Written by Hairong 2022 Cohort
Since I wrote this journal entry, I have played 4000 hours of Dota2. The game brought me endless joy and introduced me to countless friends.
To this day, the social features attract me rather than the game’s
competitive nature. According to the survey, there are only 5% female players in this game, so as the “rare” group of Dota2, I want to share my experiences. In the beginning, this game’s brought me unparalleled joy.
I could always see a wide world through the computer screen in the crowded space of the eight-person dormitory. As I completed the newbie stage and began to learn to communicate with my teammate, I noticed that the person on the other side of the screen would usually react strangely.
Some people would’ve kept asking me to assist them during a game; some would’ve cursed my male friends out loud; some would’ve asked me to add their friends at the end of the game. Once, I opened the mic to explain why I did not turn in my skills, but my teammates ignored the fact and talked to me with a laughing voice, “oh, you’re a GIRL; forget what I said.”
Realizing that playing with people I didn’t know might be uncomfortable, I sought out friends I knew from the game to play with. It was fun to play with a group of friends, we used voice software to communicate, and we sometimes lost and sometimes won, but every time we lost, they were silent in the voice channel for a long time. At one point, I quietly joined the voice software, and over the laughter of their discussion, they all thought, “this girl has bad play.” I realized that my “friends,” who had been playing for two months, had never called me by my name; they had only called me “that woman.”
Since then, I haven’t used any voice application and only played with my friends in reality. I reached a decent rank in the game after playing for 2000 hours. After I arrived in Vancouver in 2017, I started looking for a new game group. At this point, the female population of this game began to raise attention in the community. After a slender pointed at a female entrepreneur of Dota2, she came forward to theorize with the netizens, but that didn’t clear her in some player’s view, and more netizens started spreading pornography rumours about her. Eventually, it came to all women netizens, they extended malice on all female streamers, and there has been much online violence against female influencers as if the level of play was never the criteria for evaluating female players, but rather their chastity.
Then, I turned on the microphone during a handful of games with new friends. The other male players began to give me detailed instructions on how to play the game, even though it was my 4000 hours of playing this game. Finally, their teaching ended with, “It’s okay; you’re a GIRL, after all.” I shut down my computer and ignored the new message from the new friend, “Hey, girl, will you join us tomorrow?”
I don’t play the game anymore. I prefer to watch my boyfriend playing DOTA2. Once, he met some new friends and wanted to prank them, so he asked me to impersonate him using voice chat. It was clear that the female voice made him the center of attention for a group of guys all night. We were walking the dog together late at night, and he happily told me, “It was nice to be a girl.”
Is it nice to be a girl in Dota 2? You tell me!