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IeSF Wants International Game Tournaments Segregated By Sex [Updated]
RockDoctor (15477) writes The Guardian is reporting that a Finnish heat of an international gaming competition is being segregated into male and female branches in accordance to international rules. The International e-Sports Federation (IeSF) want "eSports" to be recognised as equivalent to physical sports. And that, it seems, requires that competitors be segregated on grounds of sex. Which may be appropriate for pole vaulters, but not necessarily appropriate for ePole vaulters. This leaves the organisers of national heats of eSports in a rather invidious position of having (in this case) a tournament only open to "Finnish male players." Update: 07/03 14:38 GMT by T : As several readers point out in the comments, this policy has been abruptly reversed.
Stop pretending video gaming is a real sport.
requires that competitors be segregated on grounds of sex
Right, those that have sex with a partner and those that don't.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
"I don't know why it's important for physical sports to have gender segregation, but they do it and people recognize them as legitimate! If we segregate by gender, maybe that's what will make people recognize us as legitimate!"
Just like in programming, this line of thinking clearly translates down to "I have no idea what I'm doing, and I have no idea what the consequences of these choices are, but I'm just going to bang at things until something works or everything breaks."
(Spoiler alert: usually, everything breaks.)
-Hentai [in vita non pacem est]
Poker tournaments aren't gender-segregated, for example, and they are probably one of the more successful non-athletic sports. The main chess competitions are also open to people of any gender.
There are sometimes gender-specific events, but they are promotional/recruiting things rather than the main event. For example there's a Women's World Chess Championship, but some of the best chess-playing women choose not to enter it, and enter the main (gender-integrated) tournaments instead.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
im old now and happily married.. but if i was still a teenager, i would really appreciate anything that could be done to encourage more girls (preferably hot ones) to pick up gaming.. (so they could come over to my house and play). these regulations are cock-blocking our dorky-teen brethren!!
They already changed their stance.
http://ie-sf.com/bbs/board.php?bo_table=iesf_notice&wr_id=105
i see this debate in shooting sports going the other way.
there really aren't any good reasons why a female should be a worse marksman or shooting competitor than a male. in fact, small efficient muscles and better color eyesight make females more ideal than males.
so a lot of people think that there should be no gender seperation in shooting sport competitions, and I tend to agree. but for some reason, the top females can never quite break into the top levels with the top males. just last year, Jessie Duff became the first female USPSA grand master-level shooter. on paper, there's no reason why they can't be as competitive as the guys, but in reality it just hasn't happened. so we end up with segregated competitions (in most cases. there ARE plenty of gender-immeterial competitions out there) to keep it "fair".
disclaimer: i will never be able to compete against the competitive girls.
THL phish sticks
I'm betting they received enough bad press and comments about it to realize that this particular approach was not the appropriate avenue to take for being "recognized",. as they say.... as equivalent to sports.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
This has already been changed: http://www.polygon.com/2014/7/...
There was a huge backlash on social media, which drew Blizzard's attention. Blizzard kindly made it clear that they didn't want their game being used in a male-only tournament, and the problem was fixed.
Slashdot is pretty far behind on this one.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
I know plenty of competitive game players, mostly from the competitive Team Fortress 2 scene. Now, I can understand why real sports are segregated by sex - there are irreconcilable physical differences between men and women in terms of athletic performance in some sports, thus it's simply not fair to have men competing against women. However, I don't get how this would apply to video games, where there is effectively no difference between the sexes. I have, in fact, seen female comp players who completely destroy me (largely because I don't play comp due to my favorite and only class being Engineer).
Also, there were at least two or three female runners at this year's Summer Games Done Quick. One of them did a very skilled race of Octodad against a male player, and was even ahead at one point - until the very end when she failed to get a very RNG-centric glitch to occur (the male player got it on the first try, but they both admitted that getting that glitch to occur is purely random). Another did a 7.5 hour run of Final Fantasy VI and actually out-lasted the male player she was co-opping with (from what I remember, he switched out about 5 or 6 hours in).
PS: Sorry, it's called "Equestrianism" in english, sorry :P
None of the equestrian disciplines are segregated by sex as far as I know...
You cannot proceed from the informal to formal by formal means
If you read up on the IeSF, it becomes much more clear what is going on.
-The IeSF is a South Korean organization; it is not Finnish. Ok, technically, it has a number of "member nations," but it is dominated by South Koreans. This tournament in Finland was a local qualifier for a larger international tournament. The local (Finnish) tournament organizers protested against the male-only rule, but couldn't convince the IeSF to relent until the media backlash started.
-The people who run the the IeSF aren't young male hormonal gamers. They are, by and large, middle-aged male executives at media and marketing companies. Their ultimate goal is to become the equivalent of the International Olympic Committee of e-sports, so that their companies can commercialize e-sports in the same way the Olympics were commercialized. However, they haven't been all that successful yet - they don't control any big-name tournaments in any of the games that I follow.
-As I mentioned already, the guys making the rules are older Koreans. I'll quote an interesting anecdote I saw on Ars Technica's comments:
in that case, i apologize for chastising (albeit in a tongue in cheek manner) fins in any way. sounds like its (unsurprisingly) about old moneyed men making rules to perpetuate the status quo and their wallets. glad to see people are realizing so many of these old ideas are stale
The unfortunate thing is at the college level equestrian teams are now considered a female sport in the USA so that their funding can balance out male sports due to Title 9 requiring equal spending. I have no idea how this will reflect in the sport in the long run but it certainly prevented me from competing in college where as a male I would have to pay for all of my own lessons and competitions. I doubt there will be much change in the upper levels as one of the biggest factors is still quality of horse (money) but I am curious to watch long term trends.
I dunno, I've always equated "sport" with some physical activity. Certainly gaming can be a competition, but is it really a sport? Similar I've heard of chess tournaments referred to as competitions rather than as sports.