Female gamers compete in a space where basic rules of civility are lacking
PLAYA VISTA, Calif. — With her hot pink assault rifle, Emmalee Garrido is mowing down heavily armed terrorists that repopulate on her computer monitor after each kill. As captain of Dignitas, regarded as the world’s best all-female “Counter-Strike: Global Offensive” team, Garrido has a goal of 500 to 700 kills per 30minute training session in the video game to hone her aim and reflexes before joining her teammates online for their six-hour daily practice.
“I’m the sniper of the team, so what I’m doing now is like (Philadelphia 76ers point guard) Ben Simmons making baskets from different spots on the floor,” Garrido says as her fingers furiously command her keyboard and mouse to obliterate camouflage-clad targets.
But when it comes to firing back against the online haters, harassers and trolls who are part of many female gamers’ experience, Garrido takes a decidedly nonconfrontational approach.
“Instead of saying anything back to them, I don’t acknowledge them at all and just talk with my skill in the game,” said Garrido, 28, whose screen name is EMUHLEET, a fusion of her first name and “I’m elite.”
For girls and women who compete in esports, basic civility on the playing field — the right to take part without being bullied — shouldn’t be too much to expect. But it’s hardly a given.
According to a recent online survey of 388 female gamers conducted by Casino.org, 57 percent said they had been harassed after revealing their gender online. The harassment takes myriad forms — put-downs such as “Get back to the kitchen,” insults about their appearance, profane name-calling and threats of rape and violence.
Some women — such as Jenn “Queen” DeFonzo, 26, who juggles a full-time job at an engineering company with a semipro gaming career — suspect the true percentage is higher. Online harassment has been a constant over her 15 years as a gamer, first playing Halo for fun and now competing on a mixed-gender team with three male friends.
“The harassment has been consistent, as has the struggle to be taken seriously,” DeFonzo said. “It’s, ‘You’re never going to be good at this game.’ ‘You’re always going to lose to a dude.’ Or, ‘You’re ugly.’ ‘You’re fat.’ ”
The vitriol mirrors what many women contend with online in other fields and interactions.
According to the Women’s Media Center’s Speech Project, chat room participants with female usernames report receiving threatening or sexually explicit private messages 25 times more often than those with male or ambiguous usernames.
Nearly two-thirds of female journalists report experiencing threats, sexist abuse, intimidation and harassment online and on social media in the course of their work.
Female politicians are also a frequent target of pernicious online abuse, according to a 2016 Inter-Parliamentary Union survey of female legislators around the world, with 62 percent saying they believed the intent of the harassment was to dissuade them from pursuing leadership positions.
MIT sociologist T.L. Taylor sees a resonance between the battles for inclusion that women waged in the early 1970s and those being waged today in the gaming sphere.
“The internet side of it amplifies the worst parts of the historical pattern of exclusion that women and girls face when it comes to equitable participation in so many aspects of our culture,” said Taylor, who has researched and written extensively about esports culture since 2003.
In esports, a fast-growing arena in which a global pastime is approaching a billion-dollar business, what’s at issue is more than fair play. In the view of Taylor, it is a basic human right.
“What we have not fully grappled with is that the right to play extends to the digital space and gaming,” she said. “For me, it is tied to democracy and civic engagement. It’s about participating in culture and having a voice and visibility.”
The irony, as Taylor views it, is that there is no immediately obvious reason for a gender divide in esports. Unlike in stickand-ball sports, physical attributes such as height, speed and muscle mass are not essential to success.
Moreover, there is no male tradition to overcome, such as in boxing or wrestling. In the arc of sporting history, esports were invented yesterday, decades after Title IX — the law banning discrimination on the basis of sex in schools that receive federal funds — gave legal heft to the right of American girls and women to
compete, too.
Yet the culture of many esports communities can be toxic, leading Taylor to conclude that deepseated cultural issues are at play.
“We know we face tremendous issues right now with misogyny and harassment — not just for women but for people of color and the LGBT community,” Taylor said.
With so much revenue at stake, a leading esports production company, ESL, realized the business imperative of ensuring that 50 percent of the population doesn’t feel excluded from gaming. But first, the German-based company wanted solid research that identified what the barriers were, so it joined technology giant Intel in funding Taylor’s work.
“At every level, all of us are very conscious that we’re adding to the numbers of women for the very simple reason that women make up almost 50 percent of the gaming audience but they make up less than 30 percent of actual competitive esports,” said Yvette Martinez-Rea, North American CEO of ESL.
The upshot was AnyKey, a multipronged initiative to increase diversity in esports based on the findings of Taylor and fellow researcher Morgan Romine, a professor at California Irvine and former professional gamer. The name AnyKey is a play on the phrase, “Press any key to continue,” and is intended to convey inclusion.
To help girls and women find nonaggressive gamers to play with online, AnyKey created the “Good Luck Have Fun Pledge,” which gives signatories an icon on Twitch, the leading streaming service, that signals in chat that they’re a good sport and won’t tolerate harassment by others. The pledge has been translated into seven languages and has more than 365,000 signatures.
Twitch is owned by Jeff Bezos, the owner of The Washington Post.
Changing a culture, however, takes time. In the interim, female gamers have devised their own responses to cyberbullying.
Some mute their own voice so their gender won’t be detected. Others play under ambiguous or male names. Others block persistent harassers. Still others fight back, though veteran gamers speak of “advocacy fatigue,” weary of becoming targets for speaking up. Untold girls simply quit, turned off by strangers’ hurtful, often hateful words.
DeFonzo estimates as many as 50 percent of girls quit gaming for that reason. She nearly did at 15 but decided against it after some soul-searching.
“I questioned whether this was the right fit for me, but I’ve always been a very competitive person,” she said. “I decided I wasn’t going to let one person prevent me from pursuing my dream of being a competitive esports player.”
Female gamers are forming their own online communities for mutual support, friendly practices and competition. But in the current discussion of esports’ culture, all-female teams and tournaments are a hot-button issue.
Some, such as Taylor, see all-female squads as a useful steppingstone in bridging the competitive disparity between top male and female gamers but nothing more. “It’s a necessary intervention at this moment,” she said, “but not a sufficient one.”
Others see them as counterproductive, exacerbating the perception that female gamers can’t keep up.
If tournament earnings are a gauge, the gender gap is considerable. According to esportsearnings.com, the top male pro gamer has tallied $6.9 million, while the top female has made less than $360,000. She is the only woman among the top 500 esports earners.
There’s no sense of time in the dark, windowless convention space at the Georgia World Congress Center that hosted DreamHack Atlanta, a three-day festival of gaming that alights in major world cities throughout the year.
There is also no peace. The noise borders on deafening — an aural collision of hundreds of overheated conversations, dozens of blaring songs and ampedup “Shout-casters” broadcasting play-by-play of the pro competitions on the main stage.
“Yes, they got the kills but not the bomb plant!” one brays during a “Counter-Strike: Global Offensive” showdown between two all-male European powers, a game in which five terrorists battle five counterterrorists with rifles, knives and molotov cocktails while planting and defusing bombs along the way.
Jammed into 450,000 square feet of gaming space are pros competing for $50,000 prize pools; mesmerized fans in folding chairs who’ve come to watch famous teams compete; hobbyists hunched over their monitors in the BYOC (Bring Your Own Computer) section; live videostreamers beaming their play to subscribers; and countless opportunities for anyone to plop down and play a dizzying array of firstperson shooter games, sporting games and fantasy games.
Women and girls are a rarity, accounting for no more than 15 percent of the throng.
Across the vast hall, DeFonzo takes her seat alongside her Guardians Gaming teammates for their opening match in the Halo 3 tournament. Players are meticulous about their setups, adjusting their seats and arranging water bottles, eye drops and breath mints before launching into their interstellar war between 26thcentury humanity.
With roughly 90 seconds remaining in the opening game, Guardians Gaming’s opponents put their headsets down in a cyber-surrender, they’re so hopelessly behind. DeFonzo has led the rout, tallying 15 kills and eight assists.
The gold standard of all-female teams is Dignitas CS:GO Fe — five 20-somethings from California, Pennsylvania, Hawaii and Canada. The Dignitas corporate headquarters is in Newark; the team’s training base is in Playa Vista, Calif.; and its playing fields include Denmark, France, Hong Kong, Macao, Poland, Portugal and Spain.
The squad was founded as Team Karma in 2014 by Garrido, then a full-time nurse, who recruited the best female gamer friends she knew and scraped up donations to fund their early travel to Counter-Strike competitions.
Everything changed when the team was acquired in 2017 by Dignitas, whose majority stakeholder is Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment. HBSE’s holdings include the NBA’s Philadelphia 76ers, the NHL’s New Jersey Devils and Newark’s Prudential Center. Now the women are salaried, as are the male gamers on the half-dozen other teams under the Dignitas umbrella.
Esports Hall of Fame inductee Heather “sapphiRe” Garozzo is their manager, unofficial “team mom” and adviser on developing their personal brands and dealing with internet trolls.
Garozzo, 34, the 2012 women’s Counter-Strike world champion, got her share of harassment as a fast-rising player who fell in love with the game after a knee injury ended her high school soccer and basketball career.
“The worst was when they called you a bitch,” she recalls. “I’m like, ‘I’m the nicest person! I don’t curse or anything! How can you say that?’ ”
Though scattered in different cities, the women of Dignitas practice online together six hours a day, five days a week, bumping that up to 12 hours a day during “boot camps” that precede major tournaments. While a new 7,000square-foot Dignitas headquarters is being completed in Playa Vista, known as Silicon Beach for all the tech companies and startups in the Los Angeles area office park, Garrido practices from home in her pajamas or dons a hoodie and leggings to operate out of temporary headquarters of a cramped WeWork space.
Among the benefits of being owned by the 76ers organization, Garrido said, is having access to the team’s support staff, including sports psychologists, nutritionists and physical therapists.
The sports psychologist, for example, has helped the squad manage pretournament nerves. “He told us, ‘Pressure is a privilege,’ so now I understand that it’s good to feel pressure because that means we’re doing something amazing,” she said.
The physical therapist has been invaluable helping Garrido manage chronic pain from the broken wrist she suffered a few years ago when she punched a wall in her house, angry over losing a qualifying match for a major tournament.
While the Dignitas women aren’t currently competitive with the top men’s Counter-Strike squads, that’s their goal.