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Girls in the Gaming World
dkleinsc writes "The BBC is running an article about life as a female gaming squad. There's some discussion about the welcome or lack thereof women get in the gaming community, and arguments over whether it's a good idea to have separate women's matches."
and arguments over whether it's a good idea to have separate women's matches."
Why? This isn't real life, where men have more muscle than women do (I'm not being sexist, just take an intro biology course), and are therefore superior to women in terms of pure strength, speed, etc. Online, everybody's equal, the characters can be tuned to roughly equivalent stats, the only thing that matters is reflexes to move the mouse and hit the keyboard.
Does anyone else see this as an attempt to make an issue out of a non-issue? Games are marketed towards guys because guys make up the vast majority of the gaming market. Why don't they target the elderly with hiphop music? Becuase its more cost effective to target the younger crowd. Girls gaming? Great... But no one should complain about the fact that way more guys game then girls. Thats the girl's own preogatives.
The imbalance between men and women was clear to see, with almost 50 male teams taking part, compared with just seven female squads. And as in the world of sport, there were separate competitions for each gender.
Separate competitions? That is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard.
Boys' and girls' real-world sports are separated early on because of physical attributes. Physically, girls have different abilities from boys. And there are other physical attributes that cause both genders to become... distracted.
But online? Who knows -- who cares -- about your real-world attributes? For crying out loud, that's what makes gaming great for us geeks -- we don't have to be muscular, or fit, or even easily mobile! I'd probably lose 10-to-1 against Stephen Hawking at BZFlag.
So in a world where physical ability and differences are irrelevant, what justification could there possibly be for a gender-segregated gaming tournament?
Perhaps the organizers have a cynical ulterior motive? If I were a top-level girl geek, I'd turn down an invitation to such a demeaning event -- so all they'd get would be the second-rate girl teams. And then they can say "but look, they're clearly not in the same league."
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Where have I heard that one before?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
...and they want to bring it back in? I play some of these games and not once in my mind has the gender of my teammate or opponents has ever entered my mind. In fact it would be a distraction. Thinking that someone has an advantage in a game because they are male or female is like trying to figure out if someone has an advantage if they are right or left handed. If someone wins or loses they do so because they are an accomplished or failed player. Gender has very little to do with it.
The one place where competition can be leveled down to fundemental non-physical attributes, a place where women can actually compete on equal footing as guys, they want to bring back gender divisions? I just don't get it.
That is 1,000% true. Women (or percieved women) always get special treatment in gaming situations, be it on a MUD, FPS, MMORPG, doesn't matter. People used to send my girlfriend RL Purchaseable items for her MUD, especially if they asked to see her picture. It's the same tendency that causes most men to do "chivalrous" things for women: somewhere deep down they think this is getting them one step closer to getting laid.
...
To quote the great Chris Rock, "Can I help you with that? Can I help you with some dick?"
And as to getting schooled, I'm sure most gamers wouldn't mind Stevie Case (AKA KillCreek) walking all over them in a game of Quake III. Hell, if she can take John Romero to the cleaners
Xbox reviews.. We think they're funny.
I'll probably get modded down, because no one of either gender every listens to me, but.....
Since many major online games (UT, Quake, etc) offer granularity of servers, I imagine there's probably alredy "girls only" servers and other private interest group servers just the same (password protected, et al).
It seems natural. We already have television networks (several) specifically for genders. Chat rooms for certain interests.
Now, with all that said, I can't say I mind competing with/losing to a girl. I don't understand the need for specific major competitions specifically for females. In fact, I'd imagine that 'being a male' as a requirement for a competition would probably result in legal action.
-m.
Since there is no way to mod this "Duh", I had to respond.
OF COURSE! Have you ever played an online game? There are always those who are (or pretend to be) loud-mouthed, homophobic, racist, misogynist, immature dick-heads. They usually are the ones who cheat and play like tools. They either really are that ignorant, or they do it just to cause a stir and piss people off. Being female would only garner a different type of insult from these morons. They are what make online gaming so annoying. But it is so much fun and gratifying to own them. :-)
Now I know that not everyone is like this, but the ones who aren't don't care who they are playing against. Most of the time you don't know anyway, you just know people by their screen names and your past experiences with them. For all I know, some of them are women.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
What exacally is wrong with girls gaming? I'm a female. I love video games... and I play well. Why should I have to play against all girls because some little 15 y/o boy is afraid I will beat him? Any male who thinks we should be seperated needs to grow up. It won't hurt your ego that bad to loose to a girl.
-ABG
Oh yes... but this article is about Counter-Strike competitions where females don't get the participate in the same brackets as male, and don't get to try and win the big cash prizes. Now please enlighten us as to how this is justifyable by saying girls prefer other games genres. I guess because the game is not targetted at them, they can't play it at the same level as men ?
It's a load of crock if you ask me. It's men afraid that their testosteron levels will be going down if they get beat by a girl. Get over yourselves. Even if only 1% of Counter-strike gamers are girls, it doesn't mean that they are the worst 1% of players. And it also doesn't mean that they can't play in a "no-girls allowed" tournement (you know the kind, where 8 year old boys don't want to catch cooties and stuff). And that they can't win the same prize money. This is not a sport where physical differences would tip the scale. Girls and boys handle mices and keyboards with the same skill.
I personnally don't see why women can't participate at the same level and even against men in this type of event.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
Let them compete on an equal footing initially. If it really turns out that there is such a clear deliniation in ability, then you have a great case for a separate league. If not, then we've just eliminated a lot of unnecessary organizational overhead.
.
Seems fairly straigtforward.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
Hear hear. I could be beaten by blind,pre-pubescent paraplegics with bad hearing all the live-long day and I'd still enjoy the experience. But it's ruined when some whiny brat from Jerkwater, USA calls me a "cheting haker" because I got a head-shot.Once.
To think that only women are subject to abuse is either naievity or ego.
I just want to say that the comments from the male crowd here alone is a very good indication of why there aren't as many girl gamers.
We simply do not get any respect.
A common misconception about girls that play games is that they play "boring online games", such as Yahoo games, solitare, chess or whatever. Yes, many girls play those kinds of games. However, so do many guys. The thing is, most of those guys would never post here, and most of those girls are the only ones the average slashdotter would see (Yeah, I'm using a stereotype here, so sue me).
Another common misconception is that games are marketed towards guys because there aren't as many girls that do play "the cool" games. This is a matter of market forces. While I agree that there are fewer girls that play games than guys, the number of girls that play games isn't really that low. In fact, most of my female friends play games. Females make up 51% of the world population, after all, so there's a HUGE market out there.
A third misconception is that girls aren't interested in games. Totally wrong, see above. Girls ARE interested in games. Obviously.
These are misconceptions that are repeated constantly. We girls are simply seen as people who aren't techy. If one of us IS, then we're seen as not as competent as a guy. If we prove to be competent, then we suddenly turn into a threat. All of those are reasons to talk down to girls, not just in gaming, but in other areas as well.
I can tell you one thing that girls are though. We're not interested in being called names, just because we try to show an interest in the very same field as guys.
Maybe, just maybe, more girls would confess to being gamers if they weren't insulted whenever they tried it.
(Okay, maybe this post wasn't so thought through, but I'm currently busy starving myself to keep my figure.... or maybe I'm just delirious from coding all day and forgetting to eat. Bah, whatever.)
That says to me that the girls can be just as good as the guys. Why should they be limited from playing in any particular bracket in a tournament? I can't think of a good reason...unless I didn't think I could beat them.
The problem I see is with the article rather than with the tournaments. This is the first time I've heard of a tournament that had seperate brackets for males and females. In most cases, men and women competed on the same ladders with mixed or unmixed teams, their choice. As far as I'm aware of, the push for female-only ladders came from female-only clans, not from male-only clans (and to my knowledge, few clans are male-only by choice of the members). Each clan I've participated in has welcomed any female member that was up to the normal membership requirements of the clan, which has resulted in a handful of female members over the years between the 3 clans. The only reason there weren't more female members is because there weren't more female players looking to join (one exception in my memory being a point at which membership closed while a female was being actively recruited, because the clan decided to stop playing the game rather than bringing in 6-10 new players).
-PainKilleR-[CE]
The thing that seems off about your post is how you're confusing videogames with sports. The physical differences (such as lower center of gravity, muscle-length / breadth, and etc.) that tend to delineate the female and male classes in sports don't really apply to videogames. PS: Chess grandmaster Anjelina Belakovskaia 1995, in case you were wondering. More recently, Alexandra Kosteniuk was ranked #29 over all in U.S. Chess on December 2003 (http://www.uschess.org/ratings/top/dec03/OverallL ist.php) which is ranked regardless of gender or age. She's only 20.
PPS: I regularly manage to kick people's asses in videogames, regardless of their gender. It's probably my lower center of gravity helping me.
I don't want the world, I just want your half.
The sad thing is that homophobic (gay, fag, queer), racist (jew, nigger, coon), and/or other inoffensive language (rape, cocksucker) seem to be a standard part of the lexicon for a large percentage gamers.
Frankly, I find this unacceptable. I'm not homosexual but I do find homophobic language offensive, and the same goes for the other, less acceptable language that crop up on almost every public gaming service.
I find it both funny and sad that these kids (and most of the people who resort to such language are kids) think nothing of using language that they wouldn't dare use at the dinner table or to a someone they bumped into at the mall to sound "cool" and "macho" online.
And it's amazing how far they'll take it: I've had people threaten to track me down in real life and kill me and my family, rape our corpses and then rip our heads off and shit down our necks. If it wasn't so laughable at the time then I would have been well within my rights to report the matter to the relevant authorities. I'd love to see some 13 year-old sat down on the couch with his parents and a pair of law enforcement officers explaining that he regularly sent death threats to people just because they outclassed him in a game.
The fact is that as long as this sort of behaviour is accepted or even tolerated by the majority of online gaming communities then those communities will remain the domain of teenagers who have bigger mouths and egos than brains.
There's no doubt in my mind that, whilst most men would shrug their shoulders, dismiss the idiots as part of life and just carry on gaming, most women will not tolerate such stuff.
As my girlfriend put it when she saw some of the stuff that gets spewed out by some of these people, "What idiot would say that kind of stuff and why would you want to spend your free time listening to it?"
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Yes, signing up for a privately run tournament that happens to have a male and female ladder is such discrimination. I mean the we should merge the NBA and WNBA or the PGA and WPGA. Granted, there is a big difference between a keyboard and mouse and playing basket ball, but still the point stands. There is segregation all over the place. In fact, most of the time there if a female tourny, they can also play in the "open" tournament. It's okay to have the Black Enterntainment Network, but if I started the White Entertainment Network I would be a racist. It's okay to have a female tourny and a open tourny, but if you have a female and a male, people bust a fucking gasket. I'm not against female gamers either. I like them. Gamer chicks are cool. I have several as friends. However, not every thing is a horrible injustice requiring a lawsuit.