University eSports: Investment and Exclusion

Education and business have been the main focus of eSports development, sometimes at the expense of diversity and building community.

ESports have been profiled as a growing resource to increase the matriculation and universities’ capital. Now, with the situation imposed by the pandemic, eSports have become one of the few minimal risk sports disciplines that university programs can have. While so many other sports have had to significantly reduce their activities or close the doors of their gyms and arenas, eSports have helped keep investment in college and professional sports alive. In July 2020, $20.3 million was invested in mergers, acquisitions, and improvements to Esports equipment globally.

The United States has 50 university programs with the quality to compete globally. England has more than 21 educational offerings ranging from courses to full academic bachelor’s and master’s degrees in eSports. In China, the higher education system has had to rush to adapt to the growing national demand for workers for the eSports industry, calculated to grow another 260,000 jobs. However, all this growth is seriously unbalanced in terms of gender. While 35% of gamers play competitive games, and 30% of the spectators in professional leagues are women, only 5% participate in these leagues.

In the face of this inequity in the professional levels, one would expect universities to make an effort to build educational and professional models with a gender perspective and mechanisms to ensure more egalitarian opportunities. While some instances of this are present in university eSports, they are the more isolated cases of success than the norm. The more that investment grows to professionalize these programs and develop them, the more gender equity decreases.

A problem of gender and structure

To say that female players’ sheer presence in the university and professional leagues is only a gender issue would be simplifying the problem. The league’s homogeneous character does not just come from a direct intention to exclude 35% of its players. Instead, it is a matter of structure, starting with how the research was planned from the beginning that subsequently became the foundation for the teachers and administrators to build the leagues and training programs from scratch.

Bo Ruberg, Assistant professor of Digital Games and Interactive Media at the University of California, Irvine, offers a clear and revealing perspective on why the university leagues’ initial focus was not friendly to an environment of equality.

According to Ruberg, academicians may not be aware of their own biases. Most modern works about eSports speak of these as an educational tool or as a business instrument. However, they do not delve into their dimension as space and dynamics that foster diversity, a sense of community, fair play, or emotional intelligence, among others.

This approach is practical if the intention is only to grow eSports’ economic potential and exploit their usefulness in increasing university enrollment. However, it does not do much for diversity and equity in the spaces that the discipline creates. “I think it’s worth thinking about who you loop in when you want to make more people feel safe and welcome. Business isn’t the opposite of diversity, right? It can be part of the equation if you bring it into consideration.” Professor Ruberg commented. He emphasized that a system focused on business growth can also make room for racial and sexual diversity and gender equality.

When it is not just about skill

When faced with the argument of a low presence of women in varsity and professional eSports leagues, both professional organizations and educational institutions respond that selection and consequent training are based on the level of skills and not on factors such as gender or ethnicity.

This criterion and communication strategy make it clear that, as Ruberg suggested, the structure on which the sport is built is entirely devoid of mechanisms to factor social aspects that could affect both the presence and the performance of social minorities. Ideally, they would have the potential to develop the same skills as players in the dominant social group. However, they face obstacles outside of the game that negatively impact the opportunities they have in comparison.

Under this mostly uniform structure composed of male players with similar social profiles, a player who does not belong to the social majority is an anomaly. He or she is not part of the system, and their integration must take into account aspects and peripheries that would not be considered in an athlete fitting the profile of the majority player. Put simply, being inclusive and striving for a more diverse environment while ensuring quality standards in a class causes more work than just concentrating on operational quality.

To add elements such as diversity, community, and gender perspective to the model upon which eSports programs are built, it is necessary to consider aspects such as the role of socialization when choosing and cultivating fans. Video games are a field of entertainment that, despite having a female presence of almost half of the players, is still seen as a predominantly masculine pastime, especially in its competitive side. The male players are not only motivated to play beginning in childhood; they are also used to the idea that most of the people they will be playing with will be other men. The idea of a woman in this space that has been socialized mostly for males is not just unusual; it also generates resistance and instances of both gender-based bullying and sexual harassment.

It is one thing to say that cyberbullying within online games generally is a severe and under-studied problem that needs urgent attention. However, beyond this, there are bases to argue that gender-based harassment and sexual harassment in these spaces are not only hostile and systemic but that they help maintain an airtight dynamic that limits the discipline of eSports by excluding a significant percentage of players, who are women.

Jonathan McIntosh, a recognized cultural critic, media producer, and co-writer of Tropes vs. Women in Videogames and Anita Sarkeesian, described concisely and determinedly the difference between cyberbullying and gender-based harassment within the world of video games.

In the list, Daily effects of privilege for the male player, McIntosh dissects how gender-based violence and sexual harassment in the gamer community make the female player’s experience much more complicated than their male counterparts, who only have to compete and develop skills.

Competency, language, and community

The basis of cyberbullying and online harassment is verbal language. The gamer community has its lexicon derived mainly from the competition among the players. The competition itself is not necessarily harmful, but when the players go too far in their communication and reach hostile, belligerent, or hurtful terrain, the problem begins. The way of using language in the gamer community commonly carries players to these excesses. There are no structures or dynamics that incentivize the neutral, inclusive, or friendly use of language. Along the competitive edges of this community, it is not strange to confuse competition with denigration.

Alexandra Cata, a Ph.D. student in rhetorical communication and digital media at North Carolina State University, has dedicated her academic career to studying these aspects and their impact on the community of competitive players. Cata examined marginalized groups’ communication in the gamer community, specifically through Black Girl Gamers, Women of Esports, and the podcast, Coin Concede. She found that the language used was instrumental in generating a space where knowledge was shared. The confidence necessary to build a sense of community was developed; this was done without impacting the dynamics of competitive online gaming skills. In this way, these groups made diversity and integration possible in their spaces while maintaining the competitive mechanisms that develop the members’ game skills.

Under this context of diversity and competitiveness, one does not exclude the other. It is possible to build a diverse and professional university eSports community under the understanding that diversity is not an enemy of competition, which promotes progress in player skills.

On the contrary, the rejection of communities having balanced and diverse social characteristics by a hermetic and restrictively uniform, dominant gaming community does not guarantee an elite level of play quality. Instead, it ensures the continuation of educational and professional spaces in which inequality and gender-based violence are the norms.

Translation by Daniel Wetta.

Sofía García-Bullé

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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0