The reason why I expect the market for videogame leagues to expand is obvious: Videogames can be competitive. Not every videogame, mind you, but the participants in the videogames I showed before are athletes of a sort, and they are competing in a sport, for lack of a better name, that, though young, is growing. To be sure, I join in the ridicule of the notion that cybersports deserve a place in the Olympics — the fact that an activity requires training, skill, and natural talent does not ensure it a place in the Olympics. Were that so, Chess would be considered a sport, as would Poker. But the distinction I see here may be one of acculturation and not nature; people in the future may decide that cybersports indeed do deserve equal status with the 100m dash.

Virtually from their inception videogames were competitive endeavors. The most popular measure of success was the scoreboard and competition was over achieving the top score, not reaching an end point or any other tangible reward. The reward was the experience.

Before we move further, let’s define our terms. First some facts: Women comprise, according to these statistics, roughly 50% of the online game-playing population and 40% of the entire gaming population. I can’t vouch for the methodology here — My own definition of a “game-player” undoubtedly is more selective than the criterion “has played a ‘game.’” Still I find it amusing how much press this issue constantly receives when the issue itself is trivial and the much-lamented gap is so small. Maybe someone should write an article about Correcting the Gaming Gender-Gap in order to correct the nigh-10% disparity in female to male college students. Perhaps the key to achieving gender-parity in the university is to introduce girls to more videogames, causing them to abandon their life goals and instead play videogames while living in their parents’ basements!

Perhaps I am overstating my case here, but I’d argue that fundamentally the reason for a substantial gender gap (if such a thing exists) between men and women in video games derives from the game industry’s early inability to provide compelling goals other than score. Score as a motivation invites competition, and competition as a reward unto itself is not something that most girls I know enjoy. Modern games do not necessarily rely entirely on score, but the games which are dominated by men, the games that are professionally played, all rely upon competition to drive their success. Competitive games are First-Person Shooters, games which hearken to gladiatorial combat, and Real Time Strategy games, which hearken to tabletop wargaming, itself an abstraction of the process of waging war. Is it any surprise these things are dominated by men?

A link from 2Blowhards points me towards this article by Fred Reed:

A friend recently sent me a story from the New York Times about “survival schools” in which men, mostly young and urban, paint themselves in camouflage and pretend to be soldiers or survivors of plane crashes.

…

Somebody said (or if no one did, I will) that women are realists pretending to be romantics, and men, romantics pretending to be realists. Yes. The male desire is to explore, to fly higher and higher, to invent and dare and go and see. The Apollo landings were not inspired by a desire to know the nature of lunar rocks. A man does not get on a rice-burning crotch-rocket on a desert road in Arizona and scream through the hot vastness, wap-wap-wap through the gears, 95, 105, 120…125 (go baby, get it on, do it for me), because it is particularly practical. It is the sheer glory of the thing, the speed and power, controlled but on the edge.

I can’t really think of any more appropriate way to put it than that — Take a look at the difference between male gaming teams and female gaming teams. The former put everything on the line as skilled players, dedicated in the extreme and to a degree that could be called foolish and insane, whereas the latter leverage their game playing with pragmatic sex appeal and appeal to political orthodoxies.

The dirty secret to the gender-disparity claims is that no one cares about female dominance of demographics in many games (such as The Sims or Second Life). The gender disparity argument is one that seeks to shame the games industry for, above all, the first-person shooter genre — one of the driving forces, if not the driving force, behind better and better graphics and physics simulation in games. There’s no need for characters made from millions of polygons, utilizing anti-aliasing, anistropic filtering, displacement mapping, HDR lighting, and any other hot techniques of the moment. Games would do fine without them, yet it’s from that one narrow, male-dominated corner of development that comes forth so many advancements. The argument seeks to shame this segment for its success, to shame for the unabashed celebration of masculinity that such cyberathleticism promotes.

But the old words still hold their meaning, and that spirit cannot be erased.