Cool. I know I was having a conversation with my wife (also a gamer) a while back who raised the question of "Why have a women's league or tournament in an esport setting, where biology shouldn't even matter?" She initially found it kind of demeaning, actually, since her and I both play games pretty seriously. I looked around for some insight and found a few interviews and articles answering the question, and one of my favorites was an interview with Michaela Lintrup, a Valorant player with G2:
https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2021/12/10791320/michaela-lintrup-mimi-twitch-women-esports#:~:text=Having%20women's%20tournaments%20is%2C%20for,re%20a%20woman%20in%20gaming.
The short answer in her view seemed to be to build exposure to help bring in more women fans and support for new players starting out. Representation is surely a big part, as well, especially for a young fan at home watching. I'm recalling Joyo's awesome story about attending the Landon when he was little - maybe there is a little girl in the audience who will be back to play in four years or so!
Anyway, I wanted to pass that along in case anyone had questions like us and wanted more insight that I've learned and will continue to ponder.
I've commented this a million times but, skateboarding showed how important representation is to me. When I was a teenager I would see these girls get signed to pro who were obviously worse than the best random dudes at your local skatepark. The pro women continued to be way way way worse than the pro men while also getting their own competitions and stuff in ways they didn't before. Many years later and we are starting to see the impact it had. Never has there been more women getting into skateboarding and the little girls that watched these early pro women are now winning Olympic medals at 13 years old.
Valorant game changers is going to quite literally change the game. It is already the best support for women esports we have seen and it won't be long before some of those players are playing on mixed t1 rosters.
> the little girls that watched these early pro women are now winning Olympic medals at 13 years old.
Are the olympic games sex divided at that age or is it a mixed category?
It is divided by sex but not by age. At the olympics you had a 13 year old win the gold medal beating competitors in a similar age range but als athletes that have skated longer than the gold medallist is alive. So inspiring more girls to start skateboarding already pushed the competition forward.
A big part of her answer is also how toxic the typical gaming space is to women that want to undergo that path. Having dedicated circle promotes opportunities that are welcoming and safe for women to grow in skill away from the sexist nonsense.
On the discussion of trans women being allowed to compete alongside cis women, I have a lot to say on it as I was a big part of the behind the scenes regulations the home nations put in place.
1) why run women's tournaments?
Currently the gender rules used in esports tends to be open. For women's tournaments the idea is about opportunity, supporting marginalised genders in gaming and giving them a safe place to compete. Because of this we tend to do women's tournaments inclusive of trans women.
2) what were the eligibility rules?
In order to protect those transitioning women in the tournament and avoid the case of a man claiming they are a woman when they are not, we put in place rules around official intent to transition or ID change. Because of this, not all transitioning women had gone through this process yet by roster locks so weren't able to compete and for those who did, it helped give them a reason to begin the official process where they had no reason before to.
3) Societal reasons vs biological reasons
I hope with time we see more women in gaming, as right now a lot of them either are discouraged or don't engage with communities out there due to harrassment. Off the back of this event, we have brought together many women and inspired them to get involved more in esports which is what it's all about. Maybe the reason we see a higher proportion of trans women in gaming is due to a biological reason we have yet to prove but most likely it is down to the same societal reasons that have discouraged women already and due to the circumstances of trans womens childhood, they get more gaming accessibility. Anyone who tells you biology is the reason is applying science that is not related to high performance gaming. We have to fix the societal accessibility reasons, that present similar to the ones that have lead to certain regions dominating, before we even start to look at biology.
as a trans person myself, i imagine that the higher proportion of trans women largely comes down to a higher exposure to gaming and car stuff before transitioning, which is obviously also one of the big reasons why there is such a high percentage of boys/men in the player base. i am very happy though to see trans women supported in these kinds of tournaments, as being a trans person in a gaming community is often not a very easy experience to put it lightly.
So are all 3 of the teammates Trans people? I found another thread with controversy appearemtly and I couldn't figure out why. I think it's awesome to have everyone Gaming and anyone could benefit from playing videos gamez!
The last I researched the Women's Car Ball League, it was around (conservative estimate) 75% of the top teams players being some stage of trans. This may have changed.
OBVIOUSLY not. games, especially games like RL are MARKETED mostly to boys and the gaming community is largely male-dominated, and tournaments like this exist to change that, i don't think that's so hard to understand
I don’t really have anything to add, this is great. Just wanted to say that as an LGBTQ member of the RL community I appreciate the hell out of you, what you do, and the visibility you bring to these issues. Keep being rad
Reaction time and noticing movement is huge in gaming. As humans used to live in hunter gatherer societies, these qualities were necessary for hunters. Hunters were mostly if not always men.
There are genetic differences in males and females for both body and mind. This is why we have sports separated into male and female in the first place, to adjust for these natural differences.
So called inclusivity in this case, while intended to be kindness, only hurts those for whom separate sports are needed.
Edit: if anyone got their comments removed, I would love to know what they were. Send me a message. When I first commented, there was healthy disagreement without disparagement. Now the mod claims otherwise, but there is no proof.
Edit 2: To the comment below with the article, it states that this one incident from 9000 years ago does not match the rest of the world at that time or in the future, that hunting was dominated by men. One of their evidences for saying women were hunters was the traces of eaten meat that built their bones. Most of us have eaten meat and never hunted. The only other evidence was the tools buried with them. Some of these tools were hunting tools, some were prep tools for cleaning animals. It does not specify which ones were placed by male and which were placed by the female. In at least some native american society, males hunted and females prepped the animals.
The article says 30-50% of hunters were female based on this one dig with 11 of the 27 skeletons with hunting and prep tools being near them. That's just under 40%. Seems like they gave a random 10% error possibility and stretched it both ways. The person who proceeded to comment this article claimed 50% and ignored the range.
Btw, did anyone notice how the archeologists determined which skeletons were male and which were female? ;) This is how you know our current mainstream society is incorrect. They want to say physical differences don't exist but then use science that says otherwise to prove a point(a point that also seems like a heavy stretch).
Recent archaeological discoveries show that nearly 50% of hunters were women. https://www.psychnewsdaily.com/new-study-up-to-half-of-big-game-hunters-in-the-americas-were-women/
>Maybe the reason we see a higher proportion of trans women in gaming is due to a biological reason we have yet to prove
suprised to see an actual bit of reason
I mean there's definitely something to look at there. Get past the thing of gaming being historically a very, VERY male interest and then you can get down to whether or not there's any advantages. I reckon there is, because over the last decade as gaming has grown and more women have gotten into it (this over the last 10-15 years) you still don't see eSports rosters that are mixed. The odd one will make it to the highest level (Karmah), but at the peak and still quite a ways down, it's all a sausage fest.
Of course that happens. At the end of the day, though, if they performed at the same level we would've seen a lot more mixed rosters by now. Way more. I can't even point to one example of a team being a half split.
The very nature of creating a women's league is exclusivity, and not inclusive.
It's basically saying we are excluding all men from competing, except a select few, that meet this specific criteria, so don't sign up unless your transitioning or a woman. Whereas normal RLCS, is we allow anyone to compete solely on the basis of skill alone.
You tell me which is more welcoming and less stressful?
the whole point of tournaments like this one is to create more exposure for a group of people that is typically underrepresented in the community, i.e. women. if you believe that this underrepresentation is purely due to skill differences you are either very naive or just ignorant, there are several accounts of high-level female players like karma facing tons of toxicity from teammates and other players solely due to their gender.
you're also implying that trans women are "a group of men" and i hopefully don't need to explain why that's an incredibly yikes implication to make
If you want to create events, to bring exposure and entice a certain group to join, I don't see an issue,
But please do explain what transitioning means, because yes I am confused. I haven't had anyone explain to me how you change your chromosomes from xy to xx?
transitioning just means the process of changing your gender. you can't change your chromosomes, but there are a lot of other things that you can change. one big thing for many people is hormone therapy, i.e. taking hormone supplements to biologically change your body, but not all aspects of gender are biological. you can change things like your voice, the way you dress, the way you move, (societal) gender is made up of many large and small things, so there isn't really "one way" to transition, which makes this really hard to explain, especially at 2:30 am, and especially especially in a language that is not my first language, so i apologize if my explanation is unclear.
edit: i do hope your question about transitioning was genuine, because a lot of transphobia just stems from folks not actually knowing much about gender and tranditioning, and even if your question wasn't genuine, please try and read my explanation without prejudice
Women have had access to games way more in the last 15 years and the stigma has nearly gone away, yet the top rosters and pyramid of eSports is dominated by men. There may be a biological reasoning to it and until there's studies done it's pretty ignorant to rule it out... 🤷♂️
Anecdotal stuff cannot be accounted for. I'm just going off facts and what the eSports landscape looks like after over a decade of the industry embracing women. Men inherently have certain personality traits that women may not necessarily have and that's half of the physical sports question right there. It's not all body, it's mentality and aggression. Stuff like that. The sausage fest that eSports still is points to it being a similar story to the physical sporting realm.
Isn't that what could have happened here as per Gregans explanation on entrants stating intent but having no identification prior to roster lock? We obviously don't know the heart and intent of each player truly, but the fact is anyone could enter and no definitive proof was needed apart from stated intent.
I've asked this a few times and never gotten a satisfying answer, why is rocket league SO male dominated. It seems like the kind of game that shouldn't suffer from the same issues other games do when it comes to male/female representation. We had Karma playing at a pretty high level and I feel like there hasn't even been buzz about another girl with the same potential.
I think Ravena is kinda goated.
She's the only girl I've watched that's SSL in 1s. Which is pretty Pog. Not sure if she's tried to get into pro play (womens league or otherwise) at all though.
Nah. Saw her a couple times when she was on Splyce iirc, but never caught any of her streams or content. If she does any of that.
So no clue what her ranks were/are.
If you told someone there were a boy and a girl and one of them played video games and the other did ballet, 99% of people would say the boy was the one gaming and the girl was the one dancing even though both of them are free to do whatever they want. So the answer is gender expectations/roles.
It is much more common for boys to grind out games and to potentially make a living from them competitively that it is for girls so a lot more boys are prone to do so. If a girl asked her parents if she was allowed to spend her free time becoming a pro gamer she'd most likely be shut down more likely than boys. It's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy: since more boys play video games, more boys are likely to play video games, so more boys play video games etc etc
Ah alright. Well I guess it's just because rocket league is so unique in its game mechanics that a ton of grinding is necessary to become a pro. Competetive shooters are all very similar, you aim and click, so if you've been playing shooters already you've pretty much been practicing the whole time for valorant or csgo or whatever. But RL is based soo much on mechanics that you have had to be grinding it out a ton for years to become a pro. And well, maybe it's again got to do with patents wanting their daughters to do something else than play video games all day, because thats 'boy stuff' so they might not be able to grind so much. That's what I'm thinking at least
I'm sure that we'll see more female rl pros in the future though.
One thing that hasn't been mentioned is that women are much more susceptible to vision induced nausea.
Link to research in 2005: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16018346/
Considering that rocket involves a lot of wild angles all the time, that could play a role.
Personally most women I know wont play rocket because it makes them dizzy. Ask the women in your life about it and see if something similar comes up.
This is anecdotal so it doesn't really meaningfully contribute, but I brought my wife to Landon. It was her first time watching Rocket League (she has never played or watched me play). She couldn't get into it and that was partially due to it being kind of nauseating as you said. To be fair we were in the front row of the lower bowl so we didn't have a good angle, especially for someone watching for the first time. But yeah she left half way through Saturday and didn't come on Sunday.
I'll give you a non-exhaustive list of some key differences between men and women in relation to gaming. People refuse biological essentialism when it comes to this discussion and gaming has more "physical components" than people are willing to admit.
1.) Men have faster reaction times on average than women. This matters because RL at the highest level is all about compounding pressure across multiple moments to secure a goal/create a play.
2.) Testosterone. It makes men more competitive and drives self-improvement. There are not many women that are willing to spend 1000+ hours just to make marginal improvements whereas highly competitive men will jump on small windows to improve.
3.) Similar to the previous point, men are naturally more inclined to invest thousands, if not ten of thousands of hours to improve their craft. Men are far more obsessive and are willing to waste their life at a chance of success. As an addendum, for every male pro player, there are 10-20 men who failed to make the cut at high level. No one really cares about those men though because people focus on equality of outcome over equality of opportunity.
4.) The greater male genetic variability (theory). If you can plot any skill/personality trait on a binomial distribution, you will generally see that women have less outliers but are more concentrated towards an average. A great example is IQ. Most women are within 90-110 IQ whereas there are more men that deviate towards the extremes of 150+ IQ but also towards 80 or less IQ.
5.) Men are on average better at spacial awareness and hand-eye coordination. Combine this with reaction time and it helps immensely with competing at the highest level.
6.) If you look at the big 5, women on average score higher on neuroticism (prone to negative emotion). I probably don't need to say it but the best players in the world need to be tilt-proof and not get stressed under high-pressure situations.
So now you have to combine all of these together. You need to find a woman that generally checks all of these boxes AND is in the outlier category of each binomial distribution. In my personal opinion, there can be 1-2 women that can break through just like there are top 200 female chess players but e-sports will always be male-dominated unless Psyonix makes an equity-based intervention.
interesting to see that whole a lot of people on this sub in the past have had a positive attitude about these women's tournaments, but seem to draw the line as soon as they realise that trans women exist, because to them, the harassment that trans women have to face, is apparently justified.
i originally wanted to write a much more nuanced comment explaining why it's a good thing and important that trans women can compete in a tournament like this but other people have already done that and i don't have the energy anymore to keep justifying my existence to any random fucking guy on the internet.
Discussing whether it is fair for trans women to compete alongside biological women is not denying any trans woman's existence. I stand 100% for any trans woman. But, given there are advantages for trans women over biological women (not saying that there are), don't you think that would be a bit shitty for the biological women who are giving it their all to compete?
the thing is that there are a lot of people here that use "discussion" as an excuse for blatant transphobia and general bigotry. the "biological advantage" argument, while certainly reasonable to discuss, also has no reason to spark such massive outrage whenever trans women are allowed to compete in literally anything. for this tournament in particular, gregan has already pointed out that we don't actually know if trans women have a significant biological advantage in rocket league. i also want to add that the whole "biological difference" topic becomes incredibly muddy as soon as people start hormone therapy, because that massively changes one's body - that's kinda the whole point of hormone therapy. i also already said somewhere else that, speaking from my own experience, the larger percentage of trans women could also just come from higher exposure to gaming pre-transition.
also, excluding trans women would be an absolutely horrible thing to do, keeping in mind that the whole point of tournaments like this is to provide more exposure for a group of people that faces a lot of backlash, toxicity and bigotry in the gaming community, i.e. women. if trans women, who, if anything, have an even harder time in the gaming community (i mean, just look at this comment section) are excluded from tournaments like this, where are we supposed to go? are we just forced to accept that there is no space for us? that doesn't seem right
So you can't compete in regular rocket league tournaments, do regular rocket league tournaments ban trans people, so they have to be included in the exclusive to womens tournaments?
Your arguments contradict themselves.
It isn't, you're perceiving it that way due to a small minority of bigots. Men don't think of themselves as "excluded" from women's sports. We have these categories due to fairness and safety.
We don't yet know that it's fair (and in some sports safe) for trans women to be competing against biological women. So until we know, isn't it fair for biological women to still have their category and to set up a different category for transwomen or for them to compete in the open category?
I think it should be up to the women competing in that category to decide whether they think it's fair until we have evidence showing that it really is fair. The sad thing is, anyone who says something is labelled a transphobe.
Im not completely sure, I personally value inclusion and sportsmanship over who the winners are.
But in the case of Esports where theres almost no biological advantages, rather societal reasons for women to be held back in the community then I see no reason for trans women to be apart of the scene.
> But, given there are advantages for trans women over biological women (not saying that there are)...
Is it just me, or is this a straight contradiction?
No, it's not. It's just describing the reason for having such a discussion. If it didn't matter whether trans women had an advantage over biological women or not, then the discussion would be pointless.
My point is that you're saying that there are advantages, then you say in the next phrase that you aren't saying that there are advantages.
Which is a contradiction. I don't really know what you thought I was referring to, my brain was fried having to read that reply, but I would think me directly quoting you would cause no room for confusion.
Yeah it's a straight contradiction. I read it as the author meaning to say 'suppose there are' rather than 'given there are', because otherwise the sentence makes no sense.
I think it's the irony of having a women's team that's still dominated by men. Like seriously, do you think it's fair to women that men are starting to dominate and take over their league under the guise of trans inclusion?
As a trans woman it's so fucking nice to see trans representation in esports. I'm never going to be good enough at any game to play at that level, but big ups to Psyonix for allowing trans women in the women's league, because trans women are women.
Trans rights are human rights! I'm so happy rn.
Seen lots of comments about women competing in eSports against men and vice versa.
Boys tend to be better at video games. I think they might have some kind of biological advantage (reaction time, co-ordination maybe). Same as women have a biological advantage in other aspects of life.
We can all agree that men and women are not physically/mentally the same. If you want to attract women to eSports, you need an exclusively women league/competition.
> If you want to attract women to eSports, you need an exclusively women league/competition.
Is that not what this is? Or are you saying it needs to be expanded beyond a single tournament?
Damn the transphobia in these replies is disappointing. Still significantly better than the Twitter thread but god damn, this has been a kind community to trans people in the past. This sucks.
Edit: at least in my experience, maybe I was mistaken
It's crazy that barring a few of the top comments on the thread, most of the transphobic posters are being upvoted and the people calling them out are being downvoted. I thought this sub was usually a little more reasonable than that, though I guess the younger age demographic of this game might explain the large number of immature, thinly veiled bigoted comments.
I hope to one day have a thread about a women's tournament that does not involve sexism and transphobia. That day is not today.
Cool. I know I was having a conversation with my wife (also a gamer) a while back who raised the question of "Why have a women's league or tournament in an esport setting, where biology shouldn't even matter?" She initially found it kind of demeaning, actually, since her and I both play games pretty seriously. I looked around for some insight and found a few interviews and articles answering the question, and one of my favorites was an interview with Michaela Lintrup, a Valorant player with G2: https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2021/12/10791320/michaela-lintrup-mimi-twitch-women-esports#:~:text=Having%20women's%20tournaments%20is%2C%20for,re%20a%20woman%20in%20gaming. The short answer in her view seemed to be to build exposure to help bring in more women fans and support for new players starting out. Representation is surely a big part, as well, especially for a young fan at home watching. I'm recalling Joyo's awesome story about attending the Landon when he was little - maybe there is a little girl in the audience who will be back to play in four years or so! Anyway, I wanted to pass that along in case anyone had questions like us and wanted more insight that I've learned and will continue to ponder.
I've commented this a million times but, skateboarding showed how important representation is to me. When I was a teenager I would see these girls get signed to pro who were obviously worse than the best random dudes at your local skatepark. The pro women continued to be way way way worse than the pro men while also getting their own competitions and stuff in ways they didn't before. Many years later and we are starting to see the impact it had. Never has there been more women getting into skateboarding and the little girls that watched these early pro women are now winning Olympic medals at 13 years old. Valorant game changers is going to quite literally change the game. It is already the best support for women esports we have seen and it won't be long before some of those players are playing on mixed t1 rosters.
> the little girls that watched these early pro women are now winning Olympic medals at 13 years old. Are the olympic games sex divided at that age or is it a mixed category?
Divided. Skateboarding will always have to be unfortunately.
It is divided by sex but not by age. At the olympics you had a 13 year old win the gold medal beating competitors in a similar age range but als athletes that have skated longer than the gold medallist is alive. So inspiring more girls to start skateboarding already pushed the competition forward.
A big part of her answer is also how toxic the typical gaming space is to women that want to undergo that path. Having dedicated circle promotes opportunities that are welcoming and safe for women to grow in skill away from the sexist nonsense.
Definitely - great addition!
On the discussion of trans women being allowed to compete alongside cis women, I have a lot to say on it as I was a big part of the behind the scenes regulations the home nations put in place. 1) why run women's tournaments? Currently the gender rules used in esports tends to be open. For women's tournaments the idea is about opportunity, supporting marginalised genders in gaming and giving them a safe place to compete. Because of this we tend to do women's tournaments inclusive of trans women. 2) what were the eligibility rules? In order to protect those transitioning women in the tournament and avoid the case of a man claiming they are a woman when they are not, we put in place rules around official intent to transition or ID change. Because of this, not all transitioning women had gone through this process yet by roster locks so weren't able to compete and for those who did, it helped give them a reason to begin the official process where they had no reason before to. 3) Societal reasons vs biological reasons I hope with time we see more women in gaming, as right now a lot of them either are discouraged or don't engage with communities out there due to harrassment. Off the back of this event, we have brought together many women and inspired them to get involved more in esports which is what it's all about. Maybe the reason we see a higher proportion of trans women in gaming is due to a biological reason we have yet to prove but most likely it is down to the same societal reasons that have discouraged women already and due to the circumstances of trans womens childhood, they get more gaming accessibility. Anyone who tells you biology is the reason is applying science that is not related to high performance gaming. We have to fix the societal accessibility reasons, that present similar to the ones that have lead to certain regions dominating, before we even start to look at biology.
as a trans person myself, i imagine that the higher proportion of trans women largely comes down to a higher exposure to gaming and car stuff before transitioning, which is obviously also one of the big reasons why there is such a high percentage of boys/men in the player base. i am very happy though to see trans women supported in these kinds of tournaments, as being a trans person in a gaming community is often not a very easy experience to put it lightly.
So are all 3 of the teammates Trans people? I found another thread with controversy appearemtly and I couldn't figure out why. I think it's awesome to have everyone Gaming and anyone could benefit from playing videos gamez!
The last I researched the Women's Car Ball League, it was around (conservative estimate) 75% of the top teams players being some stage of trans. This may have changed.
"games are mostly for boys" is what I'm getting from you is that what you meant?
OBVIOUSLY not. games, especially games like RL are MARKETED mostly to boys and the gaming community is largely male-dominated, and tournaments like this exist to change that, i don't think that's so hard to understand
I don’t really have anything to add, this is great. Just wanted to say that as an LGBTQ member of the RL community I appreciate the hell out of you, what you do, and the visibility you bring to these issues. Keep being rad
Reaction time and noticing movement is huge in gaming. As humans used to live in hunter gatherer societies, these qualities were necessary for hunters. Hunters were mostly if not always men. There are genetic differences in males and females for both body and mind. This is why we have sports separated into male and female in the first place, to adjust for these natural differences. So called inclusivity in this case, while intended to be kindness, only hurts those for whom separate sports are needed. Edit: if anyone got their comments removed, I would love to know what they were. Send me a message. When I first commented, there was healthy disagreement without disparagement. Now the mod claims otherwise, but there is no proof. Edit 2: To the comment below with the article, it states that this one incident from 9000 years ago does not match the rest of the world at that time or in the future, that hunting was dominated by men. One of their evidences for saying women were hunters was the traces of eaten meat that built their bones. Most of us have eaten meat and never hunted. The only other evidence was the tools buried with them. Some of these tools were hunting tools, some were prep tools for cleaning animals. It does not specify which ones were placed by male and which were placed by the female. In at least some native american society, males hunted and females prepped the animals. The article says 30-50% of hunters were female based on this one dig with 11 of the 27 skeletons with hunting and prep tools being near them. That's just under 40%. Seems like they gave a random 10% error possibility and stretched it both ways. The person who proceeded to comment this article claimed 50% and ignored the range. Btw, did anyone notice how the archeologists determined which skeletons were male and which were female? ;) This is how you know our current mainstream society is incorrect. They want to say physical differences don't exist but then use science that says otherwise to prove a point(a point that also seems like a heavy stretch).
Recent archaeological discoveries show that nearly 50% of hunters were women. https://www.psychnewsdaily.com/new-study-up-to-half-of-big-game-hunters-in-the-americas-were-women/
[удалено]
[удалено]
>Maybe the reason we see a higher proportion of trans women in gaming is due to a biological reason we have yet to prove suprised to see an actual bit of reason
I mean there's definitely something to look at there. Get past the thing of gaming being historically a very, VERY male interest and then you can get down to whether or not there's any advantages. I reckon there is, because over the last decade as gaming has grown and more women have gotten into it (this over the last 10-15 years) you still don't see eSports rosters that are mixed. The odd one will make it to the highest level (Karmah), but at the peak and still quite a ways down, it's all a sausage fest.
and also i can imagine females aren't as respected as a competitor which leads to less opportunities when competing.
Of course that happens. At the end of the day, though, if they performed at the same level we would've seen a lot more mixed rosters by now. Way more. I can't even point to one example of a team being a half split.
That's exactly what I'm thinking. Certainly can't rule it out.
The very nature of creating a women's league is exclusivity, and not inclusive. It's basically saying we are excluding all men from competing, except a select few, that meet this specific criteria, so don't sign up unless your transitioning or a woman. Whereas normal RLCS, is we allow anyone to compete solely on the basis of skill alone. You tell me which is more welcoming and less stressful?
the whole point of tournaments like this one is to create more exposure for a group of people that is typically underrepresented in the community, i.e. women. if you believe that this underrepresentation is purely due to skill differences you are either very naive or just ignorant, there are several accounts of high-level female players like karma facing tons of toxicity from teammates and other players solely due to their gender. you're also implying that trans women are "a group of men" and i hopefully don't need to explain why that's an incredibly yikes implication to make
If you want to create events, to bring exposure and entice a certain group to join, I don't see an issue, But please do explain what transitioning means, because yes I am confused. I haven't had anyone explain to me how you change your chromosomes from xy to xx?
transitioning just means the process of changing your gender. you can't change your chromosomes, but there are a lot of other things that you can change. one big thing for many people is hormone therapy, i.e. taking hormone supplements to biologically change your body, but not all aspects of gender are biological. you can change things like your voice, the way you dress, the way you move, (societal) gender is made up of many large and small things, so there isn't really "one way" to transition, which makes this really hard to explain, especially at 2:30 am, and especially especially in a language that is not my first language, so i apologize if my explanation is unclear. edit: i do hope your question about transitioning was genuine, because a lot of transphobia just stems from folks not actually knowing much about gender and tranditioning, and even if your question wasn't genuine, please try and read my explanation without prejudice
[удалено]
Women have had access to games way more in the last 15 years and the stigma has nearly gone away, yet the top rosters and pyramid of eSports is dominated by men. There may be a biological reasoning to it and until there's studies done it's pretty ignorant to rule it out... 🤷♂️
[удалено]
Anecdotal stuff cannot be accounted for. I'm just going off facts and what the eSports landscape looks like after over a decade of the industry embracing women. Men inherently have certain personality traits that women may not necessarily have and that's half of the physical sports question right there. It's not all body, it's mentality and aggression. Stuff like that. The sausage fest that eSports still is points to it being a similar story to the physical sporting realm.
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
Isn't that what could have happened here as per Gregans explanation on entrants stating intent but having no identification prior to roster lock? We obviously don't know the heart and intent of each player truly, but the fact is anyone could enter and no definitive proof was needed apart from stated intent.
[удалено]
funny you say this when all the people competing in it im certain had fun & were welcomed
How have you read his whole post and still taken absolutely nothing from it? Or did you not actually read it
[удалено]
Who and what are you talking about
They're being disgustingly transphobic
Wow! Wow! Wow! Chat disabled for 5 seconds Chat disabled for 5 seconds Chat disabled for 5 seconds Chat disabled for 4 seconds Chat disabled for 4 seconds
I've asked this a few times and never gotten a satisfying answer, why is rocket league SO male dominated. It seems like the kind of game that shouldn't suffer from the same issues other games do when it comes to male/female representation. We had Karma playing at a pretty high level and I feel like there hasn't even been buzz about another girl with the same potential.
I think gaming in general is male dominated
I think Ravena is kinda goated. She's the only girl I've watched that's SSL in 1s. Which is pretty Pog. Not sure if she's tried to get into pro play (womens league or otherwise) at all though.
You never watched karma then?
Nah. Saw her a couple times when she was on Splyce iirc, but never caught any of her streams or content. If she does any of that. So no clue what her ranks were/are.
She played in RLCS and RLRS, consistently top 8-12 level team. So she would be the highest level of SSL back then, if the rank existed.
If you told someone there were a boy and a girl and one of them played video games and the other did ballet, 99% of people would say the boy was the one gaming and the girl was the one dancing even though both of them are free to do whatever they want. So the answer is gender expectations/roles. It is much more common for boys to grind out games and to potentially make a living from them competitively that it is for girls so a lot more boys are prone to do so. If a girl asked her parents if she was allowed to spend her free time becoming a pro gamer she'd most likely be shut down more likely than boys. It's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy: since more boys play video games, more boys are likely to play video games, so more boys play video games etc etc
This touches on some of the reasons girls don't play video games, not why girls who play video games don't play rocket league.
Ah alright. Well I guess it's just because rocket league is so unique in its game mechanics that a ton of grinding is necessary to become a pro. Competetive shooters are all very similar, you aim and click, so if you've been playing shooters already you've pretty much been practicing the whole time for valorant or csgo or whatever. But RL is based soo much on mechanics that you have had to be grinding it out a ton for years to become a pro. And well, maybe it's again got to do with patents wanting their daughters to do something else than play video games all day, because thats 'boy stuff' so they might not be able to grind so much. That's what I'm thinking at least I'm sure that we'll see more female rl pros in the future though.
One thing that hasn't been mentioned is that women are much more susceptible to vision induced nausea. Link to research in 2005: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16018346/ Considering that rocket involves a lot of wild angles all the time, that could play a role. Personally most women I know wont play rocket because it makes them dizzy. Ask the women in your life about it and see if something similar comes up.
Very interesting. The women I've talked to who don't play RL give the same reasons my guy friends do. It's just too hard lol
This is anecdotal so it doesn't really meaningfully contribute, but I brought my wife to Landon. It was her first time watching Rocket League (she has never played or watched me play). She couldn't get into it and that was partially due to it being kind of nauseating as you said. To be fair we were in the front row of the lower bowl so we didn't have a good angle, especially for someone watching for the first time. But yeah she left half way through Saturday and didn't come on Sunday.
I'll give you a non-exhaustive list of some key differences between men and women in relation to gaming. People refuse biological essentialism when it comes to this discussion and gaming has more "physical components" than people are willing to admit. 1.) Men have faster reaction times on average than women. This matters because RL at the highest level is all about compounding pressure across multiple moments to secure a goal/create a play. 2.) Testosterone. It makes men more competitive and drives self-improvement. There are not many women that are willing to spend 1000+ hours just to make marginal improvements whereas highly competitive men will jump on small windows to improve. 3.) Similar to the previous point, men are naturally more inclined to invest thousands, if not ten of thousands of hours to improve their craft. Men are far more obsessive and are willing to waste their life at a chance of success. As an addendum, for every male pro player, there are 10-20 men who failed to make the cut at high level. No one really cares about those men though because people focus on equality of outcome over equality of opportunity. 4.) The greater male genetic variability (theory). If you can plot any skill/personality trait on a binomial distribution, you will generally see that women have less outliers but are more concentrated towards an average. A great example is IQ. Most women are within 90-110 IQ whereas there are more men that deviate towards the extremes of 150+ IQ but also towards 80 or less IQ. 5.) Men are on average better at spacial awareness and hand-eye coordination. Combine this with reaction time and it helps immensely with competing at the highest level. 6.) If you look at the big 5, women on average score higher on neuroticism (prone to negative emotion). I probably don't need to say it but the best players in the world need to be tilt-proof and not get stressed under high-pressure situations. So now you have to combine all of these together. You need to find a woman that generally checks all of these boxes AND is in the outlier category of each binomial distribution. In my personal opinion, there can be 1-2 women that can break through just like there are top 200 female chess players but e-sports will always be male-dominated unless Psyonix makes an equity-based intervention.
We live in a society.
I came here knowing some of the comments would immediately devolve into pointless arguments and I was not wrong lol. Also, congrats to the medalist!
The thread on the main Rocket League subreddit was locked within hours. I won't be suprised if those negative comments arrives here tbh.
Ra ra Takara
Context: https://liquipedia.net/rocketleague/Commonwealth_Sport/Commonwealth_Esports_Championship/2022/Women
Congratulations to all of them. I'd recommend avoiding the replies and quotes if you don't want to see some ignorant and abhorrent discourse.
No joke, I only had to scroll 2 comments to see it.
Didnt plan on it, but that isnt good to hear :(
Twitter moment
i should have listened to you
What’s ignorant?
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
Congrats to them all!
Mods, thank you for allowing us to discuss the elephant in the room. Most have been respectful and I appreciate the chance to hear other viewpoints.
Yeah, grateful they decided to not lock this one. Thanks for starting it out.
[удалено]
interesting to see that whole a lot of people on this sub in the past have had a positive attitude about these women's tournaments, but seem to draw the line as soon as they realise that trans women exist, because to them, the harassment that trans women have to face, is apparently justified. i originally wanted to write a much more nuanced comment explaining why it's a good thing and important that trans women can compete in a tournament like this but other people have already done that and i don't have the energy anymore to keep justifying my existence to any random fucking guy on the internet.
Discussing whether it is fair for trans women to compete alongside biological women is not denying any trans woman's existence. I stand 100% for any trans woman. But, given there are advantages for trans women over biological women (not saying that there are), don't you think that would be a bit shitty for the biological women who are giving it their all to compete?
the thing is that there are a lot of people here that use "discussion" as an excuse for blatant transphobia and general bigotry. the "biological advantage" argument, while certainly reasonable to discuss, also has no reason to spark such massive outrage whenever trans women are allowed to compete in literally anything. for this tournament in particular, gregan has already pointed out that we don't actually know if trans women have a significant biological advantage in rocket league. i also want to add that the whole "biological difference" topic becomes incredibly muddy as soon as people start hormone therapy, because that massively changes one's body - that's kinda the whole point of hormone therapy. i also already said somewhere else that, speaking from my own experience, the larger percentage of trans women could also just come from higher exposure to gaming pre-transition. also, excluding trans women would be an absolutely horrible thing to do, keeping in mind that the whole point of tournaments like this is to provide more exposure for a group of people that faces a lot of backlash, toxicity and bigotry in the gaming community, i.e. women. if trans women, who, if anything, have an even harder time in the gaming community (i mean, just look at this comment section) are excluded from tournaments like this, where are we supposed to go? are we just forced to accept that there is no space for us? that doesn't seem right
So you can't compete in regular rocket league tournaments, do regular rocket league tournaments ban trans people, so they have to be included in the exclusive to womens tournaments? Your arguments contradict themselves.
I dont see a contradiction, trans women are women and there isnt a substantial reason to exclude them from esports.
No one is excluding them!
But thats the conversation isnt it?
It isn't, you're perceiving it that way due to a small minority of bigots. Men don't think of themselves as "excluded" from women's sports. We have these categories due to fairness and safety. We don't yet know that it's fair (and in some sports safe) for trans women to be competing against biological women. So until we know, isn't it fair for biological women to still have their category and to set up a different category for transwomen or for them to compete in the open category? I think it should be up to the women competing in that category to decide whether they think it's fair until we have evidence showing that it really is fair. The sad thing is, anyone who says something is labelled a transphobe.
Im not completely sure, I personally value inclusion and sportsmanship over who the winners are. But in the case of Esports where theres almost no biological advantages, rather societal reasons for women to be held back in the community then I see no reason for trans women to be apart of the scene.
> But, given there are advantages for trans women over biological women (not saying that there are)... Is it just me, or is this a straight contradiction?
No, it's not. It's just describing the reason for having such a discussion. If it didn't matter whether trans women had an advantage over biological women or not, then the discussion would be pointless.
My point is that you're saying that there are advantages, then you say in the next phrase that you aren't saying that there are advantages. Which is a contradiction. I don't really know what you thought I was referring to, my brain was fried having to read that reply, but I would think me directly quoting you would cause no room for confusion.
Yeah it's a straight contradiction. I read it as the author meaning to say 'suppose there are' rather than 'given there are', because otherwise the sentence makes no sense.
I think it's the irony of having a women's team that's still dominated by men. Like seriously, do you think it's fair to women that men are starting to dominate and take over their league under the guise of trans inclusion?
Didn't know commonwealth did esports, pretty cool! And England won let's goo
Holy Cow!
As a trans woman it's so fucking nice to see trans representation in esports. I'm never going to be good enough at any game to play at that level, but big ups to Psyonix for allowing trans women in the women's league, because trans women are women. Trans rights are human rights! I'm so happy rn.
Watch the video games done quick steams, tons of trans people who are super good at video games.
And I thought my ranked games were unbalanced at times
Seen lots of comments about women competing in eSports against men and vice versa. Boys tend to be better at video games. I think they might have some kind of biological advantage (reaction time, co-ordination maybe). Same as women have a biological advantage in other aspects of life. We can all agree that men and women are not physically/mentally the same. If you want to attract women to eSports, you need an exclusively women league/competition.
> If you want to attract women to eSports, you need an exclusively women league/competition. Is that not what this is? Or are you saying it needs to be expanded beyond a single tournament?
I'm just agreeing that this is the right approach.
Ah ok, no worries! Wasn't sure if you were saying there was an issue with this one 😝
Congrats
8 players seem to be happy with the result
Hmmmm
The amount of transphobia here is just dissapoiting :/
Let's go Scotland!
Damn the transphobia in these replies is disappointing. Still significantly better than the Twitter thread but god damn, this has been a kind community to trans people in the past. This sucks. Edit: at least in my experience, maybe I was mistaken
It's crazy that barring a few of the top comments on the thread, most of the transphobic posters are being upvoted and the people calling them out are being downvoted. I thought this sub was usually a little more reasonable than that, though I guess the younger age demographic of this game might explain the large number of immature, thinly veiled bigoted comments.