PLAY BY PLAY
Providing commentary for competitive video games is a rapidly growing field as big companies try to get a piece of the action,
Jennifer Pichette has been playing video games since she was a kid. That’s not unusual.
Like some people with a lifelong love of video games, she started playing professional tournaments. That’s not unusual either.
Then she realized she liked commentating better than playing professionally, and started commentating online tournaments. Still not unusual.
But Jennifer Pichette is a woman, and in the worlds of professional video game playing and commentating, that is unusual, often to the detriment of the woman trying to make it in a burgeoning industry.
“Females aren’t taken seriously,” said Pichette, a Sudbury-based masters degree student in medical microbiology at Laurentian University and commentator who’s known online as LemonKiwi.
“It’s just hard for a female gamer to come on the rise, and possibly even be professional.”
Though eSports have been around since the early 1990s, the rise in popularity in the past few years that has helped the once niche hobby turn into a lucrative sport competing for the mainstream.
With the jump into mainstream come some growing pains, though. Studies have shown more than half of all gamers are women, but they’re still underrepresented in eSports and commentating.
Pichette has experienced this firsthand. Being a female “caster” is still seen as an exception rather than the norm — and the problem is worse for players, she said. Men will exclude women from teams, citing a lack of professional experience, but Pichette said it usually has more to do with gender than experience.
“Males want to work with males. Females are used more for their appearance,” she said. “We’re so put to the side as not being skilful enough to be on a male team.”
The problem extends to casting. When Pichette comes on a stream, her mostly male audience isn’t expecting a woman to be their caster, and when they find she is, it leads to mixed results.
“When they hear a female voice, they’re kind of thrown off. It’s sometimes not as well accepted,” she said. Comments on her streams will suddenly shift from talking about the game to about how a woman is casting.
There is a small silver lining to being noticed all the time. Pichette added that being one of the few female commentators in her industry has helped her stand out. “As much as there (are) cons, there (are) pros,” she said. “You stand out more in the industry when you’re the only female.”
The opportunities have been steady for Pichette. She’ll be hosting a Call of Duty tournament at the Enthusiast Gaming Live Expo, taking place April 29 to May 1 in Toronto.
Pichette still wants more women to have opportunities in gaming. She’s started an all-female professional Call of Duty league, in the hopes that a safer space will encourage more women to consider playing professional eSports.
“I just found so many more female gamers getting together and coming out of the dark,” she said. “If the female pro league thing keeps going, they’re going to get a lot more sponsor opportunities.”