Magic: The Gathering Tournament Participants Not Immune To Sexism

Good on Jackie Lee! I wish her nothing but the best; she sounds like a class act and is clearly a top player. :) 

Correction:

“one of the few top ranked Magic players. Actually, she’s the only one.”

You mean “the few top ranked FEMALE Magic players.”

I’ve never been to one of these events but aren’t there any kind of ground rules for behavior?  Can’t someone be expelled for being an ^%$#@^ at an event? I hate to think that there may be children at these events.

A brave human she is. I hope her willingness to be at the frontline will pay off.

Immature geeks and their female phobia. They don’t realize how stupid they’re being. They’re not making female players look bad. They’re reinforcing the stereotype that geeks are losers who can’t comprehend or relate to the fact that women are people.

This is why I never call myself a geek. I’m not ashamed of my interests. I’m ashamed how geeks behave.

It amazes me that this type of BS is still so prevalent in the 21st century.  I wish Jackie and any other aspiring female MTG nothing but the best and don’t let D-bags like that discourage  you from doing something you enjoy.

Off-color sexist comments are hard to police, especially if they’re not universally regarded as bad. Too often, when sexist remarks against women are challenged, the women are told they have no right to be offended, either because it’s a compliment or a joke. The word “rape” has been so misused in gaming culture that its taken way less seriously (but it shouldn’t). You can’t really make a rule against cheering when a woman loses a match, either.

What needs to happen is a shift in attitude from gamers in general. So far, it’s moving like an iceberg …

The sexism is not limited to the reactions of players, but also word choice on the cards themselves. Legends of the Five Rings has an ongoing conversation on their forums about the reasons for/against using gender-neutral language, and whether that choice has any effect on the number of women who play the game.

It’s not geeks behaving badly, it’s boys behaving badly when they have to compete against women. This type of attitude effects any type of dominantly-male competition. Look at what is happening in golf. I applaud Jackie for pursuing her dreams of success in MTG despite all of the abuse being hurled at her. I doubt MTG will ever see equality of genders, but that’s no excuse for this kind of behavior. Why do other guys put up with this?

As a fellow female MtG player, I salute her for putting up with a LOT of sh_t that she shouldn’t have to be.  Guys, I know that it’s easy to use gaming space as a “man cave” but you need to remember that you don’t have an exclusivity agreement on it. 

Jesus Christ. Between this and the Yuki Onna post today (http://yuki-onna.livejournal.com/675153.html), I don’t want to live on this planet anymore.

Speaking as an 18 year old male Magic player, I find this sort of behavior deplorable.  The only things that should matter when the cards are down are your ingenuity, integrity, and love of the game.

Wow.

I started playing M:tG at the dawn if its creation. Literally, a friend showed up with this big box one day. He had gone to visit his dad, and his dad owned a comics shop, and these boxes of cards had come in. ‘Something new’. So my friend came home with a box, and our group of friends got hooked.

In the very beginning, I would run into more girls playing the game than guys. The local comics shop that I’d go to would see more females come in (than normal) when they had their M:tG competitions. When I’d spend time at a local diner (this would be pre-Starbucks, locally), and I’d pull out a deck, and a female friend would pull out hers, we’d get surrounded by watchers… many of them female, and sometimes one of them would rotate in when my friend or I lost.

I remember thinking how great this game was, that it was absolutely and totally gender neutral. How sad it is to see that ‘the guys’ decided to own it in such a vicious and vile fashion.

There are guidelines on what is acceptable, and as someone that has been the head judge for Gran Prix I would have no problem taking care of it on site.  If you go to the original article on The Daily Dot you’ll see that these comments weren’t said on site, but in the chat associated with the live streaming coverage.

I actually know Jackie. She is great and very supportive of other female players

Examples, please? Magic is not L5R, and every card that references a player since I’ve started playing Magic has always used “he or she” or “that player.”

Here are just a couple of examples from the L5R world:

http://imperialassembly.com/oracle/#cardid=3037,#hashid=dfc0d7337e75adfa24192c3deb7aa20f,#cardcount=6
http://imperialassembly.com/oracle/#cardid=663,#hashid=dfc0d7337e75adfa24192c3deb7aa20f,#cardcount=2
I didn’t mean to imply that MtG specifically is bad in that arena, but more that male-centrism shows up in multiple facets of the industry. It doesn’t just come from the players.

“The livestreamed semifinals led to anonymous insults being thrown at her”
So I take it that these are comments being made in the stream chat by anonymous viewers?  I’m not sure if everyone here has watched a stream with several thousand or more anonymous viewers and seen what happens to the chat window.  Basically the chat goes by so fast that if you allow people to chat at all, it’s pretty much impossible to moderate.  Now, add to this that it’s mostly teenage and young-adult males, and it’s anonymous, and it’s the internet so no one can reach over and slap you on the head, you can see how easily it turns into troll city.

The only effective way for the tournament organisers to communicate with the livestream audience is for them to talk on stream to tell people to stop being idiots, but if they’re recording the event so others can see it later, it doesn’t make sense to call the audience out in the middle of the action and have that recorded too.

There’s always going to be idiots, and anonymity and the internet provides a platform for them to say whatever they want without any consequences for them.  You can call it despicable all you want, but the technology is set up in a way that empowers trolls, unfortunately.

 ”is she’s one of the few women on the list of top ranked Magic players. Actually, she’s the only one.” is the full sentence…

I’m certainly no expert, but can’t M:TG hire or request moderators on the live chat rooms? I’ve participated in several live chat sessions on livestream where the rooms were very well moderated. The rules were simple and posted for all to see. Any comment that broke those rules was almost always deleted immediately. It seems like that may be a simple solution to those nasty troll problems. :)

It’s truly sad, though, that we still have such a long way to go before this sexist crap is out of fashion.

I run Friday Night Magic events at my store, and I am thankful that behavior like this doesn’t happen here.  Disrespectful behavior of any kind is something I would never tolerate at a tournament or event I run.  It has been great to see my FNM crowd grow from a single female player to an average of 5 or 6.  While that is only about 10% of the total, it is rising and 2 of those females regularly finish top 10.  We are a niche group, even with 12 million players worldwide, we should only be seeking to encourage more people to play.

As someone who’s still familiar with the MTG community (both locally and through online forums), this shocks me none. I’ve seen it with my own eyes when I used to play the game regularly. While it’s true that some of the smartest people I know either play it currently or used to play it, it’s also true that most I’ve met and known are the most sexist, racist, and vile people to ever take part in geekdom. It kinda saddens me that it’s still like this and I wish Jackie the best.

It happens in real life, too. NOT to the same degree, I admit, but it’s not just “oh, the internet? well there’s your problem” sort of fix.

As a male player of various TCG’s and other forms of gaming, I apologize for the behaviour of those grotesque individuals. The sensible ‘rest of us’ respectful males are nothing like them.

Your support is great, but you & other guys who think this is rubbish aren’t the ones who should be apologising !

It’s some symptom of making masculinity all about deriding and rejecting anything female. It’s this twisted thinking that if a female is better than a male at something deemed important to males, then it somehow diminishes the male more so than being beaten by another guy.

I like the man who wrote about how the opposite of ‘man’ should not be ‘woman’, but ‘boy’, and get all adults to strive to be the best kind of resilient, resourceful, respectful, strong people they can be without ‘corralling’ traits into one gender or another.

If you call people out on this as a male gamer, you can be the change you want to see.

 That page you linked to is no longer there.

 Great handle by the way.

I want to comment logically and coherently but the bullying and disrespect shone to Jackie Lee is not right. It makes me spitting mad that cowards feel the need to unleash their sociopath like ids on a person they most likely do not know in a public forum. It not only makes males seem like ogres and indeed trolls, and creates a hostile environment that prevents both genders to grow and mature in collaborating to make the internet into that promising frontier of the future many of us see it as. But it also gives fuel to those that want to censor or crush freedom on the internet. Because if we cant be civil in this alternate or parallel realm known as cyberspace, what real hope is there in the physical world. 
-K.A.R.

 It’s prevalent when these skeezy wimps are hiding behind their computer screens. None of these little cretins would ever say anything like this to her/my face.

I think the anonymity is the problem. Well, after the blatant sexism that’s just brushed off as “normal” in gaming culture.

Let me put on my Devil’s Advocate hat…

… Nope, I got nothing.

See, the common defense is “it’s all in good fun,” “don’t take it too seriously,” “you have to get a tougher skin if you want to compete.”  The thing is, things like “get back to the kitchen,” comments about appearance and lewd suggestiveness is just something you don’t do to strangers.  This is just a complete lack of common courtesy.

I think it should be noted that none of her competitors contributed to this sort of behavior, which I see as hopeful.

Its a shame that the behavior of on-lookers couldn’t be on par, but it doesn’t surprise me.  I remember one particular sports match where the male on-lookers did the same to the female competitor and after questioning them, it boiled down to the fact that there was a woman here who was so much better than them, that she was there competing when they had always been taught they, as males, were better just by virtue of their gender.  That she got so far and they weren’t even good enough to compete was galling.  Its that ego raging born from old paradigms — and if there’s one thing I know for sure, no one likes their illusions shattered.

They put a parentheses too close to the link, so it made it part of the hyperlink. The post is still there and well worth the read-  http://yuki-onna.livejournal.com/675153.html 

Not really. It just takes affirmative action from the organiser. It’s not a matter between the woman and the perpetrator, it’s a matter between the perpetrator and the event organiser.

Aris is still casting big fighting game meets – AKA, noone cares about his actions. Sigh.

I’ve been trying to fight pervasive misogyny in the Boardgamegeek.com forums for years.  Not only do I get attacked and bullied and told I am over-reacting and spoiling the fun (and unfairly embarrassing the person who posted the stuff that was hateful towards women)  if I comment on the posts, but the admins think that it’s something the community needs to handle itself (because that works SO well in cases of bigotry and bullying), and they won’t do anything except perhaps warn that the thread is off-topic once all the bullies have had their say.  They never seem to think it has gone off-topic when the guys are making sexist remarks and using vulgar language concerning women, until after a woman protests and has been attacked by numerous jerks.  (I’ve actually been suspended for a while for using dick-wavers and sexist pigs in response to posts using slut, bitch, tart, and other misogynistic  terms that were considered acceptable by the admins and the “community.” —-   And, then after the women leave (or never bother to post in the first place, given the stench of the atmosphere there), comments and even whole threads pop up saying “Why aren’t there any women here?” and “Women can’t/won’t play wargames.”   I have been a boardgamer and wargamer longer than a lot of those jerks have even been alive, plus I have been published in various game-related  magazines, but I do not feel welcome on a site about my hobby because of the rampant sexism there.

I imagine at some point there will be an all female Magic the Gathering tournament in which douchebags will declare, “Why do women get their own competition?”.  There’s no winning with these people.

Those poor immature arses. Apparently, they feel threatened by women in gaming. Especially when those women are kicking their butts. Why else would they be so douchey? But it is time that gaming culture, in general, stands up and says “THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE.” 

Maybe we should retaliate by making small penis jokes while the guys are playing the games? I’m sure they would be okay with that, right?

I’m sorry, this sort of story just infuriates me. 

If you did something like that, you would be banned or otherwise reprimanded by the administration.  Women are not allowed to insult men.  :(

she sounds like a wonderful sensible person.

Well I do call myself a geek (just as people, for example, running this very site seem to be) and I refuse to stop identify with geek culture just because there are many individuals who would behave this way, just as I refuse to stop identify myself as male just because many men hold misogynistic mindset

It’s sad, really. Those people shouting those things at her are so pitiful. They have to resort to such filth all in a childish attempt to get attention, because they aren’t secure enough with themselves.

Props to Jackie Lee. I recently hit up the latest Magic pre-release tournament and as a female player I always mentally make a count of how many female players there are. And while there is a slight increase from when I first competitively played (about 10 years ago in high school), it hasn’t changed too much from *my* personal views.

Rock on that she’s doing what she loves and stands against the misogyny, bullying and general rudness that speaks louder about the gaming community than anyone wants.

I’d love to see more girls playing Magic, especially on the professional level. I haven’t really noticed that I get treated any differently in my local game store, but that’s probably mostly because the guys there know me. It has happened where a girl will wander into the store full of guys and you know she’s just looking for attention. It’s frustrating when we’re trying to work toward actually being taken seriously in the gaming community. Huge props to Jackie Lee! And honestly, had the guys making the comments not been able to hide behind a computer, I don’t think things would have been said. I know that there are usernames attached, but still. I should hope that no one would say anything like that to her face, let alone at all. 

As a long time male gamer of over thirty years, it’s absolutely appalling the kind of pathetic behavior, these fools can willfully put forth with any sincerity. For simply viewing a female human being playing a game, too. I would give anything to show their families, especially their mothers, how they view women and the things they say when no one can see their face.

Some men simply haven’t grown out of their “girls have cooties” phase.
Pity them.

To be fair, I wouldn’t exactly call facing down a few sexist Magic: The Gathering players all that daunting.