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Gender in League

slifty·9/18/2013, 5:44:13 AM·46 votes·11,612 views

Since this community section is so small right now I want to see if we can have an actual, serious discussion about a pretty sticky topic: gender in the league. I'm hoping that we can see some responses from rioters as well since they are the ones that can play the leadership role here.

In particular I want to talk about:

  1. Skins and champion body types.

  2. Gender diversity (or lack thereof) in the pro gamer scene.

  3. Appropriate reactions to misogynistic comments and language in-game (and even more subtle stuff that you might not thwap a full blown "misogynistic" label onto but would still make women disproportionately less comfortable than men).

  4. Anything else that you think should be included in the conversation!

Rather than dominate the thread seeding with my thoughts, I'm going to reply to my own post. I'd love to hear what others have to say.

Also, as a friendly reminder, if you think this is an important conversation please consider voting it up so more people see it.

129 Comments

izari9/18/2013, 3:48:20 PM34 votes

I'm actually in the process of writing a big spiel about the state of female players in male-dominated games, but I'll try to summarize my points.

Often, as female gamers, we're cornered (forcibly) into two shitty situations.

A) We hide our gender to avoid harassment / pedestal treatment, thus perpetuating the idea that girls don't play games and as such their needs and desires don't need attention.

B) We are open about our gender and open ourselves up to harassment, claims that we are being attention whores, or being idolized.

The majority of female gamers do not want any of this. We just want to play games we like without our genders being big deals.

I think it's a conversation and solution that has to be met by both genders, because yes, there are girls who could care less about games but play or stream because it's easy attention. But they wouldn't succeed in doing so if guys stopped giving those girls attention.

If you're a serious female gamer and you actually want to stream or cast about a game you love, once again, you are cornered.

A) You are either attractive and get called an attention whore, and your opinions are ultimately dismissed BECAUSE TITS, PLZ STRIP, LOL white knight legion.

B) You are not attractive and people do nothing but call you fat, ugly, still an attention whore and your opinions are ultimately dismissed.

More in relation to league - I have been playing video games and online games for a LONG time. I've never encountered the sort of harassment and harsh treatment in other games as I have within LoL's community.

When we try to voice our opinions about the state of female representation in LoL, we're immediately dismissed as whiny feminist whore bitches who are trying to ruin everything. When in reality, MOST of us are just trying to say "Hey, you know, we're here, we play, and maybe the issue isn't that our population is small so we can be ignored but rather our population is small BECAUSE we are ignored."

Not everybody can have the backbone to stick up for ourselves when LITERALLY THOUSANDS of angry / immature guys are throwing the worst of the worst at us because for whatever reason they think less battle bikinis and strip tease recall animations is encroaching on their rights, or something.

Take this thread from reddit where I told someone off for making fun of chubby cosplayers:

http://i.imgur.com/uGfF4oL.png

Which leads into my last point - objectifying and sexualizing female game characters has real-world consequences. Every time I see a gorgeous girl post a cosplay pic and either get ripped apart because she is not a size 0, or already skinny girls photoshopping their bodies to hell so that they can look good enough for global acceptance by the male gaze, it breaks my heart.

Having characters who are (at times) obscenely mis-proportioned, or at-best cookie-cutter clones of a busty, thin-waisted, booty-licious diva just reinforces the idea that a female's worth starts with her looks, and not her abilities. These are supposed to be heroes and legends, but very few human females in this game are anything but model - worthy. Nobody is average. Nobody is scrawny and flat-chested. Nobody is a little chubby.

Everybody however has an option to show some T&A, though.

There needs to be a MAJOR mentality swap from current gamers before anything can move forward.

It can start by stopping the treatment of female gamers are evil or goddesses, or whatever. We're just gamers, and we have a right to have concerns about the media we enjoy.

Riotdavin9/18/2013, 6:54:27 AM22 votes

To comment on #3, we've actually found that the general LoL community doesn't condone that kind of rhetoric. Misogyny, homophobia, racism, etc. tend to get punished by the Tribunal, which is actually a rather representative read of the general League population (see http://gdcvault.com/play/1017940/The-Science-Behind-Shaping-Player for more info on that).

That's a pretty cool thing. Runs very contrary to the idea that players are inherently negative. We talked some more about this at the recent PAX Prime panel that gtz put together (http://gbitk.tumblr.com/post/61477751672/pax-prime-2013-panel-designing-shaping-and).

The vocal minority doesn't represent the broader community :)

lorewise9/18/2013, 2:15:44 PM13 votes

This is an important discussion. I can't add much that hasn't already been said but I do have an idea related to skin and champion diversity.

Skins that are specifically opposite of the gender of the champion. It wouldn't work with all of the champions obviously but I could see this being popular. Even if it didn't change the gender of the champion I know I'd throw money at my screen let it rain style if I could play a fem Gragas or butch Lulu.

I mean who wouldn't want a Mrs. Cho'Gath skin?

http://i.imgur.com/LN02KCu.jpg

The Pumpkin King9/18/2013, 8:45:33 AM8 votes

  1. Seems fine-ish. Could use a few more female body types that aren't 36DD's.

  2. Even though the gap is getting closer to a 50-50 split for gender it's still leaning heavily towards men. Women as a whole tend more towards to social/facebook games (from personal experience). There ARE good female players out there that I'm sure could kick ass in the LCS, but it might be more a "do they want to put up with the harassment" question then a "are they good enough" question.

3)I auto report that.

4)I personally would like to a LGBT champion. But judging just by the way the racists came out of the woodwork with Lucian it would go over EXTREMELY poorly.

Varsuuvius9/18/2013, 6:11:47 AM7 votes

  1. I do think that there have been a decent number of purely sexually designed champions. I recall the relatively close release of Zyra and Syndra being brought up as they both appear to be designed to be sexually appealing rather than aesthetically appealing, Zyra moreso than Syndra. That being said, I think Riot has been doing a better job of this. Leona and Quinn both show a much more varied type of body types with full body armor and reasonable proportions when compared to Miss Fortune or Morgana. Vi is also great because of both her attitude and aesthetic appeal and her lack of sexual focus.

  2. Not to take away from the specific topic but I think this is a much bigger problem in the video game industry as a whole. The idea of a "boys only club" is still very ingrained into the entire industry. I can't say I have much of an idea how to fix this at all but I do think that slowly women are showing up in bigger force in both the industry and eSports as a whole.

  3. While I'm certainly no advocate of misogynistic comments and sexually based discrimination, I don't honestly think this is a problem that can be handled like others. Do people do this sort of thing all the time? Absolutely. Does it come up a lot and is it generally accepted by a large amount of people? I don't think there's a single way to deny that. However, I believe that's just a side effect of both anonymity and the global presence that the Internet brings. No matter where you go on the internet, you will always find hateful, spiteful comments about one thing or another. Women seem to specifically be the target in video games, League being no exception, due to the "boys only club" mentality that is just found in this hobby. I don't think raging leading to negative attitudes or frustrated cussing is inherently a bad thing. I think the problem is that people often focus their frustration at a specific target, many times often a teammate. This is a problem but other than simply eliminating the use of a large amount of curse words, this can't be curbed in a humongous way. That being said, Lyte's posts and adjustments to bans, warnings and the Tribunal seem to be doing very well in curbing this sort of behavior and attitude. Of course there will always be people who act this way but I think this issue is being handled well and will be extraordinarily difficult to deal with much better.

slifty9/18/2013, 5:55:21 AM5 votes

My friends follow the antics of pro gamers more closely than me, but it's easy to see that there aren't many women involved at that level. It seems safe to assume that this trend trickles down the skill levels as well.

If an organization wants to change the composition of the people involved in the events they support, they need to go out of their way to do so. It seems to me that RIOT ought to be taking a leadership role in this space -- going well out of their way to make both League of Legends as well as the gamer scene safer, more attractive, and more accessible to women and girls.

tehdef9/18/2013, 6:01:33 PM4 votes

So here is the deal. People pushing this agenda so fiercely need to stop. It took YEARS for females to be considered equals as journalists. In a lot of cases, they still aren't. You can't keep pushing this female gaming agenda without realizing this is happening in nearly every other situation where males dominated the demographic for years on end.

Give it time and stop pushing it. It'll change gradually whether you like it or not, and continuing to bring it up either irritates people, or makes them dull to the problem and they lose interest.

Timing a battle is nearly as important as executing it. Constantly isn't the right timing.

Just for clarification. I'm all for gender equality. However, I am not for the constant incessant bitching about a subject that based on historical precedent won't change overnight, or even over a decade. We can't even get out of women's reproductive rights, what makes you think it'll be any easier to change other things that have had time to grow a certain way?

TLDR: Overly feminists legbeards constantly moaning about their concerns helps nothing. Nor does trying to make "girl gamer" a thing. Everyone is simply a gamer, and your sexual reproductive organ matters naught. Love equality, but tired of constant moaning about something that simply isn't just going to change overnight.

Fellow Foe9/18/2013, 7:04:48 AM3 votes

Because there are no serious female gamers, and believe me, if there are there is a community around them that makes them comfortable. If that's not the case for you I'd say you are unlucky. Also most of the female streamers of league don't really play serious, they try to get attention of viewers with their cuteness (and they succeed). There just isn't a female competitive scene in the lol. If there is, show it to us. By many means, we'd love to have some female pro gamers. I think this just isn't the thing women enjoy, and I wouldn't force them really, because that would be unethical. I doubt there is anything that can be done about it. Want to limit rage level of people? So what we make a separate ghetto for men and women? That won't happen.