IeSF Wants International Game Tournaments Segregated By Sex [Updated] 221
RockDoctor (15477) writes The Guardian is reporting that a Finnish heat of an international gaming competition is being segregated into male and female branches in accordance to international rules. The International e-Sports Federation (IeSF) want "eSports" to be recognised as equivalent to physical sports. And that, it seems, requires that competitors be segregated on grounds of sex. Which may be appropriate for pole vaulters, but not necessarily appropriate for ePole vaulters. This leaves the organisers of national heats of eSports in a rather invidious position of having (in this case) a tournament only open to "Finnish male players." Update: 07/03 14:38 GMT by T : As several readers point out in the comments, this policy has been abruptly reversed.
interesting times... (Score:5, Interesting)
i see this debate in shooting sports going the other way.
there really aren't any good reasons why a female should be a worse marksman or shooting competitor than a male. in fact, small efficient muscles and better color eyesight make females more ideal than males.
so a lot of people think that there should be no gender seperation in shooting sport competitions, and I tend to agree. but for some reason, the top females can never quite break into the top levels with the top males. just last year, Jessie Duff became the first female USPSA grand master-level shooter. on paper, there's no reason why they can't be as competitive as the guys, but in reality it just hasn't happened. so we end up with segregated competitions (in most cases. there ARE plenty of gender-immeterial competitions out there) to keep it "fair".
disclaimer: i will never be able to compete against the competitive girls.
...Why? (Score:3, Interesting)
I know plenty of competitive game players, mostly from the competitive Team Fortress 2 scene. Now, I can understand why real sports are segregated by sex - there are irreconcilable physical differences between men and women in terms of athletic performance in some sports, thus it's simply not fair to have men competing against women. However, I don't get how this would apply to video games, where there is effectively no difference between the sexes. I have, in fact, seen female comp players who completely destroy me (largely because I don't play comp due to my favorite and only class being Engineer).
Also, there were at least two or three female runners at this year's Summer Games Done Quick. One of them did a very skilled race of Octodad against a male player, and was even ahead at one point - until the very end when she failed to get a very RNG-centric glitch to occur (the male player got it on the first try, but they both admitted that getting that glitch to occur is purely random). Another did a 7.5 hour run of Final Fantasy VI and actually out-lasted the male player she was co-opping with (from what I remember, he switched out about 5 or 6 hours in).