Finnish Hearthstone Tournament Changes Policy on Women - Update

[feauxx]

So are Jaina and Valeera also not allowed to be played as hero's in this tournament? (a HS tournament without miracle rogues lol) Hearthstone does not segregate, tournaments shouldn't either.

 

[gargantual]

now THIS is what female exclusion in games looks like.

 

[RoonMian]

Seems legitimate, few can argue from a strong position against them due to hypocrisy.
People are against this, but for splitting up men and women in "actual" sports because of biological differences...yet not for splitting based on race grounds even though different races are more suited to spiriting, endurance running, swimming, RTS, and the like because well...that'd be "racist" (just science in actuality).

"Just science actually"

Care to back that up with a scientific publication or do we just take your word for it?

If you want everyone to play together in everything, or everyone to be segregated further than you can stand strong...otherwise you are hypocritical somewhere.

No, you just don't understand nuanced positions.

Science actually says the complete opposite. There are no different races in the species homo sapiens: http://www.aaanet.org/stmts/racepp.htm

Edit:

-snip-

Just including you for relevance.

 

[sorsa]

So are Jaina and Valeera also not allowed to be played as hero's in this tournament? (a HS tournament without miracle rogues lol) Hearthstone does not segregate, tournaments shouldn't either.

Please, don't be silly.. the very highlight of the tournament is stoning to death any male players who made the mistake of choosing Jaina or Valeera.

Edit: Captcha: "stone's throw" this site can read wicked minds..

 

[Nowhere Man]

FYI guys, the only people who consider e-sports an actual sport are the people who play and stand to make a living off of e-sports. For the rest of us, it's called a video game.

Ever consider that just because you have no interest in something, that doesn't mean that other people can't like it? I make absolutely zero dollars off of E-Sports, same as I make off of regular sports, but I enjoy watching soccer and competitive CS:GO just the same. I treat them as equal, no matter what types of skills they require. How about you stop belittling people's interests?

Video games will never be considered sports because there is no athletic factor to them. Video games are just that -- video games. It's not belittling anyone's interests nor is it saying they can't like it. I happen to enjoy watching Street Fighter tournaments, I wouldn't ever consider it a sport, and even the term e-sport is super silly to me. It should be called what it all really is - Competitive Gaming.

 

[Macsen Wledig]

Seems legitimate, few can argue from a strong position against them due to hypocrisy.
People are against this, but for splitting up men and women in "actual" sports because of biological differences...yet not for splitting based on race grounds even though different races are more suited to spiriting, endurance running, swimming, RTS, and the like because well...that'd be "racist" (just science in actuality).

"Just science actually"

Care to back that up with a scientific publication or do we just take your word for it?

If you want everyone to play together in everything, or everyone to be segregated further than you can stand strong...otherwise you are hypocritical somewhere.

No, you just don't understand nuanced positions.

Science actually says the complete opposite. There are no different races in the species homo sapiens: http://www.aaanet.org/stmts/racepp.htm

Edit:

-snip-

That's what I thought, but I was wondering if that clown could cash the checks his mouth was writing.

 

[RicoADF]

On an off topic note, this got me thinking. Does rules like this exist in for example world championships in chess?

Chess effectively does positive discrimination for women (and there is nothing inherently wrong with positive discrimination). You have a mixed circuit and a women only circuit.

There is nothing wrong with positive discrimination except that it's insulting. And unfair.

And not positive. Discrimination in any form is negative and degrading to both genders, there really needs to be laws requiring 100% equal rules for both genders in everything, basically requiring that everyone is seen as a person not a chromosome.

 

[Clive Howlitzer]

I am guessing they don't fully understand why sports based on physical aspects are divided by gender and why it doesn't really apply to playing video games. I wish we'd stop all this comparison to real sports. Why you'd want to emulate a system with as many problems as that, I have no idea.

 

[FoolKiller]

What is "RO8"?

I googled it, but all I got was acronyms for "round of eight".

Exactly. They're talking about quarterfinals which is what the RO8 is. They don't want a guy to get eliminated by someone who can't even end up moving forward in the tournament.

As for the gender thing. Its even worse. There are some sports like dragonboat where the teams are co-ed. I don't know why this wouldn't fall into that as well.

 

[MeChaNiZ3D]

Ok, so obviously, it's really stupid that they're segregating men and women because there is no clear divide that I am aware of between their ability to play Hearthstone as a general trend. We segregate them in sports because men are naturally stronger and women should have a chance to excel in their own field. Any time physical strength is not a large factor, both genders should be competing together. No fucking idea what this is about.

But secondly, if they're segregating men and women, is there going to be another tournament with its own qualifiers for women? Doesn't sound like it. Needless to say that is plain unfair.

 

[OneNooneKnows]

What the batbuggering hell...

There's a -reason- why 'real' sports have segregation...

 

[Shamanic Rhythm]

I find it very strange that some of you think it's OK to segregate men and women in physical competition but at the same time argue that there shouldn't be any segregation in eSports. More disturbing is the fact that you accept the fact that men and women are different physically but you don't accept the fact that there are also differences between the brains of men and women.
http://www.livescience.com/2855-brains-wired-differently-men-women.html
http://www.livescience.com/3808-men-women-differently.html
These are some articles I found in a cursory search. There's probably more you can find. This one is also very good but it's more on the psychological side (which can affect performance).
http://bsb-lab.org/site/wp-content/uploads/DelGiudice_etal_2012_global-sex-differences_personality_pone.pdf

Of course, we need more specialized studies to see if differences in brain wiring truly warrant segregation in eSports but to dismiss the idea of segregation out of hand is a bit lazy.

Physical differences between men and women are significant in physical sports because raw physical abilities regularly determine the outcome of contests. E-sports makes use of far more complex systems of intelligence than contemporary neuroscience is capable of measuring, most likely involving some level of neuro-plasticity to reshape networks for faster reactions to stimuli.

To use the kind of base-line cognitive ability tested in those studies as evidence to argue for segregation of e-sports would be analogous to holding a cooking competition and segregating it by gender because the men have more physical strength and can therefore chop faster.

 

[RoonMian]

To use the kind of base-line cognitive ability tested in those studies as evidence to argue for segregation of e-sports would be analogous to holding a cooking competition and segregating it by gender because the men have more physical strength and can therefore chop faster.

That was a beautiful analogy, thank you.

 

[MrHide-Patten]

I can understand why physical sports are separated, but the difference for games is some minimal it's stupid to enforce. What are girls gonna do, distract the big nerds with lots of cleavage?

 

[sleeky01]

Why? What need exists that it would be necessary for men and women to be segregated over a competition in a videogame?

IeSF is a global organization based in South Korea with the aim to promote e-sports as a "true sport." By doing so, it divides tournaments into male and female competitions.

I have to wonder if this could be a factor. Starcraft (and gaming in general) is huge in SKorea and it occurs to me that there might have been a....."cultural inertia", for lack of a better term. If it was like that from its early beginning, perhaps no thought has been giving to modifying it?

 

[Baresark]

That is strange and I'm torn on this. At first I was like, "that is stupid, how in the world are they going to gain worldwide recognition by dividing it that way"... then it went on to outline that all worldwide accepted sports are gender divided. I get it, they want legitimacy, but those other actual physical sports has to do that because men and women are not physically equal. Male/female lifters are different, sprinters are different, soccer/football genders are physically very different. All sports popular in America are the same.

But... an eSport does not have physical limitations to it, so I don't see the purpose in this.

 

[Rozalia1]

Not entirely true.. A lot of people proclaim this, and while there is actual scientific evidence that supports their conclusion, that evidence is too limited in scope. It usually only examines at individual countries. Take the drug BiDil, for example[footnote]http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4706682. Its a drug that the FDA approved for use only in people of a certain race. Sounds logical, given the evidence, but if you examine people of the same race in different countries, results vary differently from the studies done in the United States. While the differences did indeed exist, its not because of their race, but from their ancestry, which is influenced by tons of minor and major factors. Division based on race is woefully inept for a lot of reasons, just in the same way judging somebody's physical capability solely on their sex. Similarly, a lot of sports are starting mixed-gender competition, including MMA fighting.

Science actually says the complete opposite. There are no different races in the species homo sapiens: http://www.aaanet.org/stmts/racepp.htm

Yes I knew that would be called out, with differences being cultural instead of racial, and that it isn't a real term and such. Its still in use so I can use it, and its also an easy identifier.
Of course its not correct solely on the basis that not all members of a group are the same, certain subgroups are of course different...anyway.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/nov/26/johnarlidge.theobserver

 

[RoonMian]

It's still in use because people are too slow and stupid to drop that term relating to human beings. And look in what kind of company you just put yourself.

 

[Passerby]

There's one aspect that no one here seems to have considered, and that is the social aspect around e-sports. There's much discussion on the ability aspect of sports, but not the social part of it. Could it be possible that women really just want to play with other women and watched by women spectators? It's not implausible. We've known about the rage and the tantrums that teenage boys (and grown men too, sadly) display in the heat of competitive e-sports. Women are as capable of raging as men,sure, but I'm willing to bet that men do it more. And let's not forget that there's bound to be rampant sexist comments displayed, not just among the competitors but among the spectators too. So, it's entirely possible that women generally stay away from competitive e-sports not because they don't measure up to the boys, but because they don't want to deal with the rest of the stuff that goes along with playing against men.

So, in a bid to entice more women to come forward to participate, the organisers in South Korea probably hold separate leagues - a men's league and a women's league - as a general rule. That line about wanting e-sports to be like real sports as being the reason for the segregation is, I think, just a polite lie. This is not an ideal solution, of course, but the real problems of men being obnoxious to women, especially those who beat them in a video game, isn't so easily fixed. I see this as an imperfect solution in a very imperfect world.

They probably should hold a women's competition for Hearthstone, but I can see why they won't if participation rate is too low to justify the cost.