Mindy Jun is, at first look, an everyday American highschool scholar. Chat together with her and he or she’ll talk about her aspirations for faculty and her mother’s issues about how a lot time she spends enjoying games. Yet, beneath that scholar exterior beats the center of a competitor, and together with 4 of her pals, Jun represents Troy High School in a youth League of Legends match operated by the North American Scholastic Esports Federation.
Troy isn’t your common highschool both. It’s already produced one esports professional within the type of Eugene ‘Pobelter’ Park. You would possibly know him as Team Liquid’s mid laner on the 2018 LoL Worlds occasion. This is due in no small half to the establishment’s adoption of aggressive gaming as a severe a part of its sports activities programme. Troy at present fields a number of Overwatch and LoL groups and one of many latter is the world’s solely all-girl youth crew.
Despite being a succesful provider in that very crew, Jun faces a continuing battle to divert consideration away from the truth that she’s a lady. “When I play games, I try not to reveal my gender,” she tells me. “If I do, it stops being about the game, it becomes all about me being a female. People either want to treat me like a princess and white knight me, or they automatically dislike me and treat me horribly, and that’s not what I’m playing for. I just want to have fun!”
Jun would love for her aggressive gaming profession to be accepted as one thing she does just because she had “a lot of friends who play competitively and wanted to give it a shot too,” however it’s not. Instead, it’s interpreted as being an outwardly political assertion. Jun attributes this angle in direction of her, a minimum of partly, to the Team Siren debacle.
Claiming to be the primary all-girl professional crew, Team Siren fashioned in mid-2013 and instantly drew a whole lot of warmth for his or her look in a now notorious promotional video. Its use of terminology like “baited and outsmarted,” mixed with misguided makes an attempt to deduce tactical nous and badassery by displaying them enjoying chess and capturing weapons, led to widespread mockery. “Team Siren definitely poisoned the well for female gamers,” Jun says, “but it wasn’t their fault, it was how they were marketed.”
Team Siren was simply one other approach for everybody to giggle on the legendary trope of the pretend gamer woman
Indeed, Jun isn’t the one one who has gone on file about this. Cordelia Chui, former skilled Hearthstone participant and present head of social media and advertising and marketing at Ginx TV, remembers the video all too effectively. “Those girls were completely exploited by an organisation that was seeking exposure,” she tells me. “They deliberately framed them in the most humiliating light possible because they wanted to get internet points.”
Chui isn’t any stranger to the pitfalls of being a lady in a male-dominated trade. She’s picked up a number of trophies in Hearthstone and has skilled firsthand what it’s prefer to be one in every of solely a handful of girls at a significant match. On plenty of events, she’s felt as if she was involuntarily representing all girls as a result of, as she factors out, “if I do well, I’ll be doing well ‘for a girl’, but if I do badly, I’m doing badly ‘because I’m a girl’.”
The prevalence of this type of angle in direction of girls who play games is why the Team Siren video has had such a long-lasting destructive impact. For Chui, it encapsulates all of the pretend gamer woman stereotypes that makes the videogame house exhausting for girls to exist inside.
the showdown
Corelia Chui is a vocal supporter of the WSOE all-girl Hearthstone match. Speaking concerning the necessity for all-girl competitions, she explains, “people forget the difference between how we would like it to be and how it is. It’s not how we want the future of esports to look, but it’s a necessary bridge between now and then.”
“A lot of young girls think you can’t play games and be girly, that you can’t enjoy makeup and videogames at the same time, because girls who wear makeup are one type of girl and girls who play games are another type of girl,” Chui says. “Team Siren was just another way for everyone to laugh at the mythical trope of the fake gamer girl who only plays games to get the attention of guys. It’s a sad story.”
This trope is one thing that each Jun and Chui carry up. In reality, each feminine skilled I’ve spoken to has described the catch-22 of desirous to be supplied with alternatives, similar to some other professional, however not desirous to be the token lady.
“Nobody wants to feel as though people only care what you think because you’re a woman,” Chui says. “I don’t know what opportunities I might have gotten if I were a guy. All I can really say is that the opportunities that you get as a woman tend to be based around flattery. I want to be given opportunities as much as the next person, but I also want to be taken seriously as an esports professional.”
Even extra shocking is the vocal minority of people that, as Chui places it, “believe that there is a notable biological difference between men and women when it comes to videogames.” A fast web search on this topic will reveal discussion board posts and in depth blogs the place individuals argue this level, citing hand-eye coordination and spatial consciousness as if it had been proof.
Jun believes strongly that the answer to all of those issues lies in how we educate youthful gamers. “Fostering this in high school is a good thing,” she says. “Creating communities of female gamers at a high school level would transition them well into professional gaming.”
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Chui agrees, describing how she “would have killed to have a high school League of Legends team” when she was a young person. She’s additionally optimistic concerning the future. “It’s getting way better,” she says. “I meet more and more girls who game competitively today than ever before and I do believe that there will come a time when we have as many female competitors as male competitors.”
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