Male Attitudes in Magic

Mooseman

Isengar Tussle
"Star City Games Open Series tournament — the country’s biggest competition for the fantasy card game Magic: The Gathering"
Really?

Mostly I have seen that many MTG players have little social skills and are tested to the limit of male/female interactions.
There has always been a bit of harassment in the organized play area, like pro-players/noobs, one store vs another, etc.....

But the offensive language and harassment have always been enforced at the events I go to, but every year or so, the judge community will have certain things that are getting more scrutiny and/or clearer enforcement philosophies.
 

Spiderman

Administrator
Staff member
Hm. It could be online; reading it again, that's seems to be the main gist. Too bad we don't have our females like Almindra? (see, forgot her name already!), Purple Jester, Whimsical, or Griffith_se anymore...

You know the media, could be overblowing or hyping it up, so I wanted to get other viewpoints of people who have also been to these events...
 

turgy22

Nothing Special
Holy crap! A Magic write-up in the Washington Post. Our game is famous now.

Here are my thoughts.
First of all, the article was extremely poorly researched (as evidenced by the esteem given to the SCG tournament), patently biased and seemed to paint a large group of people with the same generalizations that it seems to frown upon. I abhor these types of stereotypes, as they have no place in the world at all. Especially on the internet (although the article was probably circulated in print as well.) Now, if the WaPo really wanted a decent article, they would have had a man write it.

Having said that, allow me to generalize. No, wait. All0w me to state the obvious. Men and women are different. Not just physically, by psychologically. This is not to say that there isn't a large overlap in personalities and interests, but men and women tend to be drawn toward different interests. That's why you're more likely to see a man working on his car, closely following a professional sports team, or riding a motorcycle. And you're more likely to see a woman taking a dance class, shopping at an arts and crafts store, or gardening. It's not that any woman can't, isn't interested in, or is excluding from doing the things that men do or vice versa. It's just that genders are more likely to participate in certain activities. Males are more likely to be drawn to fantasy media. Males are more likely to be interested in strategic gaming (which is much different than video gaming). Males tend to be more competitive. Thus, a fantasy card game is more likely to draw males than females, especially at a competitive level.

Now that you all understand the difference between boys and girls, let's take things one step further. Not all males are drawn to games like Magic. Magic players tend to get into the game as teenagers. They also tend to be more socially awkward than other males. When you have a large group of people and a larger percentage than normal is socially awkward and raging with hormones, you're going to hear some socially awkward things. Now add a few females to this group and the awkwardness increases. Because many Magic players don't regularly interact with women, they say stupid stuff or stare at body parts that they don't possess. Now, when you take that same group of people and give them the anonymity of the internet, of course you're going to get some disgusting and overtly sexist comments coming out. (Though this is much more indicative of the internet culture than the MtG culture.)

In short, I think this writer takes a very narrow view of the MtG community and is attempting to make it seem like it's not welcoming of all types of players, when it's really just a handful of buffoons who either don't know how to properly interact with the opposite sex or are just a-holes. Period.

*That last "period" was not intended as a sexist joke, btw.
 

Spiderman

Administrator
Staff member
Because many Magic players don't regularly interact with women, they say stupid stuff or stare at body parts that they don't possess.
I agree with all of your thoughts, including this one, but this in particular happens to actually smacks me of stereotyping itself. Just because someone may be "socially awkward", does that mean they necessarily would say stupid stuff? Their socially awkwardness would cause them to just clam up. Plus, I can't believe none of these guys have sisters where they might deal with females.

And frankly, everyone is going to "stare", whether it be looking overtly or sneaking a peek, socially awkward or not. That's just guys. (Stereotype! :) )

I re-read yours just to make sure and I guess you're doing the generalization thing (with the "having said that clause") so I can see what you're saying but I still think for my generalization they should have had some female contact, enough not to make saying stupid stuff the norm.
 

turgy22

Nothing Special
I re-read yours just to make sure and I guess you're doing the generalization thing (with the "having said that clause") so I can see what you're saying but I still think for my generalization they should have had some female contact, enough not to make saying stupid stuff the norm.
Actually, for most of my generalizations, I'm speaking from personal experience. I grew up with a sister (and a mother, fwiw), but those sort of interactions are completely different than interacting with "girls" if you will. It wasn't until I was in a committed long-term relationship that I really started interacting with female friends, acquaintances and even strangers in the same way that I would interact with a male. Prior to that, there was always some subconscious need to say clever things around girls, even if I wasn't even attracted to the other person. And, of course, one man's definition of clever is the rest of society's definition of stupid.
 

Spiderman

Administrator
Staff member
But it doesn't have to be the norm, just enough to make it seem that way.
I don't know, if it's happening enough to make it seem that way, it seems that's the norm.

turgy22 said:
I'm speaking from personal experience. I grew up with a sister (and a mother, fwiw), but those sort of interactions are completely different than interacting with "girls" if you will...
Well, obviously personal experiences vary, but generally speaking :), the sister will have friends with whom you interact and helps to develop your inter-sex behavior. If you're shutting yourself away from family and family friends anyway, yes, that doesn't help, but I have a hard time believing the majority of M:TG players grew up that way. Call me naive, I guess, just like what I thought about Child's thief in the other thread :)
 

Mooseman

Isengar Tussle
I don't know, if it's happening enough to make it seem that way, it seems that's the norm.
Perception is rarely the actual norm. Look at on-line and cable news (US only)... they are not even close to the norm, but people perceive them to be.
 

Spiderman

Administrator
Staff member
True dat. But that's why I was asking for your experiences, of what you've actually seen with your own eyes at these events.
 

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
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?
 

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
So many people come to gaming because they were excluded elsewhere — and they can be irrationally defensive of their communities once they’ve found them.
Step 1: Cite dubious examples of some behavior.
Step 2: Psychoanalyze the behavior without actually examining any details.
Step 3: You have a Washington Post article!

“When you have that level of ostracism and feeling like you’ve made a clubhouse, anything that threatens the way you look at it is really, really dangerous,” says Elizabeth Sampat, a game designer and steering committee member of the International Game Developers Association’s “Women in Games” special-interest group. “This is their territory and they have to defend it, no matter what.”
It is slowly, by some measures, getting better.
Again, there's just the assertion that some behavior, which hasn't been explicitly defined, can be attributed to some psychological factors. This isn't even close to rigor.

Robles, who took time away from competing when she was working for Wizards of the Coast, is again playing and no longer the only woman at tournaments — female players typically now make up 5 to 10 percent of tournament participants.
That more women are playing in tournaments than in the past is true, and I'd think it's a good thing, but all that it shows is that more women are playing in tournaments. That fact does not itself establish other claims as being factual.

And behavior at competitive events is being more tightly regulated. In conjunction with Wizards of the Coast, the network of volunteer judges who run tournaments instituted new rules this summer that broaden the definition of “unsporting conduct” and allow judges to bar players for offensive language and harassment.
Hypothetically, if players did view Magic, or at least the tournament scene, as some sort of clubhouse, and if they flocked to it because they didn't fit in elsewhere, how do you think they'd react to newcomers impelling changes, such as restricting their conduct? Wouldn't that explanation make a lot more sense than "irrational defensiveness"? Again, I don't think these claims stand up to scrutiny (some hypothetical disenfranchised teenager who viewed Magic tournaments as an exclusive space for him and his ilk and is hostile to outside invasion back in the 1990's would now be in his 20's or 30's). But this half-baked attempt at psychoanalysis doesn't even hold up if its silly premises are granted.

Helene Bergeot, Wizards of the Coast’s director of global organized play, didn’t comment on whether there was a specific reason for the rule change. But she did say that the company recognizes Magic’s widening fan base, “and that’s also the reason why we are striving to make the Magic tournaments as welcoming as possible.”
This doesn't mean that they were unwelcoming in the past.

Longmore prefers to stay out of those politics. Unwilling to let anything get in the way of her game, she hasn’t paid attention to the backlash from her 2012 victory in Seattle or any that have followed.
Good for her?

Even at Sunday’s tournament, which isn’t going as well as she’d hoped, she stays upbeat. Though it’s clear by the fifth round that she is not going to make the top eight — her original goal for the day — she decides to stay through the afternoon. She loves the game, and because she’s gunning for an invite to the Players’ Championship at the end of the year, it’s good to play as many matches as possible.
Well, that's because she's playing Spiral Tide instead of a Delver deck. Scrub.

A friend checks her next assignment for her, and Longmore walks over to a table where a young man is already shuffling his deck. He looks at her as she sits down, then at the cards in her hand.
They shake hands, and when they begin to chat, the man’s first question isn’t about Longmore’s gender. He wants to know about High Tide, the card she’s famous for playing.
Longmore smiles and dives in.
Keep the dream alive, Spiral Tide players.
 
R

rokapoke

Guest
Oversoul, your lampooning of the article is clearly sexist.

Wait, I forgot to use the sarcasm font.

Anyway, I thought the most telling quote (I only looked at the article for three seconds just now) is:

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Hasbro lists “Magic: The Gathering” as a “boys’ action gaming product. The company lists Magic in its “games” category. This version has been corrected.
I would definitely say that Magic is inherently a sausage fest, as you characterize it, Oversoul -- not due to exclusivity but due to the initial draw to males. Over time, maybe it corrects closer to 50/50 (but I think 70/30 is probably where it would max out, personally). Either way, this article was clearly heavily biased in such a way to serve as click bait, it would seem.
 

turgy22

Nothing Special
Longmore is transgender
I don't know how I missed this earlier. Now, I'm not the most educated person on gender roles in society, but based on that classification and her totally gender-reassigned name (Feline / Felix?) I'm guessing that Ms. Longmore was born with boy parts. If that's the case, doesn't this kind of make her fall into the young unpopular white male stereotype that the author tries to establish at the beginning of the article? Doesn't she realize that the Magic community is riddled with overtly effeminate young men?
 

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
Just saw that on the same day I finally got around to this thread, she happened to earn another top 8 finish at a SCG Legacy open with Spiral Tide. Living the dream. That deck...

Anyone want to trade me a playset of Candelabra of Tawnos for super cheap?
 
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