Where are all the women in eSports?

of people at the same time incoming high school. It was held at the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia, which is remarkable because that's usually where the city's major traditional sports teams play the Flyers the seventies Sixers, but on this day presented pots instead of shootouts and buzzer beaters. The Pact Arena was riveted by two teams of six

sitting in chairs staring at computer screens. Now the game they were playing was being projected on a big screen above them, and I guess it didn't hurt that at stake was a prize pool of one point seven million dollars. The rise of e sports is a really fascinating space right now because people are coming together in the same way that traditional sports brings people together. This is Anita Sarkasian,

a feminist media and gaming critic. It's a camaraderie, it's an excitement, it's a it's you know, in real time, you are rooting for your teams and you're excited and you learn all the stats and everything. So I think there's a lot of value there. We'll return to Nita a little bit later to take a critical look at the competitive gaming industry, but with e sports poised to break the billion dollar mark this year, that's billion with a B. My first question is how did it get

so huge. To answer that, we have to go back to the arcade. In the seventies and eighties, video games were something you did by yourself. Remember, Yeah, at the arcade, or a little bit later in front of the family TV in the basement. Maybe you crowded around a really good player, or maybe you'd have some friends over to watch and see who could get to the highest level. But that's really as social as video games got. So

the games, remember, they weren't multiplayer. This is Bobby Kotick, the CEO of Activision one of the industry's biggest video game companies. So the only multiplayer experience you have was I had a controller, You had a controller. The two of us played with one TV against each other, and so they weren't these social experiences where you could play with anyone from around the world. But that all changed in the nineties with the advent of the World Wide Web.

With techno set you go and surfing on the Internet, the Internet made online competitive gaming possible, even though it was years before home connections were powerful enough to accommodate it. The Web also gave rise to the popularity of computer games and more sophisticated virtual three D worlds. The nineties also ushered in a new genre of video game, the first person shooter, and these games players essentially become a gun or some other sophisticated weapon, patrolling a suspenseful maze

on the hunt for people or things to kill. In games like Doom, which came out, you could play as a team fighting a common enemy, or you could seek other player years out and kill them before they killed you. As Internet connections improved over the decade, it got easier and easier to find people to play with at any time. Of day from all over the world. You take point, knock at that Hart and Brooks go get the truck,

meet us in the front of the chateau. When Activision released Call of Duty in the early two thousands, it up the anti of first person shooter games with real world war settings, incredibly realistic graphics, and a more interactive group experience. Again here's Bobby Codeck. You could talk to people with a headset, you could text them and chat with them, and the games became much more social, much more multiplayer. And that's really what created like games as

a spectator experience. So when did this whole thing blow up in terms of having stadiums full of people to watch people these games on a giant screen. So twenty years ago, we released this game called StarCraft and it was a popular game. But something happened in South Korea that was not through our own um initiatives. But there were roughly five million people that signed up to play

this game. Now there's a country where the population is sixty million people, five million of them were playing StarCraft. What happened is they started playing professionally. Sponsors started signing them up, arenas started hosting matches. Three cable channels popped up flenty four hour, seven day week cable channels tavizing StarCraft matches, and we were watching all of this and saying this is incredible, like you know what well, and what is the German nation of it? Why were people

doing this? Well, one, they were invested players, but two people got a sense of belonging purpose, meaning the same things that used on traditional sport, the camaraderie of sport for people who weren't necessarily athletes. South Korea may have been ahead of the curve with dedicated gaming events and cable channels, but by the end of the nineties, American gamers wooed by the prospect of making big money off their pastime. We're stepping out of the basement and into

live events to show off their skills in public. After the turn of the millennium, the level of participation, number of tournaments, and prize money exploded, and once streaming was introduced in the twenty tens, gamers found themselves with career options go on world tours or get paid to play online at your own house. According to Bobby Kodak, a really good professional gamer today can pull in some serious bank.

How much can of professional gamer make in a year tens of millions of dollars because they can make money from being professionals, So they get the prizes and the salaries and the compensation comes from a team. But they're also streamers and so these are some of the most Like if you look at the Internet streamers who are

the most successful. These people are making millions and millions of dollars a year, how through endorsements, combinations, endorsed prescriptions, their share of advertising dollars um, their sponsorship, their appearance fees. But endorsements, endorsements, they are no different than professional athletes. So is there, for example, the Lebron James of video games? Um not yet um not stars like like a Lebron where he like transcends popular culture. But I think like

within the community. You know, Overwatch has players who are very well recognized within the community of Overwatch players. Somebody said to me the other day that until a famous Overwatch player is dating a Kardashian, we won't get to that level of popular cultural awareness. But that may not be too far away, right, it's happening. I think we're seeing, like, you know, these people are stars and they're becoming more

impactful and popular culture. I think popular culture is embracing video games in a way that it never has before, so it will happen. The players I saw at the Overwatch tournament definitely seemed as revered as any pro athlete. They were serious about their game and people took them seriously too. But what really stood out to me about the players was that there were no women, which seemed odd considering that something like forty of us gamers are female.

How is it possible that none are making it to the big leagues. When we come back, we'll get to the bottom of my next question. And a sport that has absolutely nothing to do with physical prowess, why can't more women get in on the action. To find out where all the female gamers are, I called one up. Hello, Kristen, Hi, how are you? Hi? Kristen, Thank you so much for

doing this. Is Kristin Valnichek, a twenty eight year old professional gamer living in l A. She plays under the moniker Kitty plays Hello, My Beautiful Friends, and welcome to Kristen has actually competed at live tournaments like the one I went to in Philly, so some women do make it to the big leagues. In fact, at a tournament in Korean two thousand eighteen, Kristen one, but she's since

retired from the tournament circuit. I have done really successfully in tournaments, UM, but my main focus has always been around, uh, daily content creation. Daily content creation means she plays video games on a streaming service called Twitch, and people all over the world log in and watch. So Twitch is

a live streaming platform. UM. People come in and they watch you play your game essentially, and you've got a webcam that's like a picture and picture on the TV, so it's showing all of your reactions to the game you're playing. And while you play, you may commentary, you interact with a live chat, UM, and just build a community through that connection that you have with this live community.

And what a community. Kristen has more than one million followers on Twitch, which makes sort of the third most followed female streamer. In a world where Kristen's skills and stats come with a big gender asterisk, she's a big success.

I've been a gamer pretty much my entire life. I mean, my oldest memory, they say, is around three, and I remember sitting in my dad's lap, and you know, pressing keys and playing with the mouse when he would be playing Doom and Quake, which were definitely not appropriate games for a three year old to be playing. But I mean it led to this, so it's all okay, Um, But no, he was a huge influence in my life with gaming, and so is my brother. So just my

entire life anytime friends had like little game consoles around. Um, and then eventually I got my own, and then computer gaming really rose in popularity. Uh so I there was never a time in my life when gaming was separate. By the time she was nine, she was so good she was beating her dad. But stepping out into the gaming world as a teen, she realized there wasn't really

anyone else out there like her. When I think back to, you know, my gaming prime years when I was thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, Um, I did not have a single role model of a woman in gaming professionally. Um, there wasn't a single one, not even one, And there wasn't twitch to see that there was um other female gamers like me. Christian soon realized that her gender also made her a target for

some unwanted attention. I've been in online communities ever since I was thirteen playing Halo two and called for Modern Warfare two and these online console lobbys which as soon as you talked as a girl, you were either getting hit on or hated on. Um. For those early early days and being a thirteen year old being full of hormones, it was like a lot to learn how to deal with. Would they throw obscenities your way? I mean, how did

it get times? I mean that it can definitely get rough, um, And back then I thought that for me that was a really important time and growth in my life because I so quickly got to learn about, you know, why people are unkind um and kind of the psychology behind it and how a lot of it has nothing to

do with me. But when I pressed Kristen for details about the kind of harassment she faced then and faces now as a professional, she pushed back, talking about, uh, the ways that people can harass people on the internet really ends up harming the people that are on the internet even more when people see how they're able to target and like I can live, I've been targeted by every type of harassment on the internet, but I've never spoken about it unless it's privately to you know, people

in my community to mentor them through it, or to learn how to block the holes that's creating that attack. Um. But it when people recognize that they can gain attention and can actually affect your life through the computer screen and are shown how to do it, um, it just makes it worse for everybody. So I really try not to have that discuss just to protect not only myself but my peers. To understand Christian's position here, I decided to get outside of the industry, which is where Anita

Sarkisian comes in. Anita is the founder of Feminist Frequency, an educational nonprofit that critiques the media. So what do you think about the philosophy that talking about harassment only encourages more people to harass? It absolutely does, um. If you it's this vicious circle where if you talk about the harassment you're receiving to try to get support or awareness of of the harassment, you will get harassed worse.

And it just it happens every single time. And so I will never judge someone for not speaking up about being harassed or being afraid to speak up about the harm and abuse that they're facing. But I also know that that having people speak up allows other folks to see that they're not in it alone and that they're not the only ones. So it's a bit of a

catch twenty two, isn't it. Yeah, you know, it can be really hard for folks who are trying to maintain a career to speak up about harassment, or to speak up about abuse in the industry or or things that they're facing because they're afraid they're going to lose their audience or or worse, that they're going to get her asked for having these kinds of opinions. Anita can really

speak to this because she experienced it firsthand. In two thousand fourteen, she was a central figure in the large scale harassment campaign against women known as gamer Gate, but her relationship to gaming goes way back. I think gaming since I was a kid. I started on the n S. I didn't actually have a system at home. I would go to my neighbor's house to be able to play games. It took a really long time for me to convince my immigrant parents that gaming would not rop my brain.

So I've been getting Yeah, I've been gaming for quite a while, kind of on and off. Right. I think the games and games communities, you know, tend to be a little alienating to young women and girls, and especially when I was growing up, and so, you know, popping in and out of it over the years. But then when I started doing my work with feminist frequency around pop culture and feminist analysis of pop culture, gaming was

such a natural fit for that. And two thousand twelve, Anita announced a Kickstarter project to fund a series of videos looking at how women are portrayed in video games, and that announcement alone made her the target of an overwhelming level of online hate and abuse. So we're talking about the UM hundreds of thousands of death threats and rape threats flooding all of my social media, UM, flooding all of my emails anyway that they could communicate with me.

They were sending me these threats. UM. They would be written, or they would be visual. So pornography is often used as a weapon to uh, to victimize and to um humiliate women. So my face would be superimposed on pornographic images, or there would be very lifelike drawings of me being raped by video game characters. And this goes on and on.

It got very extreme. UM. There's also efforts to docks me, which is to collect and publicly distribute my personal information and those of my family and the people that I work with. You know, it can get very serious, very quickly, and it can be very terrifying. Despite that, Anita completed the project Welcome to our Multipart video series exploring the roles and representations of women in video games. It ended up being sixteen videos made over the course of five years.

Hosted by Anita, they examined the many, many sexiest ways women are often presented in video games, such as The Damsel in Distress. How many times are women in games the object for the male protagonist to rescue, or the the object in which a woman is is stolen so that the male protagonist has some um reason for you know,

killing five hundred aliens or whatever. The game is um down to extremely violent expressions of violence against women, either in the game world or that the player is required to or is given the opportunity to do in the games. And so, you know, those are just a couple examples. They're not all that extreme. You know, there are examples such as women, um who are a reward right, so

they're not necessarily important in the game. But maybe if you do really well you'll see a picture of a woman scantily dressed, or you'll get a kiss at the end, or you know, different types of things like that. The video has made the claim that the effect of these persistent stereotypes extended far beyond the reach of the virtual world of gaming, reinforcing harmful attitudes about women and our

culture at large. Nobody really wants to acknowledge that media does have an impact on us, and it's not necessarily a one to one correlation. It's not like you know you're going to see violence against women in the media,

and therefore you will then commit violence against women. But there is the There is research that shows that long term exposure to hyper sexualized images tend to make people of all genders more tolerant to sexual harassment, more believe easily accepting rape myths, for example, and that has a huge impact in what is already a patriarchal, misogynist world.

Uh the way it has a huge impact on the way that people perceive women around them, their partners, their mothers, that you know, their coworkers and that sort of thing. So is it is unsurprising to me that when women started making themselves visible in the game space that there was some pushback. It's a daily experience. They hear are women's voice and you will be mocked. This is Chase Prairie, a game where we met at the Overwatch tournament, who didn't want to give her real name for fear of

retaliation online. She says, when it comes to competitive team play, it's really hard to advance within the game because of the harassment she faces. You play a game, there are six people on your team, and everyone is expected to be on voice chat and to treat each other as respectable peers and you know, don't get angry at each other and be patient, and so those emotional responses if men perceive a woman on their team is like not holding her own because oh, she a girl. But the

games don't become about playing the game level. The game becomes the argument you're having in voice chat instead of the game. And this happens really, really frequently all the time. And so you can choose to the act of hitting the higher tiers of the game requires like you win this game because you work well with your team, and if your team won't take you seriously, you can't win.

And so that's part of what's driven um both my friends and just like general groups of women and l g B t Q people to create their own communities, so we only ever group up with people we trust

and people we know, and you know it it. There are people who say that means you're not a real Overwatch player because you don't engage with the wider community, and like women don't make it up to the higher tiers for this reason, but it's like we have a valuable experience of the game despite that, because we fought

for our own space. Coming up, How can e sports and the gaming industry do better for its female players given the fact that harassment is still a regular occurrence in gaming, is some level of gender segregation one solution. Kristin Bounichik thinks it may be a good start. I think there's still a huge barrier of entry for women getting into the pro scene and getting into the lobbies

to be able to practice against the other pros. So finding a space for them to compete against each other to get their feet wet, to gain confidence before entering into the male leagues was great, But that was done in a very casual sense with all women involved. So I think if the league's did go and switch to a female separated male base. Um, that could potentially hurt women in the long run. So your goal is to

make it more of a co ed proposition. Yes, definitely, because I believe that women can compete at the same level as men in gaming. So my concern is really, like, what are the opportunities, Anita sarkees and things. Separating the genders is a cop out. There's lots of discussion around, like should leagues be gender separated? Can women join teams?

You know, all of those kinds of conversations that I find incredibly frustrating and remnants of, you know, the this idea of like who belongs in games and the gate keeping that happens in gaming, because it is it would be ridiculous to say that playing a video game is a gendered is gendered in any way, right, Like we can all pick up a controller and play it, and we can all train and get good, and some people will be better than others, but their gender doesn't matter here.

But in terms of how or if the industry has learned anything from gamer Gate, Anita says, progress is slow. I think in the time since I started doing my work, what has shifted is a conversation around what we expect from games, that the public is much more educated around

issues of racism and homophobia and um sexism. Like there's a bigger demand that gaming studios do better, and so we are seeing that in some ways, we are seeing games that are you know, less sexist, or there's female protagonists or their non binary characters coming out in more games, the more trans characters, and that's really exciting, but it's not,

you know, the whole industry. There's still all of the sexism, all of the male dominated, all of the sort of macho um you know mechanics and um storylines that we have been getting in the past. Are you feeling optimistic as this trend gets bigger and bigger and bigger. I feel like it's a little hard to be optimistic about anything today, and I don't say that. Here's the thing.

I am, however, optimistic about the fact that whenever I go to events, I run into women who come up to me who are constantly saying, I entered the games industry because of you. I want to make the games industry better. Thank you so much for doing your work.

It really inspired me. I learned all all of these new things that I didn't know about before, or I used to be trying to be a part of the boys club, and now I know that I can do better and and all of the and you know, then they tell me about all of the things they're doing in their workplace and the games that they're working on, and so it's I get a lot of inspiration and hope from the fact that, like there is a pretty strong group of people who are trying to move this

industry forward in a meaningful way. I've had a lot of male developers come up to me over the years and say, you critiqued my game, and I'm really glad you did it. Thank you. I'm not going to do that again. And that's one of the best things I can hear, because I can't change the past, but we can make the future better. Well that's positive. Yeah, there you go. You get dig deep, but you gave it to us, So there you habit. Listeners e Sports one oh one. I got quite an education, and I hope

you did too. Now, even if you don't play video games, they will continue to play an increasingly important role in our culture. Even big names and professional sports like Alex Rodriguez and Bob Kraft are getting into the game. There's clearly gold in them their computer screens. Meanwhile, I could not believe the scope and scale of the e sports

scene back in Philadelphia. And I love the fact that gamers like Anita and Kristen and Chase Prairie are fighting to make sure they get their seat at the console and making sure others do too. Let's help the gaming industry gets with the program. And that's it for this week's episode. Keep up with Next Question by subscribing on Apple Podcast, the I Heart Radio app, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. And you can keep up with me by following me on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and

all the rest. And if you need a little news guidance these days, and let's face it, who doesn't sign up for my morning newsletter wake Up Call by going to Katie correct dot com. Thank you all so much for listening, and until next time and my next question, I'm Katie Couric. Next Question with Katie Rick is the production of I Heart Radio and Katie Curreic Media. The executive producers are Katie Kurik, Courtney Litz, and Tyler Klang.

The supervising producer is Lauren Hansen. Our show producer is Bethan Macaluso. The associate producers are Emily Pinto and Derek Clemens. Editing by Derrek Clements, Dylan Fagin and Lowell Berlante, Mixing by Dylan Fagan. Our researcher is Gabriel Loser. For more information on today's episode, go to Katie Kurik dot com and follow us on Twitter and Instagram at Katie Currik.

For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows