I started following competitive gaming, or Esports, around the time Starcraft 2 was released on July 27, 2010. Later that year, I started getting into fighting games. with Super Street Fighter 4, and I began attending local meetups to improve my skills and abilities as well as make new connections, which I still maintain today. For a few years, I played competitively in my scene, traveling to tournaments in my state, and watching top level players compete for thousands of dollars on twitch.tv. I also got involved in the community when I started the Video Games Club at the University of Miami as a way for people to meet and play competitively. The fighting game community prides itself on being incredibly diverse, but with the current political climate and the abundance of women's marches, I've noticed that the proportion of female players is heavily skewed towards men. Gaming communities other than the FGC, such as League of Legends and Dota, also have this uneven ratio, especially at the highest level of play. This brings me to my question. Why are women so underrepresented at the highest levels of gaming, where skill and not gender is considered the most important aspect of a player?Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why should violent video games not be banned"? Get an original essay To begin to answer this question, I searched one of the FIU databases with all three keywords esports, women's and video games. One of the articles I found published in the Journal of Sport and Social Issues is titled “Women's Experience in Esports: Gender Differences in Peer and Spectator Comments During Competitive Video Gaming ". This article is very valuable because it directly analyzes and discusses the experiences women have during competitions which I think could explain why there is a lack of women in eSports. Researchers Omar Ruvalcaba, Jeffrey Shulze, Angela Kim, Sara Berenzki and Mark Otten conducted two studies. In the first study, researchers analyzed gender differences in online gamers' experiences with feedback from other players and spectators during online gaming. The second study analyzed gender differences observed during gameplay by male and female streamers and comments directed to them on Twitch.tv. I found the results intriguing because the researchers went against my preconceptions that women did not receive more negative feedback from men during online gaming as I thought and actually received more positive comments. However, women received ten times more sexual comments from commenters while streaming on Twitch. This leads me to believe that the issue is perhaps more complex than I initially thought and that this study may have benefited from live observations at events rather than adhering to strictly in-game gameplay. line. After reading the first article, I wanted to see an example that focused more on the experience of an individual than that of a group. I did a search looking for high-profile women in eSports and immediately came across a woman named Kim Se-Yeon, also known as Geguri, who plays in the Overwatch League. An article I found in a book called Feminist Media Studies called “I Play to Win!” ": Geguri as a (Post)Feminist Icon in Esports" details Geguri's rise to becoming a feminist icon in gaming, butalso illustrates how women in esports are not. have the same chance of failing and are “trained to support sexist structures and focus on their flaws as individuals.” The article also states that women, like Geguri, often feel the need to reject feminism and adopt a post-feminist mentality to alleviate negative attention from male gamers. This article helped me understand exactly what type of harassment women can experience in the world of esports and leads me to believe that it is a contributing factor to the underrepresentation of women. However, because esports is such a meritocracy and esports is under the umbrella of “gaming”, there must be problems within the gaming industry and not just esports. My search to see if there was a larger problem led me to information that went against the ideas I had about the game in general. I learned that women make up a large portion of the population that considers themselves gamers, but they don't play the same types of games that men tend to play. This point was made clearly in Aleks Krotoski's article “Chicks and Joysticks – an Exploration of Women and Gaming” found in the ELSPA white paper which was reproduced in Male and Female Roles in the article “Men and women are both adopting gaming technology." Krotoski uses this article to "examine the role of women in gaming, as an audience and as contributors to the future of interactive entertainment. This will show that women are a growing force behind the scenes and at the checkout counters and that their inclusion ushers in the era of gaming as a mass market phenomenon. In Krotoski's article, she shows how, even though boys were the predominant gamers in the 1980s, companies sprung up, like HerInteractive and Purple Moon Interactive, that saw the potential of girls in the market and started creating games intended for girls to buy. Krotoski details that the choice of women in games differs from the main categories of shooting games and sports simulation and rather reflects the desire to use technology to learn skills about themselves and enjoy the good plot, rich characterizations and choice in how they pursue their goals, and a There are various other reasons. After reading this article, it gradually becomes clearer to me why women don't play competitive games. One of the reasons I think there isn't representation is because women just don't play games. This article shows me that this reasoning is wrong and that women play games, but not the games that men tend to play. This is not to say that they don't play competitive games at all, as Krotoski says in her article, there is a subculture of women who play games such as Quake and Counter-Strike, which are primarily “boys” games. However, most female gamers seem to have started to shy away from these types of games, preferring games that involve a heavy plot or are more "casual". As I continued my research, another article caught my eye and began to reinforce the idea that more women are starting to play. The article in question, which I found in the Opposing View Points database, is written by John C. Beck and Mitchell Wade and is titled "Video Games Transcend Gender Roles." In this article, Beck describes a survey they conducted as well as interviews they conducted with students. The data they received was complex, indicating that most men thought..