eSports World Championship Attempts to Ban Female Gamers and Fails Miserably

In a highly controversial and seemingly nonsensical move, the International eSports Federation has chosen to segregate its 2014 World Championship along gender lines, before being forced to quickly backtrack as players and companies responded in outrage.

IeSF announced yesterday their intentions to only allow female gamers to participate in its Tekken Tag Tournament 2 and Starcraft 2 finals, the latter of which will be held separately from the male Starcraft 2 competition. Male participants will also be allowed to participate in the Hearthstone¸ Dota 2 and Ultra Street Fighter IV championships, but not the Tekken Tag Tournament 2 one.

The story broke over on Reddit when a user noticed this particular clause of the Finnish eSports Federation’s guidelines for its Hearthstone World Championship qualifier at Assembly 2014:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Further digging found that the FeSF had added this stipulation in keeping with the IeSF’s as part of an “effort to promote e-Sports as a legitimate sports” by complying with unnamed international sports authorities. However, much of the effort to elevate eSports to the realm of internationally recognised sports has been focused on its place as a mental or sitting sport along the lines of chess or poker, which begs the question—why choose to segregate along gender lines?

While chess has a Women’s League (created primarily to encourage female participation), female players are not barred from its General League and are allowed to compete against their male counterparts. A surprisingly large number of athletic sport organisations such as the American NBA don’t also explicitly ban female participation, despite having equivalent women’s leagues. Gender segregation of physical sports has been controversial for decades as well; gender “testing” is at best invasive and demeaning and at worst actively transphobic.

Unsurprisingly, this raised eyebrows among the estimated 46% of gamers who identify as female and quite a few of their male counterparts. It would, arguably, be one thing if male and female participants had access to the same competitions, but the IeSF’s decision to regulate which games men and women can compete in is nonsensical, to say the least, especially with Hearthstone’s reputation as having a large female player-base, and several international-level female Dota 2 players.

One can only assume the IeSF is concerned that our fragile female physiques don’t have the physical endurance required to repeatedly select cards in a turn-based CCG.

The IeSF was forced to backtrack today however, after Blizzard--an official partner of the 2014 World Championship and the company behind Hearthstone and Starcraft 2--came to the rescue and threatened to pull its support of the competition if the IeSF did not change its regulations. The organisation has now made its previously male-only Dota 2, Starcraft 2, Hearthstone and Street Fighter competitions open to all participants. However, it will still host female-only Tekken and Starcraft 2 tournaments during the November event.

Sorry male Tekken players--you're still out of luck.