For Women, eSports Isn’t All Fun and Games
Despite the push for gender equality in society, gaming remains a male ‘safe space’
Walking up the stairs to an internet cafe at the age of nine, Ellesha Tran was excited to finally play video games with her older brother. Upon entering the narrow room, she found the latest computers; sweaty, 30 year old men who had been there since early morning; and the revelation that she couldn’t play with her brother. His friends admitted, “Your sister’s a girls, she’s gonna suck for the rest of us”.
“That’s not fair,” Tran cried out. But her resistance meant nothing; she waited, at the back of the cafe, as her brother and his friends enjoyed themselves without her.
“Your sister’s a girls, she’s gonna suck for the rest of us”
Welcome to the tremendous, and terrifying, world of women in eSport competitions. While eSports has grown rapidly throughout the world, women have an awkward place in these competitions. Sadly, it’s an open secret that video games are not the friendliest place for women: rape threats, online abuse, blackmail are a regular feature for women in the video game community. Despite the abuse that they may receive from both men and women, female eSports players are determined to help make video games a safe space for women, as much as it is for men.
eSports, starting less than a decade ago, has teams competing in competitive online games for the chance to win thousands of dollars in prize money. And eSports have already become a massive, global competitions. Newzoo, a market tracking company, says that last year, about 320 million people around the world tuned into an eSport broadcast. Importantly, it’s expected to only get bigger, with the audience growing to 600 million in only four years. For context, more people live streamed the finals for the video game League of Legends than watched the American NBA finals in 2015.
Tran had been playing the online shooting game ‘Counter Strike’ throughout her teenage years. Tran decided to audition for a number of teams, ending up as a substitute for all of them. In 2016, Tran grew tired of substituting for a male team. “I wanted to make a girl team because there was no girls team at the time,” she said. “I think my female team was one of the first at the time.” But in starting a team, Tran realised the challenges of just finding five female players to be apart of her experiment.
“I only knew about three girls.” Three girls, from a sport that has come to dominate continents and internet traffic. After several months of meetings, Tran was able to partner with the eSport organisation DarkSided, and launch her female-only team.
Most leagues are mixed gender, and without the physical requirements that have segregated women from other sports, in theory women should be able to compete with and alongside men. However, in an interview with ABC, Steph Harvey, a Canadian Professional Counter player, said that women made up only about 5% of competitive players. It’s not as though women don’t play video games, or don’t watch eSports. SuperData Research estimates that women make up over 52% of video game players, and 27% of eSport audiences.
The reason why women don’t join into eSports is online abuse. A study by the Pew Research Centre asked men and women their experiences online and found that online gaming was the most hostile space for women: 63% of women report being harassed while gaming online; 35.6% quit temporarily, 9.6% quit permanently.
Since started playing games over a decade ago, Tran has come to weather abuse for just being a girl in gaming. Fat-slut, ugly, and everything in between has been used against her by guys, just for playing online.
And the abuse would bleed into the real world. Coming home from school one day, a message appeared on her phone. Private number. It read, ’I know where you go to school’. She couldn’t eat much after reading that message. “I know girls who’ve been blackmailed, and when they didn’t do what they guy said, they had their nudes released online,” speaking frantically.
Another time, sitting down at her computer ready to train with her team, Tran noticed the internet had slowed to a trickle, not even letting her load a webpage. “What’s wrong with the internet?”, her parents yelled across the house. Frantic, Tran dashed to the internet router and reconfigured a jungle of wires. Nothing. Tran knew what had happened, but didn’t want to believe it. She had been DDOS attacked.
A DDOS attack, or Distributed Denial of Service for short, involves a hacker gaining access to your computer through a computer virus. Once in, the hacker begins slowing down your internet access to a crawl, like water sprinkling out of a hair clogged drain. For the average internet user, a mild inconvenience. But for a professional eSports player, where thousands of dollars are on the line and training has to be cancelled, a DDOS attack can be disastrous.
Madeline Barnard, a female eSports player for the team Athletico, says her abuse has always revolved around her weight. However, Barnard says that men aren’t the only ones responsible for the atmosphere of abuse. “It’s the females on other females, which saddens me,” she writes.
In order to overcome these challenges, Tran and her team put their lives on hold to prioritise their training. At the time studying teaching at Victoria University, Tran deferred her degree, quit her two jobs, and started training four nights a week, four hours at a time.
These drastic changes were a shock to Tran’s parents. “My dad cried,” Tran remembers. “You’re never going to get married, you’ll never find a boyfriend.” Though her parents wouldn’t understand, DarkSided were established and needed a showcase for their skills.
“You’re never going to get married, you’ll never find a boyfriend.”
And in March, 2017, that opportunity was presented with the launch of the WPGI League, the first women’s only eSport leagues in Australia. Of the six teams that registered, the top four teams were flown over to the Gold Coast to compete for a prize pool of $10,000. The event was held in a small, LAN Cafe in the City’s CBD, with each team being placed on a long, circular table.
At this points, hundreds of hours had been spent training. Each round is a one minute and forty-five seconds, with a total of 30 rounds. Advancing to the finals, Tran was one game away from being crowned the top female Australian team and advancing to the international finals in Copenhagen. A small audience relative to major, international tournaments, Tran could hear the audience her name. Unfortunately it wasn’t enough, as DarkSided finished second to Athletico.
When asked about future plans, Tran sat back in her chair, regaining her posture. “I’m not playing this season because I’m boycotting it. We still haven’t been paid for coming second.” According to Tran, for coming second, the team had won two and a half thousand. However, despite the event finishing in March, the team has not been paid by organisers.
This situation for other women is scarcely better. The top male player in 2016 earned $2.6 million from tournament winnings and sponsorships. The top female player? $156,000.
But there are signs, admittedly few, that eSports is opening up to women. Frank Li, founder and owner of the Chief’s eSports Club, female only leagues fostering a platform for women to compete and grow, free from stigma. “Women are perfectly capable of competing in the highest tiers”, Li says, with the hope that tournaments like WPGI being a showcase for women to join mixed teams in the future.
All interviewees admitted that removing abuse would be almost impossible, but are hopeful. When asked if she would recommend eSports to a young girl, Barnard wrote, “Hell yeah! I would tell them to stay in school, but also follow their passions for gaming.”
