The various federations and organizations devoted to professional gaming and electronic sports, known appropriately as “e-sports,” strive for legitimacy and professionalism. Although e-sports continue to grow across the world and have seen a recent surge in popularity in the past few years with the online accessibility of big name events like the Evolution Championship Series and the World Cyber Games, many still seem hesitant to label it as a “real sport.” While I believe that the devotion and skill of the players and competitors puts them at an equal level to athletes, there’s just something about the sedentary nature of gaming that makes people skeptical. Regardless of personal opinion, e-sports seem to have everything in place to be classified as a real sport: participants who have devoted countless hours to practicing, teams, leagues, sponsorship, and even high stakes betting. But despite their attempts to legitimize themselves as a professional sport like any other, e-sports continue to be weighed down by normalized and unrestricted sexism, racism, and homophobia. The 2014 Evolution Championship Series (EVO) was held this past weekend in Las Vegas, Nevada, where the top players in a variety of fighting games including Marvel vs. Capcom 3, Ultra Street Fighter IV, BlazBlue: Chrono Phantasma, and even Super Smash Brothers Melee from across the world gathered to show their skill. E-sports fans and players alike had the unique opportunity to watch all the center stage matches live on Twitch with upwards of 50,000+ users watching at any given time. In addition to streaming the match itself, prominent players of the particular game being streamed provided commentary over the gameplay. Throughout the entire three-day streaming event only one woman acted as a commentator. Despite being a successful, popular, and skilled player in her own right, she was targeted by streamers and users on social media for her gender and her appearance, something that was rarely if ever directed towards the male hosts (although as many of them were men of color, racist comments weren’t unusual).
E-sports, particularly those involving fighting games, can be hotbeds for this offensive content. In 2012, Aris Bakhtanians revealed just how accepted discriminatory attitudes can be when he commented on an article discussing how harassment needed to be removed from fighting games:
“You can’t. You can’t because they’re one and the same thing. This is a community that’s, you know, 15 or 20 years old, and the sexual harassment is part of a culture, and if you remove that from the fighting game community, it’s not the fighting game community—it’s StarCraft. There’s nothing wrong with StarCraft if you enjoy it, and there’s nothing wrong with anything about eSports, but why would you want just one flavor of ice cream, you know? There’s eSports for people who like eSports, and there’s fighting games for people who like spicy food and like to have fun. There’s no reason to turn them into the same thing, you know?”
One female player, Miranda Pakozdi, even threw a match as Bakhtanians, who was her teammate, continued to make inappropriate comments towards her and harassed her.
Of course, these aren’t unusual actions or attitudes for women, non-heteronormative people, and people to color to face when participating in online gaming communities. And as always, this doesn’t speak for all competitive gamers or even gamers in general. But it’s behavior like the two above examples that continues to undermine professional gaming’s campaign for legitimacy. High profile cases like Bakhtanians’ reveal only a small portion of the overall and widespread problem that might go unnoticed. His comment, however, reveals what is so concerning: that being offensive is a part of the fighting game culture. Discrimination parades around as “harmless smack talk.” Sexism, racism, and homophobia are further cemented as “funny.” Although that attitude is, arguably, present in our culture at large, it becomes particularly virulent among the community when it becomes associated with “belonging.”
As the gaming community at large struggles with similar issues, it’s important to recognize why this issue is particularly important in professional gaming. As an organization/profession whose players act as representatives of not only their respective communities/games but of gamers as a whole, ignoring, excusing, or even letting these attitudes go by unnoticed can only hurt e-sports’ legitimacy. While something like a single-lined comment on a Twitch livestream might seem harmless or trivial, there are a number of consequences for allowing it to go unchecked: women, who are already severely underrepresented in professional gaming, and other marginalized/minority gamers or even audience members or aspiring players might be turned off from playing or competing, other users see it as “okay” or funny or a way to fit in, and the sport as a whole might be judged for it. Because in such a universal group with players from around the world, a respect and sensitivity for diversity is a necessity in order to be seen as a legitimate and innovative sport.
