After reading this, I feel compelled to comment on a couple of things.
First off, kudos for the well-written piece. The almost stream-of-consciousness, emotional outpouring hit home.
But there are two things which I feel a need to comment on. First of all, the thoughts resulting from the competitiveness of fighting games. I think the smack-talk, the feeling of needing to win, the insecurity, that is all part and parcel of climbing the ranks of a combatitive endeavour. You get better, you’re afraid of losing. You want all those times that you have proved yourself to your opponents and to yourself to not be for nothing, not to be a lie. Any loss would mean a setback and is something you want to avoid, something you strive to not have happen to you. That happens to certain personalities not just in gaming, but in all sports, business, politics: everywhere you have shown you can excell. C’est la vie.
And the stakes get higher as you go. This is not a ‘woman in gaming’ thing. This is a ‘person in gaming’ thing. The better you are, the rougher the smack-talk is, the more personal it all gets. The more you invest in this thing which, truly, is only as worthy as much as you assign worth to it.
And then there is the lamenting on the woman-man interaction in what you wrote. Welcome to the world, to life. This is not just gaming, or fighting-games. This is everywhere and in all things. It’s just a part of life and how men and women (or certain men and certain women, certain sub-sets) interact.
When it happens it is uncomfortable. Annoying. But those kinds of interactions are not just the reserve of women who compete in fighting games, or even gaming in general. That can happen everywhere.
What you wrote made me a bit sad for your bad experiences. It just seems to me that you have conflated the problems of male-female interactions and competitive gaming, making it seem as if they are related. But I think they are two seperate issues: men can react oddly (to say the least) to women in any setting, and competitive gaming can lead to personal feelings where the higher you go, the more is at stake and the rougher the interactions can get no matter if you are male or female.
TL;DR: I’m sorry for your bad experiences and I understand the maudlin feeling they engender, but I think that certain men can react strangely to women in any setting and any competitive occupation can lead to things getting personal. They just aren’t necessarily related.
