Gammatron 64 posted:

There was that whole thing with Aris on Cross Assault which was really inappropriate. I think that one sorta has a happy ending though because if I'm not mistaken, Aris did actually learn that his behavior wasn't acceptable and is a better person today.

Gammatron 64 posted:

By and large, women don't play fighting games.

Endorph posted:

that isn't true, man. gently caress off. kof had a huge female fanbase back in the 90s, doa has a big vaginahaver contingent, etc.

It's more that they don't often go to big events. And I don't think it's even so much 'oh man what if I get sexually harassed,' though that's a part of it, but the culture as a whole. Like, that 'I saw a woman beating a guy' thing about MVC3 was more emblematic of that than Noel Brown going for the t. hawk. If you win a few matches, suddenly you're a grand crusader for the Women, and if you drop two combos suddenly you're proof that girls are poo poo at fighting games. It's like the one good comic to ever come out of XKCD, with the 'wow, you suck at math' 'wow, girls suck at math' thing. And that attitude becomes a thing when an area has barely any women in it. Which means that attitude becomes a thing, which means women get turned off of it unless they're willing to put up with that poo poo, which... so on. It isn't something that's going to be fixed by Girls Only Tournaments, kicking Noel Brown out for a year, or pretending that Aris is a decent person now because he hasn't talked about assholes that he wants to lick in the past seven minutes. It's going to require a wider, cultural shift in the community as a whole, and speaking up when you feel that somebody has crossed a line, or even just said something kind of lovely.

Endorph posted:

that isn't true, man. gently caress off. kof had a huge female fanbase back in the 90s, doa has a big vaginahaver contingent, etc.

It's more that they don't often go to big events. And I don't think it's even so much 'oh man what if I get sexually harassed,' though that's a part of it, but the culture as a whole. Like, that 'I saw a woman beating a guy' thing about MVC3 was more emblematic of that than Noel Brown going for the t. hawk. If you win a few matches, suddenly you're a grand crusader for the Women, and if you drop two combos suddenly you're proof that girls are poo poo at fighting games. It's like the one good comic to ever come out of XKCD, with the 'wow, you suck at math' 'wow, girls suck at math' thing. And that attitude becomes a thing when an area has barely any women in it. Which means that attitude becomes a thing, which means women get turned off of it unless they're willing to put up with that poo poo, which... so on. It isn't something that's going to be fixed by Girls Only Tournaments, kicking Noel Brown out for a year, or pretending that Aris is a decent person now because he hasn't talked about assholes that he wants to lick in the past seven minutes. It's going to require a wider, cultural shift in the community as a whole, and speaking up when you feel that somebody has crossed a line, or even just said something kind of lovely.

Endorph posted:

It isn't something that's going to be fixed by Girls Only Tournaments, kicking Noel Brown out for a year, or pretending that Aris is a decent person now because he hasn't talked about assholes that he wants to lick in the past seven minutes. It's going to require a wider, cultural shift in the community as a whole, and speaking up when you feel that somebody has crossed a line, or even just said something kind of lovely.

bhsman posted:

Milktea has also talked about this and why she supports starting out with women's-only tournaments to encourage greater participation among female players, as well as groups like Smash Sisters.

Ventana posted:

I get the rest of the post, but it needs to be said that those elements listed above ARE a good part of starting said cultural change. Stuff like this is needed, but it's not the end goal.

punk rebel ecks posted:

I have mixed feelings about women-only tournaments. I feel that in a way it results in even more cold feeling toward female players.

"Lol women are so bad that they need their own tournament! They can't hang with the men!"

I recall during the EVO Women-Only Tournament a few years ago (or at least I think it was EVO) a lot of people were saying that a women only tournament was necessary not due to them finding a safe space, but due to them literally being unable to compete with men due to women having a slower reaction time. Thus it is impossible for them to be competitive against men in a tournament.

punk rebel ecks posted:

I have mixed feelings about women-only tournaments. I feel that in a way it results in even more cold feeling toward female players.

"Lol women are so bad that they need their own tournament! They can't hang with the men!"

I recall during the EVO Women-Only Tournament a few years ago (or at least I think it was EVO) a lot of people were saying that a women only tournament was necessary not due to them finding a safe space, but due to them literally being unable to compete with men due to women having a slower reaction time. Thus it is impossible for them to be competitive against men in a tournament.

Endorph posted:

gently caress off

Gammatron 64 posted:

Women have slower reaction times? Is that even true?

punk rebel ecks posted:

I have mixed feelings about women-only tournaments. I feel that in a way it results in even more cold feeling toward female players.

"Lol women are so bad that they need their own tournament! They can't hang with the men!"

punk rebel ecks posted:

I have no idea. That was just the argument that was going around. Even then so if one would take the arguments at face value the reaction time "gap", that people were claiming to exist, would be like less than a millisecond. It wouldn't really affect anything.

In Training posted:

It's frustrating for eSports because it's one of the few professional competitive venues where gender has 0 impact, would be nicer to see more women playing because that's just more talented people in the competitive pool!

Real hurthling! posted:

Women have the same reaction time.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4456887/ posted:

Furthermore, male medical students have faster RTs as compared to female medical students for both auditory as well as visual stimuli.

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0026141 posted:

The mean fastest reaction times were 23 ms shorter in men than women (166 ms vs 189 ms, respectively

http://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/BF03208225 posted:

Women were more accurate but slower on the choice task; they had higher reaction times on the mental rotation and the shape-comparison tasks. These latter gender differences interacted significantly with degree of rotation and dissimilarity of the test form, suggesting the presence of gender differences in visual-spatial strategies.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/001401399185685 posted:

Results demonstrated a near-significant overall reaction time advantage for male participants.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0885201412000512 posted:

In letters tasks, boys outperform girls in both RT and accuracy. ► In animal drawing tasks boys outperform girls in RT and in accuracy at an angular disparity of 135°.

punk rebel ecks posted:

Did you even read the article? She specifically said that the harassment came from other FG communities. SGC was the most helpful to her. Though she later stated that she doesn't believe that other FGC are worse than Skullgirls as she assumes that "there are bad apples to be found in any batch" so to speak.

quote:

JS: I’m assuming you were hanging out primarily with the SG community, due to only playing Skullgirls. Is that true?

RG: Yeah. I didn’t interact with anyone else intentionally.

attackmole posted:

hell is other nerds

Why can't people just be cool and chill

Shiki Dan posted:

Anyway, not to veer too much off-topic.
There's a lot of poo poo in all games in the FGC that are hostile and discourage to female players, especially at large events, that need to change.

Endorph posted:

It isn't something that's going to be fixed by ... pretending that Aris is a decent person now because he hasn't talked about assholes that he wants to lick in the past seven minutes.

Zand posted:

Luckily there is more to playing fighters than raw reaction times

Dias posted:

But those were people interacting with HER, not the opposite. I'unno.

Also Zand, one of those quotes comes from a paper about sprinter reaction time that concludes by saying "we think the whole difference is because of physical strength required to activate the switch, if it was compensated the reaction times would be similar".

it's not like extreme reaction times are the key factor in making you a good FG player anyway, it's not as twitch-based as an FPS, so even if there's a significative difference you could make it up by having better spacing or just being a setpiece monster.

Shiki Dan posted:

Anyway, not to veer too much off-topic.
There's a lot of poo poo in all games in the FGC that are hostile and discourage to female players, especially at large events, that need to change.

Zand posted:

really tho?





and then even in children


Luckily there is more to playing fighters than raw reaction times

Zand posted:

1 of 5

I'm just posting poo poo that I found because I wasn't willing to accept the assertion that there is literally a zero difference between men and women with regards to reaction time, so i typed it into google and this is what I found. I found other papers that treated a faster reaction time in men as mere fact from precedent from other studies as well. I don't think it's a bad thing: for example women are quicker and nimbler fighters and men are large and slow brutes like "brawlers"

I also don't think its a reason to segregate tournaments by genders, but women have way way less competitive experience than men because it is so hard for women to compete in an arena dominated by men for a variety of reasons, systemic sexism being a big factor. Unfortunately the community of people that play fighters together gathered in physical locations in large numbers is mostly men, so for women, despite potentially making up a large amount of the actual players, their participation in female-only tournaments tends to be something of a novelty akin to a show that they are putting on for male participants. And every single womens only fg tourn I've seen has been this way.

Women can compete with men fine tho in fighters. Reaction times aren't the sole deciding factor in competitive play. The top echelon of fighting game players, at least in the USA, is a nearly untouchable because of experience, and mostly men. But Ricki is one of them, competing with the best of the best and holding her own fine.

punk rebel ecks posted:

Again if you read the article she said it came from strangers. Hence why she said she didn't hang around anyone "intentionally". To add to that, if you were actually at Combo Breaker, you would know that she was walking around the general venue and posing for pictures, not just hanging around the Skullgirls section.


Like I said, it is so tiny that it literally makes no difference in a real world game.

http://users.nber.org/~rosenbla/econ311-05/syllabus/murielgender.pdf also at [url posted:

http://web.stanford.edu/~niederle/Niederle.Vesterlund.QJE.2007.pdf[/url]]We conducted controlled experiments to test the hypothesis that men and women react
differently to competitive incentive schemes. We found that when participants are paid a
piece rate there is no significant gender difference in performance. Using tournament
incentives, however, resulted in a significant increase relative to the benchmark in
performance in male participants, but not in female participants, when mixed gender
tournaments were employed. As a result we observe a significant gender gap in
tournaments. We show that this difference is not due to the uncertainty of the payment in
tournaments, through gender differences in risk aversion. To understand a possible reason
for this gender gap we investigate whether women do not show an increase in
performance in competitive environments per se, or only when competing against men.
We ran single sex tournaments where women (and men) still have to perform in a
competitive environment, though now compete only against their own gender. This
results in an increase in mean performance of women and a decrease in the gender gap in
mean performance. Several reasons may account for those results. First let us note that in
all treatments on average men slightly outperform women. This can lead to gender
differences in optimal performance in mixed tournaments. The reason is that men only
face two male competitors, whereas women face three male competitors. There might be
an additional effect that women feel less competent than men (beyond what would be
warranted by the slight male advantage). Our last experiment provides support for the
conjecture that women feel less competent than men in their ability to solve mazes.
The results of our experiments allow for an analysis of the impact of different
incentive schemes when participants are required to provide real effort. We observe a
significant increase in mean performance when moving from a non competitive scheme,
such as a piece rate (or the random payment), to competitive schemes, such as the mixed
and single sex tournaments. Furthermore single sex tournaments are as effective as mixed
tournaments in eliciting performance of all participants and in terms of eliciting high
performance of the winners of the tournaments. Naturally single sex tournaments present
a strong form of affirmative action. The proportion of women among the winners of the
tournaments reflects the gender composition of the participant pool (50 percent), whereas
in mixed tournaments, only around twenty percent of the winners are females. It is
31
therefore especially notable that this change in composition of the winners comes at no
cost in performance.

Zand posted:

surely a single difference in one aspect of play, like reaction time, makes no difference. but a painting is rarely done with a single brush stroke. to get the full picture you must take many aspects of competition in to account if you truly wanted to assess the gender gap in fighting game competitions.

take for example the differences in how men and women view competition, especially with regards to how tournament models tend to drive women away:


Its been a long established fact that women perform poorly in competitive environments relative to their male peers and has been used to explain the difference in math testing results between the two groups. I don't feel like looking up a source tho

fadam posted:

Are there any female professional top tier LoL players? SC2 has (had? I haven't watched in a while) Scarlet and I can't think of any in DotA.

Zand posted:

surely a single difference in one aspect of play, like reaction time, makes no difference. but a painting is rarely done with a single brush stroke. to get the full picture you must take many aspects of competition in to account if you truly wanted to assess the gender gap in fighting game competitions.

take for example the differences in how men and women view competition, especially with regards to how tournament models tend to drive women away:


Its been a long established fact that women perform poorly in competitive environments relative to their male peers and has been used to explain the difference in math testing results between the two groups. I don't feel like looking up a source tho

punk rebel ecks posted:

I have responses toward this, but I feel that this could become a long drawn out ugly discussion. Would be nice to have it as a separate thread however.

Endorph posted:

Zand posted:

Biotruths is a bit of a stretch. There is a large amount of socialization, at least in the USA, that dissuades women and girls from being competitive. I haven't seen any evidence that women, on a biological level, dislike the tournament format.

Zand posted:

Biotruths is a bit of a stretch. There is a large amount of socialization, at least in the USA, that dissuades women and girls from being competitive. I haven't seen any evidence that women, on a biological level, dislike the tournament format.

Zand posted:

the FGC is accepting of ethnic minorities yet for some reason has longstanding issues with homophobia and fetishistic views of trans people.

Zand posted:

this is the fighting game thread. and this is fighting game discussion. i don't think that this is really an ugly discussion at all or that it even has the potential to be that way. it would absolutely turn that way if for some reason, in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary, anyone taking one of the variety of stances possible to take on this issue were to dig in and refuse to accept truths. I'm of the personal opinion that women can compete on the level of men in fighting games. But I also believe that the FGC has long been a boys club that has at times been hostile to women. I also think that cherrypicked anecdotes on any side of this issue (there are more than two sides btw) are used far too often and extrapolated upon to try to paint, say, the entire USA FGC as Aris or Noel Brown.

The FGC began as a grassroots movement of mostly young men, and the rare women that participated were typically just girlfriends of established players or categorized as "groupies." Also, while we're on the subject on inclusiveness, we could talk about gay players and transgendered players, and how it could be possible that the FGC is accepting of ethnic minorities yet for some reason has longstanding issues with homophobia and fetishistic views of trans people. After all, if we wanna go eSport, all of these issues will need to be discussed at some point. Why not here? In the thread dedicated to fighting games?

Endorph posted:

And the race breakdown varies wildly from game-to-game (KoF)

In Training posted:

Lol at the guy who said men of the FGC are hyper masculine.

In Training posted:

Lol at the guy who said men of the FGC are hyper masculine.

punk rebel ecks posted:

I feel that there are any few people who describe the fighting game community as nothing but a bunch of Noel Brown's and Dark Prince's. In reality these people are just a few bad apples that you will find in most male dominated competitive communities. That said, I feel that there is a miscommunication occurring, where some feel that when people bring up the topic of harassment that they are attacking the FGC as a whole of engaging in these actions. I feel that when these topics are brought up it is mostly to condone the perpetrating individuals and to let others know that "this does exist, and it does happen, and it is not okay."

I find that the more "animu" the game is, the less blacks and hispanics there will be. Guilty Gear is a weird exception though.