This week in World of Warcraft, 5 of us girls decided to team up to plan an upcoming night where we will all do M+ keys together and broadcast it live on Twitch. In the World of Warcraft community streaming on Twitch, there are numerous women that are pushing high keys on their streams and receiving a lot of the same sexist trolls, but also a lot of the same people encouraging our success. A few nights ago on my stream, I received one of the more common fan messages requesting that I do keys with Mischief, who is one one of the top discipline priest players in M+. It was at that moment that I decided this could be a really great opportunity.
Historically, women have had a hard time entering the competitive gaming world. In an article by Nick Yee, a statistic that year showed that it was 50/50 in the gaming scene between men and women in 2017, but the breakdown of this statistic by genre shows a much smaller percentage of women still in MMORPG’s such as WoW. In the most recent Mythic Dungeon Invitational, only one women in the entire world made it to the regional finals which were broadcast live on Twitch, showcasing the top-qualified North American teams competing to send the best two teams to the Global Finals this past summer. Despite their best efforts, her team did not make it to the World finals, so throughout the entire competition, there were no women that made it to that big stage.
It is hard to come up with reasons why there are clearly women playing the game at a high level, but why there are none who have made it to the finals. Are we not taken seriously enough? Are we just not good enough? What is going on here?
In my experience competing in M+, I have found that there are many politics surrounding women that often rise to the surface. One of the main ingredients to success in M+ is consistency, which means forming a real team of 5 players who consistently play together to develop synergy, strategies, and good rapport. However, this can be very tricky when combining men and women in a competitive atmosphere. If a woman is a streamer, there is a stigma that can follow her that she is just doing everything for show and isn’t actually “good” at the game. There is also a stigma about girls getting carried by better players and that their score is only a reflection of this free pass to success.
More than that, there is something called the “only girl syndrome” where women feel the 
need to compete with one another due to gender because they are often replaced in teams of all men if another younger, prettier, or exciting new girl enters the picture. This can cause anxiety and unnecessary competition that spans much outside of a girl’s talent in a game and much more into the politics of the men controlling who gets to come and go in a group.
Additionally, many women that I know have noted issues on teams with guys when one or more of the members develops feelings for the girl player and refuses to group with her if he gets rejected. On the flip side, if two of the players on the team end up dating, this can also cause drama due to arguments over favoritism as well. It is not uncommon for workplaces to forbid relationships among their employees for these reasons, so it should be no surprise that there are teams and guilds that don’t allow for co-ed group compositions out of pure business-sensibility. Regardless, it still makes it difficult for women to make it in the high-end competitive scene of any game, but it is particularly noticeable to me in WoW, since that’s the game I currently stream on Twitch.
The last time I did a M+ Dungeon on my stream with all women, I didn’t even advertise that it was all-female and people still figured it out immediately because they didn’t hear any male voices coming through the audio. We received tons of trolls in my chat making statements flaming our gameplay for our gender or making sexist jokes such as “Wait, five girls in a M+ dungeon? How did they even find their way into the instance?” Sadly, this discouraged a few of the girls from doing it again if we were on stream and I haven’t done it in almost a year now.
However, I recently decided that it would be a really fun opportunity to play with 5 capable, talented female players on stream to both satisfy the requests of our viewers and to gain some empowerment by playing together without men. This way, we can’t be accused of getting carried if we are chesting keys within the timer all on our own. I reached out to 5 of the best women players/streamers I know and we set a date for our first stream playing together. We all think that this could be a really fun night and are aware that we may get turned into some of the biggest memes of our lives, but we are not going to let it discourage us. The pros vastly outweigh the cons because we may be able to really make a difference if we succeed and show that, even if we make mistakes, we’re still all capable players and we’re having a great time regardless of your opinions of our “girl brains”. Bring it on!
VITAMINPEE 