I still haven't responded to this? Well, better late than never...
Feline Longmore hadn’t anticipated having fans. She didn’t grow up playing the game in which she is now nationally ranked. She doesn’t look much like the average competitor, either: Far from the stereotypical teenage boy gamer, Longmore is a 31-year-old woman.
Turgy already covered what's wrong with this.
And yet, here in the starkly lit, heavily air-conditioned ballroom of the Walter E. Washington Convention Center on Sunday morning, she has fans. Lots of them. Toward the end of each round of the Star City Games Open Series tournament — the country’s biggest competition for the fantasy card game Magic: The Gathering — crowds of admirers tend to gather around Longmore’s table.
I hate Star City Games with an inexplicable passion, but, big as they are, we can all agree that SCG Opens aren't the biggest competitions for Magic. That's just objectively incorrect.
One bespectacled teenager hovers nearby during every round. He’s the proud owner of a Longmore-autographed High Tide — the card she is famous for playing — obtained at a different tournament. But he doesn’t say anything about it. He just watches.
Well, that's kind of weird. Wait, High Tide? That card essentially doesn't exist outside Legacy and the only people who play it in Legacy fall into one of two groups...
1. Gluttons for punishment who still want High Tide to be a good combo deck. They have dreams about Frantic Search being unbanned and think that it's real, then they wake up and slowly realize that Wizards of the Coast still isn't unbanning cards in Legacy anymore.
2. People who have too much money, so they build decks with Guru Islands, Candelabra of Tawnos, and such. They'd use foil Force of Will if it existed.
Anyway, SCG Opens
are the biggest Legacy events in North America (excluding some WotC events), but Legacy isn't generalizable to the rest of Magic. And the Legacy crowd isn't necessarily like the rest of the community.
The response to Longmore’s success hasn’t always been so positive. When she won a similar tournament in Seattle two years ago, the online backlash was virulent. The day after her victory, a thread went up on a message board for gamers titled “Magic The Gathering Legacy tournament champion is a chick. Would you hit it?” When commenters found out that Longmore is transgender, their language became even more venomous.
Trolls? On the internet? Stop the presses!
This was the Magic world asserting its boundaries. Invented in 1993 as a quick trading-card game that could be played between rounds of Dungeons & Dragons, it’s a fairly geeky pastime even by gaming standards. Some players have said they got involved in Magic in high school because they weren’t cool enough to hang out with the kids who played video games. For them, Magic was a refuge, the one clubhouse where they could be themselves.
I got involved in Magic when I was young, and that was even in the 1990's, and I'm pretty sure that everything in this paragraph is wrong. It wasn't invented as filler between rounds of D&D. And no one on the planet got into Magic due to not being cool enough for video games. Come on.
For nearly two decades, that clubhouse has included mostly young, white men — a demographic that still makes up about 90 percent of tournament participants.
This is
kind of true. Firstly, those who play in tournaments don't necessarily represent everyone who plays the game. Secondly, Magic is now over 20 years old. While it started out as something demographically less diverse, many players stick around as they get older, and they often introduce the game to family and friends.
But Longmore’s success, and the
recent success of other female players, set off something of a crash course in diversity training for Magic players. It had to. The game isn’t just some extra-obscure corner of the offbeat nerd community anymore: It’s a $200 million-a-year industry with a fan base of 20 million and a growing pool of elite players who make their living from tournament prizes (which top out at about $40,000). There’s even a
Magic movie in the works.
There have been a couple of high-profile female tournament players for over a decade. It's not
that new. Also, this part reads as very condescending.
“That kind of behavior, it’s just not healthy for the game,” Cedric Phillips says of the online vitriol directed at Longmore and other female players. A former professional player-turned-play-by-play announcer for Star City Games, which organizes tournaments, Phillips watches the Magic community more closely than almost anyone. And he does see it improving.
You know what else isn't healthy for the game? Star City Games. Jerk.
He attributes the change, in part, to demographic shifts that are happening across the gaming culture. According to a
report released by the Entertainment Software Association in the spring, women make up 48 percent of all computer and video game players, and the average age of gamers is 31.
Misleading. They're counting people who play Bejeweled on their smart phones as "computer and video game players" here. Yes, I checked.
Gaming is becoming more mainstream, Phillips says, and as it does, it’s growing more diverse. Magic offers a case study for the question all games will soon face (if they aren’t already): As the community expands, can it drop its no-rules, boys’ club mentality?
This is a misconception I've encountered a lot. Outsiders see some seemingly male-dominated community as a boy's club, but it's actually not a boy's club, but a sausage fest. It's not male-dominated because females are pushed away. It's just male-dominated because it developed in some way that the people who were drawn to the community were mostly male. That's a very important distinction. Women and girls have been involved in mostly-male gaming communities the whole time. It's not that they're unwelcome.
“Gaming has always been perceived as a guy thing to do,” says Tifa Robles, founder of a
Seattle-based group that aims to cultivate a more welcoming Magic community at local game shops. “So either someone was hitting on you, or they assumed that women don’t know what’s on their cards the same as men do.”
Eh, I'll leave this one alone. They're talking about the Lady Planeswalkers Society, which I kind of like.
Andy Bruce, a competitive player who participates in three to four tournaments a week, has written extensively about what it’s like to be a woman in Magic: people staring at her chest, speculating about her underwear, asking her if she was going to take her shirt off so she could win.
I don't buy it. Yeah, the game has some awkward kids and some people that are just jerks. I've played against a few jerks myself. And it's not like they won't be jerks to me, but they'll change their approach depending on the audience. A guy who's a jerk probably isn't going to try to make sexual remarks toward me, beciause he doesn't think it'll provoke me in that way. If you're a woman, and even if you're not, you're eventually going to run into jerks at tournaments. How you react is up to you. I prefer to ignore it unless it goes too far. I guess you could also opt to blog about it? But "speculating about her underwear"? Like she sits down to play a match and her opponent is all, "I'd guess that your underwear are dirty"? Nah, something fishy is going on here...
Bruce found similar testimonies from other female players online and realized the breadth of the problem. It goes beyond Magic, too. Bruce pointed to Anita Sarkeesian, whose video series “
Feminist Frequency” draws daily threats and crude remarks for its critiques of how women are portrayed in video games.
I don't know anything about Andy Bruce, but I am familiar with Anita Sarkeesian. Without going into detail, I'll just say liar, liar, pants on fire.
It’s difficult for gamers to pinpoint the source of these attitudes: Is it the immaturity of players? A belief that women don’t belong in the gaming world? But they do see something of an explanation in gaming’s origins.
Or maybe it's a total lack of journalistic integrity by a certain reporter at the Washington Post? Who knows, really?