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E-Sports Gender Gap: 90+% Male
An anonymous reader writes "An e-sports production company has published the results of a survey into the demographics of the gamers who attend competition events. Even though nearly half of the gaming population is composed of women, they account for less than 10% of the players in competitions. The e-sports company, WellPlayed, said, '[A] whopping 90-94% of the viewers were male, and interestingly enough, only about half of the remaining survey takers felt comfortable being identified as female.' The results were taken from survey responses over the past year at competitions for StarCraft 2 and League of Legends. DailyDot makes the point that competitive gaming communities also tend not to be racially diverse. Quoting: 'Although no studies have been done about race in esports, it only takes one trip to a Major League Gaming event to confirm what Cannon says. With the notably racially diverse exception of the fighting-game community, Asians and white Americans make up an enormous portion of esports players and fans. Black and Middle Eastern esports fans are conspicuously missing.'"
WTF is an e-sport?
I'm sorry but playing StarCraft 2 is not a sport. It's a video game.
Wonderful. Another story based on the assumption that absolutely everyone should be absolutely equally interested in absolutely everything.
*Shock* *amazement* they're not. Unless the venue is telling women, black people, and Middle Eastern people they're not allowed in the door, there is no story here.
Oh and if women are uncomfortable identifying themselves as female, maybe it's because stories like this keep making it into a Great Big Deal. Maybe they just want to be a person and not *OMFG A WOMAN IS HERE!* all the time.
Well, according to the "equality of outcome" school of thinking that dominates progressive thinking and policies, this amounts to racism. Therefore, the government must intervene in order to restore the preferred state, namely a statistically representative distribution of all genders and races.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
abuse victims abuse... why would current & former victims want to watch?
Well duh. When black kids want to play sports they go outside outside and play - basketball, football, whatever they just play. If they want to dunk, they dunk.
There's one Asian guy who can dunk. The rest have to dunk from the couch. Is it not obvious why little Asian high school kids aren't on the high school football team? There's a safety issue there. Look at the NFL and NFA - thousands of black guys, 34 white, and two Asian. The white guys who want to play do so via Madden 2013.
Slashdot posting about a problem that doesn't exist.
This just in: only one in one hundred quilters are male! Where's the outcry?!?!
All this study says to me is that White Males and Asian Males typically have more free time capable to dedicate to this sort of endeavor.
Men and women are not equal in everything, regardless of what people may want to belief. There are differences in physical and mental capabilities, career inclinations and aspirations and a lot of other physical and psychological traits. Trying to conform men to women behavior and women to men behavior is a violence our political society tries to do to people, is ironically comparable to what it did in the past trying to make homosexual people straight.
In this day and age, where laws do not only grant equality of rights, but try to enforce equality of results, whenever there is a gender gap it is because it is part of what makes us different and the freer we get to choose the greater the gender gap will become. In a general manner, social gaps that can be closed by force are social gaps that should not be closed.
Not only does this provide more toys, it also allows more leisure for their offspring.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Really? Does this term really have serious traction or is it another blogger term that is being used for page clicks?
It's called Video Games, and real players embrace that term.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Women in ESports are still making their mark on the scene. Early on it was just Tossgirl the first female pro to compete in all male leagues for Starcraft one. Along with her coach January coached one of the first Starcraft teams. And now Starcraft 2 is making head way for females in competitive gaming. "Ladies of the Swarm", http://wiki.teamliquid.net/sta... , is a great tournament run by all women and has a pretty decent prizepool too. While females in competitive gaming is trailing behind there is no lack of involvement. The best interviewers, translators, and hosts for major Starcraft events are run by ladies. They all do a great job too and it has been a pleasure to meet many of them. Other then this being a slew of statistics, it doesn't really show anything new in the article or attempt to suggest solutions to this "problem." Females, whether gamers or ESports entertainers, get their opportunities as equally as men do. And in fact they are welcomed with open arms from the Starcraft community. And if it means anything, one of the top non-Korean progamers is a female.
You can't expect this to have any kind of semblance to any real social sporting institution or to be held to the same standards.
Quite - despite the purported gender gap and the various potential explanations for it, not even autistic vidya game nerds can keep up with the amount of misogyny required by professional sporting clubs.
Also they've all got prescriptions for their performance-enhancing adderall, so it's not technically doping.
nothing but white bread at the Dave Matthews concert
The vast majority of people who are serious enough about a game like SC2 or LOL to watch it online are male. Is it any surprise that the majority of attendees at an event who are there to watch it in person are male?
The majority of of the Major League Gaming events are in the United States. The percent of people in the USA that look like they're from the "Middle East" is vanishingly small. "Serious" gaming like SC2 or LOL requires a decent computer at the $500+ range. (monitors, keyboard, and mouse included) It also requires a decent internet connection especially in an age where LAN play is no longer widely available. A decent internet connection in the US costs at least $20 a month. Given the income distribution of the US (slanted heavily towards whites and asians), is it any surprise that the racial profile of competitive gamers mirrors that of people well off enough to afford the equipment?
Is there a gender gap in competitive chess? Yes. (Isolated/small team improvement training much like in gaming)
Is there a gender gap in competitive football? Yes. (Very high commitment of time and energy for a very small chance of making it big much like in gaming)
Is there a gender gap in computer science? Yes. (Many indications of passive/unconscious exclusion of women and blacks due to the attraction/selection/attrition process)
Is there a gender gap in cheerleading? Yes. (Social stereotypes that discourage many from participating if they are not $Physical Trait and $Racial Trait, people don't consider it a "real sport," etc.)
Why should we be surprised or upset that there's a gender gap in competitive gaming?
In my experience, most competitive/pro gamers have a Napoleon/Alpha Male complex. Congratulations, you're the best at playing a videogame! Those skills don't typically contribute to anything outside of gaming. It is not at all surprising to hear about a gender gap in competitive and pro gaming...
Prostitution Gender Gap: 95% female, 5% male.
I don't see social programs toward moving more males into prostitution. Nobody sees this a problem.
Why anyone should see gender inequality in gaming as 1st world problem?
Let girls be girls.
The statistical probability of meeting one is just 0 :P
Women play"games" like candy crush and farmville. That's why they don't watch e-sports.
And storytelling. Girls like storytelling.
Since you like libeling me? You ran from this "Chumpy" -> http://yro.slashdot.org/commen...
(You sure "talk a good game" -> http://games.slashdot.org/comm... but you can't even produce a MERE SCRIPT!, windbag...)
You aren't even on the level of a "script kiddie", & full of HOT AIR!
You certainly won't reply there in that 2nd link I posted either, as that would remove your downmods to my posts like this one you can't validly disprove or justify your downmod on -> http://games.slashdot.org/comm...
Oh, I suspect that IS the case here (simply logging out of a registered account & trolling by ac is a common troll trick around here OR using alternate registered 'luser' accounts sockpuppets to do the job will also, & Lumpy is LOADED with those & trolling - which doesn't matter: He PROVES he's all talk, no action (or skills, OR brains, lol))
(You're all TALK, & NO action "CHUMPY!)
* :)
(You know it, I know it, & so does anyone reading AND laughing their asses off @ you now... lol!)
APK
P.S.=> Answer the question in the subject-line Lumpy - since you had to "eat your wrods" in the 1st link above flavored with your FOOT IN YOUR MOUTH + the "bitter taste of SELF-defeat", lol...
... apk
Women can play e-sports too, if they are not as interested in it as men, so what?
And the NHL, arguably more athletic and dangerous than the NBA or NFL, is 95+% white dudes. Explain that one!
WellPlayed, said, '[A] whopping 90-94% of the viewers were male, and interestingly enough, only about half of the remaining survey takers felt comfortable being identified as female.'
If half the remaining survey takers didn't reveal their sex (assuming this is in fact what is meant by the above), how can one profess to know they are female?
how many pairs of boxer shorts should you own?
My first instinct was to think that the competitive nature of e-sports would be more likely to attract men than women, as men are "naturally" more competitive when playing games, while women (in my experience) tend to play games either to socialize or relax. It is a very broad brush to paint the two sexes with, but as we are basically looking at a sub-section of men (those who are interested in playing or watching e-sports) versus an entire gender (women, specifically why are there not more of them playing/watching e-sports) any comparisons are going to be a bit disingenuous.
However, I suspect that a large percentage of people who chose not to declare their gender in the survey are doing so out of a sense of privacy, rather than a desire to hide the "fact" that they are women... unless they are also attending the venue where the survey is taken while wearing androgynous clothing designed to mask their gender, and expect to be pounced on like an antelope surrounded by a pack of hungry lions if there is even a hint of femininity (disturbingly, that is probably not far from the truth in some cases).
The problem with saying "half of gamers are female" is in how you identify someone as a "gamer." If you identify someone who plays phone games but doesn't own a console and hasn't purchased a AAA game since they left high school as a "gamer," you're not going to be pulling from the same pool as people who would be interested in actually playing StarCraft II or League of Legends competitively. For the purposes of identifying the gender game in e-sports, those casual gamers are not "gamers." And if that means that the pool of available players shifts to something like 75% male (I have no idea if this is true or not, this is entirely a hypothetical), then the gender gap does not appear *as* bad (but obviously would still exist). And if that means the pool shifts to 90% male, then the gender game as it applies to e-sports basically does not exist, because the gender gap in e-sports would be a result of the gender game in competitive games in general, and not an e-sports specific problem.
I have to disagree.
When the competitors have to train harder than real sports athletes and have shorter shelf lives than Olympic athletes, it is a real sport.
E-sports simply is more competitive, and shows of far more impressive, super-human, skill than its RL analogue.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
I meant "gender gap."
To be fare, we should have known better the moment 22 grown-ass men decided to get together and chase after a ball using nothing but their heads and feet...
Then again, there is the matter of shoes and jewellery...
Black and Middle Eastern esports fans are conspicuously missing.
Hispanics make up 17% of the US population and aren't mentioned at all. What's up with that?
Those of Middle Eastern ancestry make up .42% of the US population. That would be 4 people at a 1000 person convention. The small percentage makes it very easy to skew the over/under representation.
You don't have to be able to throw or jump in hockey except *after* you score a goal, or your team has won the game.
More seriously, skating does not consume anywhere nearly as much energy per unit of time as running at the equivalent speeds... and since you did say it was only "arguably" more athletic, I figured that meant it would be okay to argue with you.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
You don't need to be able to jump really high to play hockey.
Am I the only one who looks at these things and thinks, "Well, DUUUUUUhhh."
The marketing departments know it. The psychologists know it. Why does anyone think this is an issue?
If you hand my daughters a 4x4 post, they're going to sit it on end and dance around it.
If you had the same 4x4 post to my son, he's going to beat the shit out of things.
What makes the difference?
_BALLS_
So why is this considered a problem?
This seems like another veiled attack on masculinity to me.
Make up your mind. The summery keeps switching between the two, like they are the same thing.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Cost of entry. Even as a white dude with a decent income, hockey is one of the few things that is off the table for my kids, because it's just too expensive. The amount of training that people put their kids through in Hockey in unlike any sport out there. You won't see kids who only ever played on an outdoor rink making it into the professional leagues. 20 years ago, that might have happened. But parents now spend thousands of dollars per year putting their kids in training camps, travelling leagues, and all other sorts of expensive endeavors, making the sport completely inaccessible to low income families, and even middle income families who don't want to devote all their resources to the sport.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
So we know that roughly half of all gamers are women yet nearly none attend these events. First, I would like to see a breakdown of game genre's between men and women. There are differences in the way we approach the world, and therefor the worlds these games provide. Of course this cannot be exclusive, my GF prefers Grand Theft Auto over Portal, so let's assume there is little difference in the games being played.
Here's the problem: marketing. These events are being marketed to people with the mindset in my above quote from the article, because the marketers have a stereotypical, gender role assigning mindset and approach.
The NFL got things right. They took an event the was stereotypicaly assigned to men, realized they were missing half the potential viewership, and marketed successfully to both men and women.
The fact that an esports Production company is conducting this survey tells me that someone in their marketing department got a clue and realized they were only marketing to half their potential revenue stream. So in defense of the sexism, it's a brand new industry trying to figure itself and it's market out. To apply my own stereotype, I would be willing to venture that this entire business model originated from immature young males. If the survey is an indication that they are considering an environment friendly to both sides, marketing and advertising are powerful things and honestly I don't think it would take a whole lot to turn this mess around.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Another great slashdot story, not
Who gives a fuck, why do I still visit this shit site?
Big deal. Not everything has to be gender neutral, or racially diverse. And if it's not, that's not evidence of a conspiracy or something that has to be corrected...
If women as a group really care - they can start a group...
If Race X as a group really cares, they too can start a group...
The groups can then choose (or not) to compete against each other...
That's because testosterone makes us competitive and aggressive where as most women find a lot of games pointless. That is THE reason, this isn't a problem, this isn't sexism, and this isn't an article worth reading. The end.
If you had the same 4x4 post to my son, he's going to beat the shit out of things.
hey .... is that you Dad? You need to pick me up at the local precinct again.
The porn industry has some amazingly sexist statistics. It's a very sexist industry. Something needs to be done about that!! We have to encourage more women to enjoy watching porn and more men to engage in producing it. Yeah... equality in all business and recreation. That's the ticket!
http://psychology.wichita.edu/...
The numbers pretty much match up. This is simply a gender based preference. Argument that "women play more but are discriminated against in competitive scene" which is what these claims usually push appears to be patently false - the issue is that women are simply not interested in comeptitive gaming, preferring cooperative gaming instead.
E-sports simply is more competitive, and shows of far more impressive, super-human, skill than its RL analogue.
By what judgement do you claim it's far more impressive? I've played plenty of videogames and plenty of sports. The top professionals in all of them seem very, very far away. I've actually raced alongside a professional XC racer: the usual staged start, but he got a puncture almost straight out of the gate and so was passed by the entire field, myself included. Seeing him in action in conditions I was riding was frankly incredible.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
And the NHL, arguably more athletic and dangerous than the NBA or NFL, is 95+% white dudes. Explain that one!
Everyone knows that hockey is the national past time in Canada, as such we get a controlling stake in the say of who gets to play. No one, not even Americans can tell us otherwise. Now that I've let the secret out though, we can't have you spreading it around...
Om, nomnomnom...
MACHISM OVER HERE!! smallcharacterstobalanceoff
1. "It Is The Tools (Stupid)." And by that I mean "the tools" I mean the software used to watch and participate. None of this is exactly "user friendly" or easily discoverable. I don't play "League of Legends" but I do play "Dota 2" a lot and you have to actively follow reddit.com/r/Dota2 and know where to look for the information on the software let alone matches. It is difficult if not impossible to even use social "share" mechanism. And even using the hooks offered from Twitch.tv into FB/G+/Twitter just means your "regular" page becomes a spammy mess.
This isn't about "dumbing down" or "making it easy for girls". If you want casual players to participate by simply watching a match that can be a chore even for hard core gamers because they haven't followed "the scene".
2. I am suspicious of the data because a lot of the metrics that float around for "Dota 2" don't even collect "gender". Dotabuff.com catalogs a huge volume of stats on all matches played where it can tell you things win/loss of any particular hero, item popularity, stats for some players (that enable public posting), and a bunch of other tidbits but for all of the data and stat tracking it has it can't answer a simple question: How many matches where played by women? There are 530,000,000~ matches stored and yet there is no evidence supporting it either way. Using one survey at one event (is this even a major?) is the definition of "inconclusive".
For nerds? Check. News? Not so much.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
99% of men have some health care by the time they are adults but less then 99% of men are nurses. Why are we discriminating against men!
99% of men had a elementary school education but there are less then 50% male teachers discrimination i say!
Plus they do chromosome testing at the E_sports events, so the 50% of male gamers that pretend to be women on-line can't pass at the event.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
And the NHL ... is 95+% white dudes
Hockey is the national sport of Canada. Canada is 95+% white.
Purely subjective.
I have never been impressive by any RL sport. The results we see seem completely plausible for someone who has dedicated their lives to it. In fact, they have always disappointed me. I do not understand how someone would dedicate their life to being the best archer, dart-er, bowler (etc.) and ever make a less than absolutely perfect shoot/performance. I myself, having bowled 3 times in my life have gotten a large number of strikes. In my opinion, any professional bowler that ever bowls a less than perfect 300 point game is a failure. Professional athletes should be roboticly perfect.
The problem with this is that it would make professional bowling (and so many other sports) obsolete. After you got to a certain level, their would be no reason to complete as you have reached the plateau of perfection where everyone is equally perfect at the game. I think it is likely that this huge incentive to not be perfect subconsciously prevents people from getting this good.
Starcraft does not have this. You can always be faster, and the strategy (intellectual level) in the game is not even comparable to football of any other RL sport (in many ways even far beyond chess). But for whatever reason, in my opinion these sport's athletes do push what is is to be human beyond what you might think is possible.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
I love watching nature. The female deer come out every spring and engage in these amazing head-butting fights to see who will win the docile males. Or something like that.
Of course, there are exceptions to behavior patterns among individuals. But facts are facts, and male (not-equals) female.
You're a fucking retard.
Are you serious? You think because you have some natural bowling ability that becoming "roboticly perfect" should be common? Did you ever notice that human bodies aren't perfect? That wooden lanes aren't perfect? That the oiling of the lane isn't perfectly distributed? That the pins aren't perfect in weight and shape? Too many variables.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
The numbers for sporting events are the same for e-sporting events: most viewers are male.
The results we see seem completely plausible for someone who has dedicated their lives to it.
I have a feeling that you don't do much by the way of RL sports.
It might look "plausible" to an armchair expert, but unless you've tried it then it's impossible to know quite how hard it is. You will never come close to doing a 2 hour marathon, no matter how hard you try, because you almost certainly don't have the physiology for it.
Likewise you will never be a top level wrestler.
Or basketball player (you're too short).
Or cricketer (professional bowlers are huge, huge men).
Or cyclist (that and you almost certainly don't take enough drugs either).
I do not understand how someone would dedicate their life to being the best archer, dart-er, bowler (etc.) and ever make a less than absolutely perfect shoot/performance.
That's a hilarious claim. Person who has never done something doesn't understand how it can be hard.
I myself, having bowled 3 times in my life have gotten a large number of strikes.
Well, well done. I guess you have some degree of natural talent for it. What are you scoring on average? And furthermore, can you keep that up consistently. It's mildly unliklely, but not implausible to play 3 beyond average games in a row.
In my opinion, any professional bowler that ever bowls a less than perfect 300 point game is a failure.
I'll bet you make a great (I believe the US expression is) armchair quaterback too.
Not sure it's troll, but it's quite funny how you had 3 decent games of bowling in your life and extend that to a criticism of all professional sports.
Professional athletes should be roboticly perfect.
Why should they be? According to you, perhaps. But humans aren't robots.
I think it is likely that this huge incentive to not be perfect subconsciously prevents people from getting this good.
I'd love to watch you go up to a professional athlete and tell them with a straight face that the reason they're not better is because subconciously they want to be imperfect in order to preserve the sport.
The whole point of professional athletes is to strive to be as good as they can. They cannot achieve perfection because they are human.
TL;DR I very much get the impression you have never done any sort of physical activity to any sort of level at all.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
People are capable of perfection. Someone who dedicates their life to something should be incredibly good at something.
As another example, I have no idea how professional basketball players can ever miss a shot, from any distance within a basketball court. It is not plausible to me that someone who dedicated their lives to it can ever miss.
Not common, just possible with millions of hours of practice. After ten years, and your brain has be completely rewired to be basket ball dominating machine, being so incapable of perfection is astounding to me. People achieve this perfection in other disciplines.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
I really wanted to use this meme, I like it a lot.
So they've got that going for them, which is nice.
It's also 90% antisocial assholes. Its a pit of the very worst personalities in the online gaming community and I'm glad they keep to themselves. The girls stay away because they know it's not worth trying to insert themselves in to such a toxic environment.
Soulkey, is that you?
You're lucky Dear didn't compete in more matches.
It's almost as if girls are actively made to feel unwelcome in gamer culture or something.
That we like something that other white dudes and asian dudes are into? Fuck no. It's fine. Not everyone has to like every thing. If only white guys like it, that doesn't mean that something must be WRONG with it, or white guys, or that the whole institution is sexist and/or racist.
The NBA isn't very racially diverse, and has 0 sexual diversity. Who gives a fuck?
I'm not convinced you've ever watched a hockey game. The athletes aren't gliding on the ice; they're effectively running on it and they do travel far more distance than most other sports require. Not to take away from the physical demands of other sports, but there is a reason most hockey shifts are only a few minutes long.
I... I don't think you know the meaning of the word?
How does this compare with other competitive activities? Without a reference point there is no basis for any assumption.
My (totally non-scientific) guess is that this is just a consequence of how the genders are raised. Boys are usually encouraged to take sports and play with cars while woman are encouraged to play with dolls and play instruments. This favors boys to have a more obsessive drive to master a subject, be it sports, science, or competitive videogames.
In the popular eSports titles (LoL, Dota 2, SC2, CS GO and a few more) there are many competitive female teams and there are also many female tournaments.
However, their skill level is simply far away from that of male teams and the female tournaments are also significantly smaller.
But that's not really a problem.
What's really the problem is the sexism in the community. Often, female teams are only reduced to what their members look like. Going through commets (before the mods clean them up), you can see plenty of evidence of this.
Since I regularly play competitive (CS GO) myself with mixed teams, I just keep witnessing it over and over again. Once you hear a female voice in teamspeak/ventrilo/mumble (with VoIP you can't really hide your gender), there is surely gonna be at least one male players that's gonna make a comment.
Interestingly enough there seem to be many female gamers that kind of enjoy the extra attention too.
But still, there is a significant amount of male gamers that are simply sexist towards female gamers.
One very interesting case is that of the Canadian female SC2 pro gamer Sasha 'Scarlett' Hostyn. Currently she's considered the best foreigner by many (Koreans are Koreans and the rest of the world are foreigners in SC2, because Koreans dominate so hard and there are only few Non-Korean that can keep up with them... barely)
She was born as a male, but feels as a female.
Well sadly, there are many many male players that make a lot of fun of her.
(here a very good article about it from Day9 who's a rather famous SC2 commentator: http://day9.tv/d/Philosopher/a... )
Better have 100++ modpoints Lumpy to go with your sockpuppets too - see your post history, chump!
(Especially since I KNOW why you won't post here using your "registered 'luser'" acct. -> http://games.slashdot.org/comm... since it will remove ALL downmods YOU applied prior to that post in response to you there... lol, I am PRETTY SURE it was you doing those, so let's see YOU post there (that, or you used sockpuppets to do so)).
You "Run, Forrest - RUN!!!" from THIS challenge in parenthesis above?
Man - I will have your ASS same way I caught tomhudson = Barbara, not Barbie using BOTH of those sockpuppet multiple accounts for trolling... lol!
* Like I said: I will win... - I do, ALWAYS!
(Especially, vs. no-mind/done zeros like yourself in the art & science of computing (especially in comparison to myself).
APK
P.S.=> By the way, Lumpy? ANY commercially sold code to your name that was a 2 yr. in a ROW finalist @ MS-TechEd? Mine was 2000-2002!
Additionally - JUST like how I shot you DOWN easily with concrete, verifiable & UNDENIABLE facts you RAN from, here (with Mr. Steven Burn who works for malwarebytes) -> http://yro.slashdot.org/commen... ...?
Yes - I can do the EXACT SAME on what I noted now, albeit w/ Mr. Eric Dickman, owner of SuperSpeed.com (whose ware my idea & code made that very set of apps 40% faster for that very set of technical conferences)
So - how about you, BIG talker - answer that question that starts ouf my 'p.s.' here!
I doubt it on YOUR end, dunce... lol!
... apk
women are smarter then that?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
These comments are a great example of one of the big drivers of the gap. The gaming community is hostile towards women. When someone says "women are less good at gaming than men," that's textbook stereotype threat. My wife and I play games together, and when we play Dota2 she won't talk unless we know everyone on our team, because people freak out when they hear a female voice. When she does talk, she gets friend requests after (not an exaggeration).
To what extent the hostile environment prevents women from competing in or enjoying esports I don't know. But I do have personal experience of it being a problem.
You clearly don't see the problem.
Lets say you are a new guy (or girl) who has only heard of "Dota 2" from the guys at work who won't stop talking about it so you want to watch a few games to see for yourself. You need to install the client which isn't that hard (as difficult as anything else on Steam) but it is not stupidly trivial either. You can try the default settings but that is a "your mileage may vary" situation where one might have to tweak the graphical settings to get a smooth running display. Now that you have system setup what game do you watch. As you astutely point out there is a big fat WATCH button at the top but the problem is that it is a giant list of games of public games which are of varying quality but ultimately not that important matches. Tournaments are on the other tab and those are better quality matches and often have commentary attached but they (often) require buying a ticket which may be a shock to someone new.
Finding out what is going on the next episode of "Survivor" is easy. Finding out when the next game for the Boston Celtics is easy. Finding out when the next game Na'vi is going to play is difficult. Where is "corey" from Zephyr right now? You have to follow their FB page and follow reddit.com and even follow a few players to figure out the right time to be online to start watching. All of that makes it hard if not impossible for anyone who wants to be casual about following games because by the time they see this stuff pop up in a new feed or whatever it is too late.
The point is that for a new guy, they are given no clues on what to watch or when to watch or even why they should bother to pay money to watch. Forget the gender thing, the only people who are watching competitive MOBA games know exactly what they are doing and the neophytes are left out. No one should be shocked that random men or women aren't interested because its convoluted to follow and sustain interest.
In the case of basketball, bear in mind that aside from free throws, every player who has devoted their life to learning to shoot baskets has a guy in their face who's devoted their life to (among other things) stopping you from making that basket.
Just make the games for women easier and bore men away. More women, less men... ratio improved. Problem solved.
I've never really understood the point of sporting video games. If you're playing a game, why wouldn't you fly a spaceship or kill aliens or build a railway or raid tombs or do something that you couldn't otherwise do in real life?
Why play a soccer video game when you can just go outside and play soccer?
(Exceptions, of course, for those people with physical disabilities. If you like soccer and don't have use of your legs I suppose it makes sense, but I also assume this is a small minority of players.)
why do pro b-ball players miss? stress, fatigue, defender's pressure, sweat changing the physical properties of the hand/ball contact.
If you went to a training session you'd see a very long series of successful throws.
Also players have different tasks assigned to them and not everybody is valued by his raw scoring skills. Dennis Rodman was all about defense so even if he knew how to throw in his youth, that skill went unused and detoriated.
My sides!
Have gnu, will travel.
Women need a league of their own.......preferably one without a Madonna movie attached to it.
I think e-sports competitors have to train just as hard, and have a far shorter shelf life than Olympic class curlers.
(Which may have been your point. It could read either way)
I like women. Heck, my wife an daughter are women. It's unusual that it is almost necessary to define that these days. But when I see women linebackers on an NFL winning team I'll know us guys are doomed. ;-)
Oh, yeah! Wise guy, huh? Woob woob woob woob! Nyuk! Nyuk!
People are capable of perfection.
Er, no. People get tired, injured, distracted or just have an off day.
The human brain and general neuro-muscular parts have limits.
Someone who dedicates their life to something should be incredibly good at something.
Yes, but that's not the same as being perfect.
As another example, I have no idea how professional basketball players can ever miss a shot, from any distance within a basketball court. It is not plausible to me that someone who dedicated their lives to it can ever miss.
Well, than frankly you're mad. The evidence is clearly in favour of them being able to miss. Clearly the task is more difficult than you imagine.
Not common, just possible with millions of hours of practice.
Well, maybe if you could practive 8 hours per day, every day from age 10, live to 352 and somehow not die and not suffer age related deterioration then maybe you would reach a better level with the 1e6 hours of practice.
Or perhaps there are also other factors.
After ten years, and your brain has be completely rewired to be basket ball dominating machine, being so incapable of perfection is astounding to me.
It's astounding that you believe this. You have never achieved near professional level in anything physical, or even tried to do some beyond the most basic level. Yet you persist in arguing from a point of view of utter ignorance.
People achieve this perfection in other disciplines.
No, they don't.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I have never been impressive by any RL sport. The results we see seem completely plausible for someone who has dedicated their lives to it.
When someone like Ronnie O'Sullivan scores a 147 point snooker break in under five and a half minutes in competition that does not seem completely plausible to anybody on the planet, except Ronnie.
Even under practice conditions, that's implausible. World champions watched with awe and wonder. There's only one person that's ever lived that could even consider matching that right now, and that's Ronnie himself.
The problem with this is that it would make professional bowling (and so many other sports) obsolete. After you got to a certain level, their would be no reason to complete as you have reached the plateau of perfection where everyone is equally perfect at the game. I think it is likely that this huge incentive to not be perfect subconsciously prevents people from getting this good.
Nope, it's because it's just not as easy as you seem to think it is. You underestimate the amount of practice, natural ability, dedication, mental effort and physical skill needed to perform at the top end of any sport.
But for whatever reason, in my opinion these sport's athletes do push what is is to be human beyond what you might think is possible.
How the fuck is performance in a fully deterministic computer game more impressive than performance in an infinitely variable real world?
You admire e-sports competitors. That's cool, they're bloody good at what they do. That doesn't make them better than people that master other sports, even if they're not 'perfect'.
I've never heard the term "e-sport" before today. How many females even know what it is?
E-sports should just take a month out of the year to use pink mice and keyboards. They can add a pink tint to all of the boards and characters on the screen. It's working for the NFL.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4yH2r2uzDI&list=PLS4KoI1QwbWKYwbY7vnxHhXqZtbY9hj09&index=8/
There should be an outcry but there isn't. You thought you were being funny.
you are drawing examples from the most extreme gender-differentiating society next to Saudi Arabia. that does not prove at any level that a gender gap is a "fact of nature".
someone doesn't like getting judged by video game competition
so he says losing in video games is meaningless because winning in video games is meaningless, because IRONICALLY, he has his own alpha male complex and can't accept being shoved down into Bronze league.
otherwise, he has to accept that he is functionally less-able than others. WHOOPS.
I do not even know what Snooker is, so I have no idea if I would find it impressive or not. But I think I can safely say, you can exclude some sports from my blanket statement. I have seen Tiger Woods do incredible things. And in general would consider golf a decent sport. I do not think you can compare getting a 1-inch ball in a 1.2 inch hole 5 miles away over a infinity complete, detailed, and varied surface to getting a 1 foot wide ball down a perfectly level surface with a minimal amount of accuracy for only like 15 feet (indoors) [I am talking about bowling].
The problem is that every sport in existence was created as a leisure activity. Perfectly fine and enjoyable for people to do in-between work. And they have turned into entertainment for the masses; Which works as well. What both these things are not are mediums through which to test, strive for, and topple perfection. Mainstream sports cannot be too complex, as they are for the masses, and they were all historically designed for amateurs to play. Even chess is simply too deterministic and simple, as it is designed to just pick up and play; Really all you need is some autistic man with a perfect computer like memory to memorise billions and possible situations. E-sports like SC, and real sports like golf, are not like this. Their are infinity complex and cannot be modelled like that. There is no perfection, only the striving to be better. Also, it is important for a sport, in my opinion, for to test what it is to be human. It is simple to build a program that would play chess perfectly. Given improved sensors, a robot would easily be better at golf than a human. but it would be very hard to build a AI that would be better at the full complexity of SC, even though speed is such a huge issue in the game; Yes, they could probably micro-manage their way to a victory, but they would suck at many aspects of the game.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bish%C5%8Dnen
Bishnen (?, also transliterated About this sound bishounen (helpinfo)) is a Japanese term literally meaning "beautiful youth (boy)".
Today, bishnen are very popular among girls and women in Japan.[2][3] Reasons for this social phenomenon may include the unique male and female social relationships found within the genre. Some have theorized that bishnen provide a non-traditional outlet for gender relations. Moreover, it breaks down stereotypes surrounding feminine male characters. These are often depicted with very strong martial arts abilities, sports talent, high intelligence, or comedic flair, traits that are usually assigned to the hero/protagonist.[4]
yeah keep up the MANLY YOU MANLY MAN MAN MAN
Let's shed some more light on the subject here with some more data.
Market research on computer games by studios:
http://www.theesa.com/facts/pd...
- "Women 18 or older represent a significantly greater portion of the game-playing population (31%) than boys age 17 or younger (19%)"
- Women make up 45% of the gaming population
Compare with this Time Business article about women in competitive jobs:
http://business.time.com/2010/...
- "...anecdotally at least, it appears the industries and positions with the most competitive work environments tend to pay the most."
- "Females were more likely to pass on the job once they found out part of their pay would be based on their performance versus a co-worker."
Women come to gaming later in life than men. Studies have shown that fast action gaming develops the areas of the brain associated with rapid decision making, so taking into account the predisposition for young boys to play games with big guns in, neurological development means men will be inherently better at the kind of games that come under the e-sports umbrella. Case closed.
"The problem is simply that we know women play games and enjoy them but that they are for some reason not taking part in competitions. "
Women may enjoy the games, but they do not enjoy competition/tournaments to the same extent as men. They play their games for fun, not for scoring. they are less competitive, so they don't compete as much. No problem, and no surprise here either.
So women are smarter?
The problem is that every sport in existence was created as a leisure activity.
Your opening premise alone is flawed.
A lot of sports originate from skills that were essential initially for survival, then for cultural dominance - which in itself is sometimes essential for survival.
As for automation: SC is easier to automate than most RL games, including golf. Shit, people have already produced AI better than most players and that's without even putting a team of computer scientists onto the problem.
"I'd love to watch you go up to a professional athlete and tell them with a straight face that the reason they're not better is because subconsciously they want to be imperfect in order to preserve the sport."
I think there is just less drive. I once, for example, heard the training regiment of the 203th best tennis player in the word described as drinking whisky and smoking.
These sports, even world class professional sports, do not necessarily recruit the best of the best, and they do not necessaries inspire complete dedication.
Some sports inspire 12 hour a day, 7 day a week training regiments. Training is simply your life if you want to stand a chance.
But even these do not necessarily get the best of the best to work with. Sports, to a large degree, recruit from the poor and less determined, exclusively. The best humanity has to offer are too busy getter doctorates, building billion dollar companies, or solving mathematical problems or philosophising in some shack in the woods. The same people who are really good scientists are not necessarily the same people would make the best bowlers, but I do not think that there is any reason to assume that the people who would have made the absolute best bowlers have any reason to become professional bowlers. I think it is quite likely that the person who would of been the absolute best Starcraft player of all time is instead performing surgeries for millions of dollars a year somewhere.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
The number itself has no meaning. First there is always an imbalance due to random fluctuations, thought 90/10 is unlikely to be entirely random (but we have Feminazis complaining about 60/40 distributions in other fields).
It cuts both ways, too. In some things, there are more men, and in others more women. There are, for example, more female than male nurses.
That is not a problem.
It only becomes a problem if some man who would like to be a nurse can't get the job due to his gender. So for e-sports, the real question is if there are any women who would like to be in e-sports, but can't because of their gender.
It's the difference between equal rights and opportunities, and Gleichschaltung.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I get it, you think sports with a simplistic setup like a bowling alley should be easily mastered. They are not. Bowling is not a very cerebral sport, it is just physical performance based on the same setup every frame, but it is extremely difficult for a human to get that strike 12 times in a row. It would also be hard for a machine to do it. There are variances in all the real world objects involved that a machine might not account for.
You seem to like games like SC that would have more thought involved. Do you consider war to be a sport then? That would have all the strategy and thought that you see in SC.
It's harder than it looks to deliver that curling stone down the sheet.
Where you libeled me & ran when I used facts vs it -> http://yro.slashdot.org/commen...
(You sure "talk a good game" -> http://games.slashdot.org/comm... but you can't even produce a MERE SCRIPT!)
You aren't even on the leve of a "script kiddie", & full of HOT AIR, windbag!
(You're all TALK, & NO action "CHUMPY!)
* :)
(You know it, I know it, & so does anyone reading AND laughing their asses off @ you now... lol!)
APK
P.S.=> Answer the question in the subject-line Lumpy - OR, is it you won't since it will remove the unjustifiable downmods you applied to my other post here -> http://yro.slashdot.org/commen... ?
Oh, I suspect that IS the case here (simply logging out of a registered account & trolling by ac is a common troll trick around here OR using alternate registered 'luser' accounts sockpuppets to do the job will also, & Lumpy is LOADED with those & trolling - which doesn't matter: He PROVES he's all talk, no action (or skills, OR brains, lol))...
... apk
Men enjoy sports and keeping score on the game. Women keep score on real life.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
They group whites and Asians together, and claim the group is not racially diverse. Further, Asians represent 4.8% of the total US population, which means they are overrepresented.
The 50% of gamers things gets bounded around a lot, but people never look past the surface. Women play games, but not the same games as male gamers tend to. Games women tend to play are far less competitive, and in general spend a lot less on video games then men do.
That 5% represents the 10% of women, (math is fun), that play games the same way men do. 5% is exactly what you should expect.
Also, professional gamers tend to have professional gaming rigs, which cost a lot of money. Black people are underrepresented in professional gaming because they are overrepresented in poverty. Also, how many Arabs are there in the US? Wolfram groups everything but White, Black, Asian (assuming that means east asian), and Native into Other, which collectively represent 4.8% of the total US population. At most that means Middle Eastern probably represents 1-2% of the US population.
*slowclapmodule*
Yeah, when I read the title I assumed they were talking about the physical fitness video games with motion controllers and stuff. These I consider "competition video games" and it's been known for years to be over 90% male (I knew someone who won competitions in Counter Strike).
The reason they travel more distance than most other sports require is because being on ice actually enables them to do so within human limitations. The exact same game played without skates, and otherwise using a playing area that is the same size is *FAR* more physically debilitating. Watching such a game would be like watching hockey in slow motion.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
People are capable of perfection.
We call the demand that everything be perfect an anxiety disorder. If your claim is that sporting should have been perfected by now in a sense that Esports aren't, then I begin to wonder whether the dispute here is simply concerning a phenomenological difference in performance anxiety. That would make sense, since this isn't sport.
Myu:
Statistics! Let's just edit the story a bit and see what we get:
In other news, The International Basketweaving company, WellWeaved, said, '[A] whopping 90-94% of the viewers were female, and interestingly enough, only about half of the remaining survey takers felt comfortable being identified as male.
DailyNeedle makes the point that competitive basket weaving communities also tend not to be racially diverse. Quoting: 'Although no studies have been done about race in basketweaving, it only takes one trip to a Major League Weaving event to confirm what Cannon says. With the notably racially diverse exception of the underwater basketweaving community, Middle Eastern and white Americans make up an enormous portion of basketweaving players and fans. Black and Asian basketweaving fans are conspicuously missing.'"
WTF are you babbling about?
Required reading for internet skeptics
As for automation: SC is easier to automate than most RL games, including golf. Shit, people have already produced AI better than most players and that's without even putting a team of computer scientists onto the problem.
Better than most players != better than the best players. GP is quite correct - it is easy to throw a bunch of electro-mechanical components together that will best even the very best "sportsman" of all time, but it is well-nigh impossible (provably so) to put together an AI that will better a Go champion (e-sport).
So, for traditional sports we already have the ability to beat the very best humans while for E-sports (Go, Starcraft, etc) it's still very much a human-dominated activity, with good reason.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
Since when the fuck was Go (a centuries old game played with bits of wood, stone or other non-electronic materials) an e-sport?
You're actually arguing that a non-e-sport (I.e. Go) is not automatable, and trying to use that to say e-sports are harder than real ones. Well done, I concede the debate; I can't win against an idiot.
So, what is sports? Is figure skating a sport? (results by judge) Synchronized swimming?(pretty much just floting, results by judge) Nascar?(is driving a car sports) Destruction derby?(now they aren't even trying to drive fast) Chess? (just sitting there) Shooting?(olympic sport, but you can be in very bad shape and yet be very good)
Why not computer gaming? I actually do agree with you that "sports" is a wrong term, but that term is already missused in many places. If there can be motorsports, why not electronicsports?
At least Lol and Dota are very team oriented games. The highest level is 5 person teams agains eachothers.
parity in counter strike teams in 3..2..1
Going back to something you said earlier:
How the fuck is performance in a fully deterministic computer game more impressive than performance in an infinitely variable real world?
There are a finite number of games of Go possible. At least to my understanding, but I don't know all the rules. There are definitely a finite number of possible moves on a given turn.
I'm not really sure what the argument is with you and the GP. Trying to prove whether e-sports or traditional sports are harder or more impressive? I don't think it's possible to say. When you have humans competing against other humans at something, you're going to see some amazing things. It doesn't matter if it's an e-sport or a traditional sport, or if it's fully deterministic or infinitely variable.
I agree with you. People at the top-end are bloody impressive, whether it's Starcraft, the triathlon or fellatio. I can admire the skill, whether it's something that could be automated or not.
The challenge with the other guy is that he seems to think e-sports are more impressive. I'd say he needs to find one of the people I referred to above.
Is there any sort of moral imperative that women must consist of 50% of all occupations? Even the niche dumb ones?
Here is a US page showing high concentration *female* jobs. Where's the cries for more men in teaching and nursing?
Now, show me women who are trying to get into e-sports and can't, and then we can talk.
Talking with some female friends, feminist or not, they really feel incomodated in having majority os male protagonists inside the games. Women play looking for a virtual male on the screen. Also, some games have machist/maleist content, I accept, even liking them. For example, OutRun 2 and OutRun 2006 Cosat to Coast, with the Heart Attack Mode in which the man do some trickies requested by one of the three girls ans receives hearts and kisses for it. I wrote to Sega requiring to equilibrate things on a next OutRun version, maybe with some FLower Attack Mode, with one of the girls driving and Alberto giving flowers to them. I also wrote do Konami, in the Winning Eleven era, requiring a version of that game comprising famale soccer.
Every single hobby, job an sport does not have to have a 50% female presence.
Perhaps they just aren't interested, and that is OK. Why do we have to bother defining them as male / female?
They don't need to have separate leagues. Pile them in with the men, let them all be known as gamers.
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