Our WA people hopefully know that we have the Mixed Doubles event happening this weekend (Sunday 7th August). It all started at Masters last year when there was only one female player yet there was a heap of girls that came along to watch who paint and play but won’t play in tournaments because they are intimidated or don’t feel comfortable or don’t think they are up to the standard of the male players. I said to the one female player ‘wouldn’t it be great to have a women’s event, that way any of the girls could come along and play without worrying about the guys’.
We have to be honest here, this is a very male dominated hobby. We recently put out a community survey, available here, and we had one female response so the chance of running a women’s event and having 50% women at Masters or even 25%, heck even 5% at this years masters was going to be slim but we (Ok I) wanted to give girls who are interested in playing at events a gentle entry point into tournaments and events.
We did a lot of informal qualitative research (that is tech speak to we chatted to a bunch of players, male and female). Please excuse the sweeping generalisations, the consensus seemed to be girls generally get into playing once they start dating a gamer and so they are less experienced than their partner and so wouldn’t come by themselves (we know there are exceptions to this, we know there are girls who get into it by themselves, who are better players than guys, who seriously rock at painting and the list goes on!).
Off the back of that we came up with the mixed doubles event. The idea was that girls could come along with a partner so they would feel like they had some moral support and someone who maybe knew the rules better than them, for the girls that rock at 40k, they will have a more social time playing in a doubles event.
During a brainstorming session (in the car going down to the Albany event) we chatted about making it a couples event. Then there was an issue we didn’t want any GLBTIQA (aka same sex couples for people who don’t recognise the acronym) couples to be excluded as we had promoted it as a mixed doubles event. Could we add a line on promo material saying ‘couples identifying as GLBTIQA are invited to attend’. Issue with that was, if we did that would we get guys who wanted to play but who are single or whose partner doesn’t play pretending to be gay, and that would be disrespectful to people who do identify as gay. Aaahhhhh!
After going around in circles with this discussion for the better – worse part of an hour I asked M and I this question ‘what is it that we are hoping to achieve by hosting this event?’ M’s response was ‘to host an event where people get to play 40k’. It has to be more than that. It has to be more than 40 people in a room playing 40k or why aren’t we hosting a full on event with 100 tickets available that differs from Masters in that it is one day not two? (Hmm actually maybe that is a good idea for next year 😀). There has to be a bigger why. For me the reason was because I heard those girls at Masters say ‘I enjoy playing but I could never play in an event like this.’ Why not? If you don’t want to then fine, but if you do want to then I don’t want you to miss out on experiencing that just because the guys are big and loud and intimidating (you are all beautiful to me, I love that you are big and loud – unless you are playing in the ObSec dungeon and wake my 3 yo up AGAIN and then your big and loud won’t have anything on how intimidating I can be 😀 oops slightly distracted, where was I…). So then I thought about it, why is this just for women who are intimidated to enter the tournament scene. By the time we were heading down to Albany ObSec was nearly a year old and I had heard many guys say the same thing ‘I enjoy playing but I couldn’t play in tournaments’ or guys who haven’t been playing long and want to play in a tournament but don’t feel they know the game well enough yet.
Really what I was hoping to achieve by the mixed doubles was that it would be a mix of a rookie and a more experienced player teaming up (and if one or both of those was a girl then woohoo!) to give the rookies a gentle start in tournaments and events. I described it to M as wanting the event to be like a great big hug, welcoming new players (M just raised one eyebrow when I said that, which isn’t fair as he knows I can’t do it back). If we have teams come along to the event that aren’t rookies that is fine too, providing they are going to be part of that kind, gentle, fun experience that we are hoping to achieve.
The mixed doubles event is in only a few days. I’ll let you know just how warm that hug was sometime next week!
E
That. Was. Awesome. The event, sure. But the way you described the process had me lolling in my office. Also, I literally pictured Mike with his eyebrow up…