Hey everybody!

Once again I’m gonna write a hopefully interesting blog. This time I wanted to discuss a thing which I think a lot about, gaming. I read Liefje’s (a person I respect for what she has reached during the last years) latest article on Cadred and it made me write that blog entry.

Girls will never be as good as male-gamers

I have been playing for a really long time now (too long) and I have spent hours and hours of playing public, mixing, practicing in different teams with different people. During my time playing, there has always been shit talked about female-gamers. No matter what it was about, there were always some bad-mouths here and there. “Girls will never be as good as male-gamers” - and you know what? Yeah, I totally agree on that. They don’t have the same talent as many male-gamers are “blessed” with; neither have they the motivation or the same “state of mind”. One thing that is really annoying though is that people keep on commenting by blindly generalizing the topic: “ALL female-gamers suck”. I think that shows, many people see things pretty superficially and don’t do enough research before making such a bold statement. Not all female gamers suck; not ALL of them.

I have seen girls kicking boy’s asses and I observed some girls playing kinda smart, they make wise, smart decisions ingame, have good aim, good team-play and overall a good understanding of the game.

SOME girls have potential

The only bad thing is that there are just three girls I have “admired” for playing in my whole five years of gaming and its thanks to them that I am the player I am today. I’m not forgetting about the males that have influenced my game as well, but this time I’m talking about the girls. Only three girls that I have “admired”, and compared to the male scene that has so many gamers that are good and they have different gaming-style to choose from that you can “admire” them for. It is not the same with female-gamers. Even if I have only those three girls in mind, I have seen that some girls have potential and they are better than many boys already now (and I don’t mean teams like mTw here - cause obviously that would be like comparing apples and oranges).

Sometimes when I’m bored I play on a Swedish public site called spelarenan, and I swear to god, I have never seen worse boys playing then there. The worst part is that it’s those kinds of boys that say we suck. There are a lot of sucky boys, but just because of that, I don’t say they all suck. Funny thing is, boys are a majority when it comes to playing Counter-Strike, aren’t there more boys overall that are worse than girls then? Whatever, just don’t forget the girls that stand out and try to be better. They deserve a chance.

Good looking equals = easier marketing

A while ago, when we started this whole project with Pink Zinic officially, there was a random-girl that commented on a news about us and said “We should practice more and stop putting on lipstick”. It’s so sad when girls get jealous, instead of embracing each other’s victory, they write stuff like that when they don’t really understand the situation. Just because we had pretty pictures of us does that mean we don’t practice? We are making a deal and trying to get ourselves where we want to be. We did those photos so they could promote us and while doing that they get their ideas and items sold. “Sorry that we look good and can use this for our advantage”. How can all that be embarrassing? We never said we were good or were gonna rock the world, we are just gonna do as good as we can. Keep doing what we have been doing for the last year. Yeah, we have played together for a whole year, so for the people that say “they will split up after a month”, try again. All stars from all industries are using their look in order to market themselves better. It is fine when tennis, football or basketball players do a photo shoot and it is fine when the male CS and WC3 players pose cool on pictures - but female CS players aren’t allowed to do so?

Maybe it is easier for people to be mean via the internet. You can say there whatever you want without the need to face the person eye to eye you are talking crap about! There have been so many comments about how sucky we are, from both female and males but to be honest, I just think many are jealous! Of course not everyone.

Counter-Strike is business

You might ask, why don’t you just play, but why do you have to do those pictures and all? What do we get from all this? It is business like whole competitive eSports is business. Without all that marketing there wouldn’t be tournaments with thousands of euros in price money around the globe and there wouldn’t be paid players. We are five Counter-Strike playing girls doing what we like to do. What we are doing helps us to visit events like Dreamhack, ESWC, SLAP and maybe other LANs. Our organization really believes in us and wants to help us improve our game by giving us the chance to attend more male tournaments, rather than one or two female tournaments a year.

And think about it yourself. If you had the chance to get your flight ticket, food and hotel paid, would you say no? If you would have the chance to focus on your hobby in order to get better and get offered a professional environment, what would you do? Like any other job, we do stuff and get what we want in return. Yes that is a job and that is business. While this is happening, when we are at home, we are sitting practicing our asses off to improve our game and try to perform better then we have done past times at events.

Want to discuss this topic? Please do it here in the comments and check out on IRC #zinic