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.

Comments

simple fix

[sunking2]

Stop pretending video gaming is a real sport.

Re:simple fix

[lgw]

Whatever old people want it to be.

Seriously, just abandon the word "sport". It's not helping in any way. Trying to avoid "gaming" is understandable, as it means "illegal gambling" to many people, and in many laws, but there's got to be a better word than "sport".

"eSports" is trying to come down on the wrong side of the great jock-geek divide. Why do that?

Re:simple fix

[Tridus]

"real sport": Competitions I like watching on TV.
"fake sport": Competitions other people like watching on TV.

Sex?

[Sir_Eptishous]

requires that competitors be segregated on grounds of sex

Right, those that have sex with a partner and those that don't.

Cargo-Cult Sociology

[Hentai]

"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.)

not the norm in other non-athletic competitions

[Trepidity]

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.

interesting times...

[gandhi_2]

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.

Re:interesting times...

[hweimer]

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.

This is simply not true. Margeret Murdock won a silver medal at the 1976 Olympics (she lost the battle for gold under very controversial circumstances) and set four individual world records. In the eighties, most shooting sports became gender-segregated, the only exceptions being skeet and trap, which became gender-segregated right after a woman (Zhang Shan) had won the gold medal in the skeet competition in 1992. There are other examples as well.

So, if today's women are no longer competitive with men, then that's certainly a consequence of gender segregation and not an argument for it.

Re:interesting times...

[gandhi_2]

ahh, the "certain amazonian society" argument whereby someone seeks to argue against the prevalent facts by citing some small exceptions.

of course there will be a few exceptionally talented black swans that show up from time to time. these are exceptions to the rule.

for the year-after-year slog of shooters making their way to various competitions up to the top... WPW's, Camp Perry, USPSA nationals, IPSC championships, and all the hundreds of others, including the olympics, the males statistically dominate the top.

as far as I know, none of the scores are scaled differently for male vs female. the courses-of-fire are generally the same. the scores can be compared apples-to-apples, but we just hand out more trophies. females don't do worse BECAUSE of the separation, that is ridiculous.

Re:the real reason?

[hendrips]

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:

Koreans can be remarkably thoughtlessly sexist (and racist, etc) without thinking about the broader implications. This is highly visible every time you park a car in a modern shopping center - there are reserved spots for women. The parking lanes (marked in pink) are wider and closer to the entrances. These aren't parking spots for expectant mothers or women with small children. These are parking spots for all women, with forethought that they're doing women a favor because they can't park cars as well as men. Westerners see this kind of thing and are instantly offended by the blatant sexism. A Korean will be confused as to why you don't see that women are obviously better off this way.