's all. There is a dearth of girls in pro gaming. Or even just gaming. I know of maybe two or three girls besides me who play League, out of dozens of guys I know.
But even so, when I first heard of Team Siren, my heart sank.
Here is their promotional video.
Naturally, the League player community (mostly men, you understand) was in a tizzy. Looking back at the reactions, I sort the responses into two types. The first were your typical immature teenage boy misogynist jokes or other inappropriate comments: quips about women in kitchens, or any number of remarks about 'hotness.' The comments on the video more or less illustrate this class of response. The second type, though, is what I aim to address. I encountered one on Tumblr; here are some excerpts:
'The attitude they [Team Siren] have with their team is disgusting. They antagonize men, making it seem like the pro teams are excluding women intentionally. However, it is obvious that this is not the case.
ESports does not care if you’re a male or a female. It cares about your skill. If you can play well, and you’re female, so be it. Go ahead and make it to the top ranks.
...
But the main reason why I think Siren is exclusive, sexist, and feminist is that they focus on the fact that they are women than actually proving themselves.
They wouldn’t let a male join their ranks, no matter how skilled he is, because of course, they have to remain an all-female team.
...
In my opinion, they just want to draw attention to themselves for support.
I replied in turn, and you can see from the ensuing comment thread between waddlebuff and I that we had a remarkably civil conversation. If you don't want to wade through the walls of text, here is a summary of what I wrote:
- League of Legends is a meritocracy and everyone who plays it, like waddlebuff, believes in it. You get ahead by skill alone, regardless of who you are.
- But it's flawed. The people more likely to play League do not make up a representative sample of all people in the world skilled enough to play; something is selecting out the women.
- This plagues not only ESports, but other fields as well. In my field (physics), only around 10-20% of bachelor's degrees are awarded to women, and this rate is huge compared to numbers from decades ago. Physics is also a very meritocratic field. People in physics can be known for their fame, or charisma, or skills at playing bongos, but they are most revered for their brilliance, their superb physical intution, their contributions to the field. Scientists are narrow-minded in that they only care about the quality of your data or your theory, but they are incredibly open about everything else about you, whether you're a woman or you never shower or you're really attractive.
- Because we believe in the 'myth' of our chosen meritocracy, whether it be League or physics, we feel threatened when something reminds us the meritocracy isn't perfect. Waddlebuff, for instance, was angry that Team Siren seemed to be trying to gain an advantage because of their femaleness, not because they had actual gaming skill, and I think most players felt the same. Last winter, I and the writer of this blog attended the Midwest Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics only to find the speakers focused on their experiences as women in science but spent little if any time on the actual science they were working on. We didn't want to hear about scientists who were women; we wanted to hear about scientists and their research. To be fair, the title of the conference should have warned us enough. But to be annoyed by this, as women in physics who should be the last people this should bother, tells us something. We believe/want to believe in the meritocracy too.
- So why aren't there more women in ESports or physics? This is a question far from resolution in both fields. It has seen, however, numerous articles both in ESports (see this 2012 Forbes article or this article written soon after the Team Siren debacle) and in science fields (see this HuffPo article or this AAUP article or this Chronicle compilation, to name only three).
The issues in both fields may stem from differences in the ways boys and girls are raised even from an extremely young age. In studies such as "Baby X Revisited" (Sidorowicz & Lunney, Sex Roles vol 6 no 1, pp 67-73, doi: 10.1007/BF00288362), for instance, we see that knowing the gender of an otherwise indistinguishable infant changes how adults interact with it. And as they grow older, we expect the girls to wear pink and play with dolls while the boys are expected to wear blue and play with trucks. And so on. It is my inkling of a theory that these radically different upbringings lead to different general inclinations for men and women. Meaning, perhaps men are generally raised in such a way that competitive, aggressive, technical pursuits are more appealing to them, whereas women may not receive this type of thinking. But there are plenty of other theories, informed or not, which I would encourage you to explore.
In some ways this saga reminds me of the story of Riven, one of the champions in League of Legends. Her backstory states that in her homeland, 'any citizen may rise to power regardless of race, gender, or social standing - strength is all that matters. It was with committed faith in this ideal that Riven strove to greatness.' However, Riven grew disillusioned with the new horrors of biological warfare, leading to her current condition of 'self-imposed exile' in which she could still maintain the egalitarian philosophy that made her a warrior. In my response to waddlebuff, I wrote that
If anything, I hope that the Siren video inspires other girls in the community to ‘prove’ themselves better than the Siren girls. More skilled, but less upstartish; more worthy of respect.
In other words, I hope that we all can be more like Riven: believing in a truly egalitarian meritocracy, yet acknowledging and working to change the fact that we're not there yet.
No comments:
Post a Comment