With the announcement of a women’s SSF4 tournament at Evo 2010, the Evo game announcement thread has erupted into a discussion of whether or not such an event is good for Evo, good for women, or good for the FGC. This is an important enough topic that I would like to start a discussion about it.
I can count the number of serious women players in the FGC literally on one hand. Why is this? There are a lot of factors – fightng games are targeted at young boys and men, men tend to be more competitive in nature, etc – but certainly a factor is that the FGC is not usually a friendly environment for women. There are lots of good guys out there, but for every one of them there is at least one monkey-boy trying oggling the women that do show up to events. If you’re still skeptical, check out the usual traffic on the #capcom IRC channel or listen to enough stream commentary and you will see and hear a lot of stuff that is not shall we say respectful of the female gender.
A big question is, should the FGC try to correct this? With the release of SF4 there is now at least a small group of girl gamers who are playing the game for real. Is this something the FGC wants to encourage, and if so what can and should we do to welcome the girls and help them on their journey?
Discuss, but let’s keep it serious people.
Edit: If you’re a competitive woman player who has competed at Evo or is likely to compete in 2010, and you would like to have real input in the way Evo deals with this issue, PM me.
I think it is a good idea to “encourage” women to play. However, I think ultimately women want to play on the same field as men, the main SF4 pools. Correct me if I’m wrong ladies.
Another concern about the EVO tourney is that people believe that this extra tourney is taking away from another game that both women and men can play. (Marvel, CvS2, 3s, etc).
I would love to see more women play FGs but I dont think they should be separated from the men in tournaments. My 2 cents
uuuh, you act like this is glaring problem that is only present in the FG community. The only game that currently attracts a large female audience is World of Warcraft. Having a seperate tournament for women does nothing, but belittle them and it makes it seem like they aren’t capable of making their way up there without having a tournament set up for their gender solely. It’s incredibly insulting to them, and that tournament isn’t going to do anything but attract mysoginist men who are going to watch the stream, and make fun of those who enter. Even if it might not have been created for this purpose what is most likely going to happen is a bunch of males are going to tune in, and make fun of the females ability to play. I wouldn’t have any respect for a female who would join to put a show for others like that. Unless they are attention whore types.
Question inkblot. I do realize you guys have good intentions in all this. And the ultimate goal is to get these girls to enter the main evo pools sometime in the future (preferably now). So are there any measures going to be taken to encourage the girls entering the ladies only tournament to also enter the main ssf4 tourney? Like maybe a lowered price on their evo registration fee or something if they also choose to enter the ssf4 main.
Your WOW assesment is horribly wrong, FPS games have strong all female teams, it is worth mentioning that those all female teams do compete (and win) against the rest of the (male) league.
I get what they are trying to do with the event, and you know what, I had the same knee jerk reaction most of you all have had, but the more I think on it, the more I see that good could come out of it.
We dont know if we dont try right?
If its a flop, its a flop, lesson learned.
If its NOT, then we might just have effectivley doubled the community overnight, then once the players are there, the integration of both sides would be much easier.
Last year there were a bunch of females involved in a women’s only SFIV tourney at EVO, it just turned into some catty shit. Not only that, now the FGC has fuckin’ groupies, who can’t actually play but they say they can. I’m not sayin the latter in particular is terrible, but just lettin you know what you could be working with here. On the flipside there are some ladies out there who put their foot in it and do their best when they enter tournies and whatnot, their place is amongst the men, I don’t think they need the special attention and honestly I don’t think some of these chicks who scrub out because they either don’t practice or they just ain’t gettin it, need it either.
I don’t think there’s any reason to encourage them to join the scene or play fighting games specifically. if they want to, they’re free to play just like anyone else. That said, could the environment be made friendlier for those that do choose to enter? Yes. The community on the whole basically behaves in a very locker room fashion, that’s how any community will act when it’s made up of 99.9% males, especially younger males.
In public venues, most groups or organizations try and maintain at least the appearance of gender neutrality, no matter how its members act behind closed doors. If you want srk/evo to cultivate an atmosphere that is less locker room and more friendly to women it would take a lot of work, and that’s assuming you could get the majority of the community to agree to it. You can’t police what people say and how they act, especially on the internet. Well, you can, but trying to police what too many people say at one time is impossible.
The best thing that can really be done imo is to make it known that you would like to see the community change, and hope that people want to. Good luck.
1. The “female” tournament sprung out of nowhere…and at EVO at that.
Not saying Evo is the worst place to try and attract the opposite sex into fighters. But the way it’s being pushed right now is going to probably piss more females off than be happy. the females are trying their best just like males to “come out on top”.
2. Females have been playing fighters seriously before the release of SF4.
sure not as many. But I personally can’t say i’ve seen more female players play fighters because of SF4. I’ve seen more of the SC/BB/GG series do that if just for the characters.
I’m personally not saying it’s a bad idea. But It’s just being implemented very wrong. I can get it if you’re trying to ease new female players in. But then you could wonder why there isn’t a SF4 tournament for newbs or players in their first year of fighters or something. My sister plays fighters. Casually yes but I keep her up to date on the games (and she does her own browsing on the net…wouldn’t be surprised if she lurks SRK.) and if she wanted to enter a tournament with the others i’m sure she would. But she’s a busy person.
I think it also comes down to the fact most females just don’t see the point of training so much in a game for A tournament (or a few they’ll enter and then stop playing altogether.)
And this kind of disgusting tripe is the primary reason this could fail (and most likley the reason this issue even exists in the first place), pathetic troglodytes like this spouting off thier own sexually frustrated nonsense.
hey man, look, as soon as a woman can play in: the nba, the nfl, the pga (nice try michelle wie), the mlb, or the nhl, i’ll respect them. until then, they’re just genetically inferior to us in every conceivable way, physically and emotionally. they don’t have that killer instinct when it comes to competition, so they’ll never stack up to us.
Noone made a big deal about it when GodsGarden did it. Either way, I don’t really care about the sexism issue. If women feel strongly about it they just won’t enter. The only question I have about the EVO tourney is how many women will sign up. It would be a waste of time IMO if it only gets like 10 entrants.
As for the issue on the whole, what do the women think about this? Do they feel that more women are needed in the FG community? Do they have any ideas about how to do so? Serious question, because so far I’ve only read male opinions.
If girls were serious about competing in fighting games, they would enter the same tournaments as men. Fighting games are not a physical sport; you do not need man hands to handle a stick or a controller. Ergo, they do not need special treatment in order to enter tournaments. Having a tournament for females encourages girls that do not take game seriously but love the attention to enter, which makes the tournament counter productive anyways. Attention whores should not be encouraged in any way. I doubt any serious competitor would want to hear “You need a training wheels tournament because you don’t have X”. Girls shouldn’t be under the assumption (and neither should men) that they’re inferior in FGs just because they lack a penis, and the Femme Fatale tournament just sends the message “If you’re too scared to play with the men, here’s your special training wheels tournament so the big scary men don’t scare you”.
Well we’re already making SRK more n00b friendly so I guess it can’t just stop there. The only way to reach out to everyone who may be interested in SF is to reach out as far as possible. I’m going to assume that some women just have the general self confidence in themselves to not care about guys oggling at them cuz most of the hot girls I know tend to brush that stuff off. Though in general yeah the best way to invite women into the fighting game scene is to treat them more like competitors and less like women. Which I’ve pretty much done for any woman I’ve talked to during my time in the fighting game community. There’s so little time to see a woman compete in a fighting game to begin with that when I finally do see one there really is no point in just talking about how hot she is or how she is nowhere near as hot as that other fighting game girl cuz in the end that shit doesn’t matter. If she still has trouble putting together the basics of SF then we are still at a loss for truly bridging the competitive divide in our eSport.
Like I said in the Evo thread though…Evo is still handling this a good bit better than other game corporations such as the CGS who basically kept women on seperate terms when competing. At least Evo is freely allowing the women to allow the regular SFIV tournament just like they did last year. I think all Evo is trying to do is make sure that people know that there are actually women who do play SFIV competitively even if it isn’t at the go to and place at every local and major event level. They just want to put a spotlight on them for one year and that is completely fine considering it’s pretty damned obvious that no girl player outside of Miyuki has a chance of making it into even the semi finals of the standard unisex event. Especially considering that a new game is coming out that we all have to figure new strategies for. They just have too much work ahead of them to place even pretty well in the regular tournament outside of maybe one or 2 of them and there should at least be something to signal that women are playing this and that more women can and should.
Obviously, female gamers are pretty ubiquitous now. It’s just about as common for women to be into games as it is for men, but social and gender roles play a part in every aspect of life.
Here’s a good analogy:
Roller derby. It’s a unisex sport, but the player pool is predominately female. The sport is also dominated by female players. What if at the Roller Derby national tournament, they announced a men-only event? Yeah, it would encourage more men to play if they wanted to be horribly embarrassed.
You can also bet that the female roller derby players are going to crack a few beers and put ALL the male players on blast. It isn’t because they’re immature: it’s because they’re a group of females. We’re a group of males. Do you think we are going to be different when it’s us? This isn’t a “our community is immature” thing, it’s a “we’re all male, so this is what would happen” thing. The EXACT same thing would happen if the roles were reversed.
It’s well-known that roller derby is predominately female, and having a male side tournament isn’t going to just erase those gender roles and make it OK. Street Fighter tournaments are a predominately male phenomenon, whether we like it or not. What woman is going to enter this female-only tournament and still feel good about themselves? Only the ones who don’t take it seriously (or want free money).
One of my friends dates an ex-frag doll, so I’ll get her opinion and post in the thread as well. The two female gamers I’ve talked to so far, though, thought it was a sexist idea.
And yeah, men already respect the female players that bring skill to the table, but how many are there? Probably not enough to make a Top 8 look better than some very amateur matches. I could see Top 4 being decent (undoubtedly so if Choco/Sagat girl came from Japan), but yes, when you show a bunch of guys who take the game seriously bad matches they will laugh whether the players are male or female.