An alarm went off at 8 a.m. as civil engineering major Evelyn Tay prepared for her day.
Once she finished her morning routine, instead of leaving to go to class, Tay turned on her gaming PC and opened League of Legends. It was time to start her seven-hour gaming session.
She was on the Division I collegiate team at Cal Poly and made it her goal to reach Grandmaster, the second-highest rank in the game.
After months of hard work, she finally hit Grandmaster and immediately told her friends.
However, her accomplishment was met with excuses for why she made it. Because she was a woman, people would tell her she was either playing an easy champion, or that her friends boosted her to a higher level by playing on her account.
These comments were affecting her mental health to the point where she stopped playing ranked games and instead played normals that did not affect her standing.
Now, as a senior, she is no longer on the Division I team. Instead, she is the esports coordinator for Cal Poly’s League of Legends club.
She is helping the other esports coordinator, Jordan Levin, introduce women’s and gender-inclusive teams by the end of the fall quarter or early winter.
“These types of tournaments are important to introduce women into competitive gaming,” Tay said. “There was a female VALORANT player who wanted to go competitive, but people on the team didn’t want to play with a girl.”
Sexualizing characters
This discrimination against women is deep-rooted in the gaming community and started when developers first made video games.
In the 1990s, Nintendo started airing ads for their Game Boy on television. There was one thing missing from these ads: females.
“I was born in the early 2000s, and many games were geared towards male audiences, such as shooting and racing games that are mainly pushed onto boys,” senior animal science major Kayla Nobles said. “If they were geared towards girls, it would be centered around Barbie dress-up and make-up.”
Nobles is a casual gamer who plays on console and PC. Like Tay, she plays League of Legends with friends but has been harassed online.
“Men feel insecure or threatened when women try to join a space that has been predominantly male for many years,” Nobles said.
Not only were advertisements designed for men, but gameplay had women as side characters in the story but weren’t playable for the user.
“So many people think it’s not a big deal, but when women are constantly being represented as just a pretty face in the background, I think it affects the people who play it,” former Cal Poly student Amanda Clopine said. “It sends the message that if you’re not pretty or sexy as a woman, you either don’t exist or you aren’t worth interacting with.”
Clopine graduated in 2022 and did her senior project about Dungeons & Dragons, a fantasy tabletop roleplaying game. She is passionate about gaming and hopes games will improve their diversity in character design.
The complete opposite of female eye candy is the strong, overtly sexualized female. This trope is seen in Tomb Raider (1996), an action-adventure game where the protagonist, Lara Croft, is searching for an ancient artifact.
“I am all for owning your sexuality as a woman, dressing how you want, and being hot,” Clopine said. “But the problem is that most female designs in the video game industry reeks of the male gaze.”
In the earlier game versions, the character wears a blue tank top and shorts with an unrealistically narrow waist.
“Developers will always find a way to sneak in some revealing armor set that looks like a bikini… just blatant disregard for basic human anatomy when designing their female characters,” Clopine said.
When women game developers tried pitching non-sexualized female characters, they were rejected, according to The Guardian.
Real-life implications for women in gaming
Riot Games, the creators of VALORANT and League of Legends, settled a class-action lawsuit for $100 million in 2021, according to the Washington Post. Some claims involved not hiring women into senior leadership positions, denying women promotions, and paying them unequally compared to men.
At one point, its leadership team was all men, according to the Washington Post. Now, 22% of the team comprises females, while the other 74% are males.
Riot Games has taken steps towards inclusivity by creating Game Changers, a championship for women and other underrepresented groups to play in competitive esports.
“There’s more of a demand for games to step it up in terms of diversity and character design as more women, queer people, and people of color enter gaming spaces,” Clopine said.
The League of Legends Championship Series (LCS) Game Changers 2023 had their first run this year in September. It is the first edition to be officially broadcast and to include team coaches and managers.
However, League of Legends is known for having one of the most toxic communities.
Despite its bad reputation, Nobles is going on three years of playing it. During one game where she and her friend were winning, one enemy team member took out his anger on her.
“This person, who I am presuming to be male based on how unhinged the comments were, started calling me out and said they wanted to kill me,” Nobles said. “That’s more on the extreme, but he said other very nasty and vile things.”
Riot Games tried to make the game less toxic by removing the ability to ping or notify teammates. Instead, it made it impossible for people to communicate and faced much backlash.
“Although a lot of times people use it to be toxic,” senior materials engineering major Levin said. “I actually use those pings to tell my teammates to do something.”
Levin coached the collegiate League of Legends teams last year and noticed that Santa Barbara introduced a women’s team to their roster.
This realization made him want to start a similar program at Cal Poly to make the game more gender inclusive.
“Gaming is for everyone, and I think many people are finally starting to realize that,” Clopine said.
Correction: This article was updated at 1:53 to clarify what division Tay was a member of.