Player 2 has entered the game: How women are transforming gaming

And with women taking charge behind the scenes, the industry is changing too. “It’s evolving as women developers, streamers, and gamers gain prominence and respect,” says Swayambika Sachar, aka Sway. Sachar captains Top-G, the team that recently won the all-women National Esports Championship organised by the Esports Federation of India. Top-G will represent India in the World Esports Championship in Romania later this year for the first-person-shooter game Counter Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO).

Mansi Sottany, aka MatkA QueeN, captain of Team Purr-ple and Top-G’s competitor says the change is recent. “It has become more inclusive and welcoming for everyone as gaming communities create safe spaces for female gamers and combat online harassment and toxicity. It’s an ongoing effort.”

In gaming, as in life, it takes a village to affect change. See who’s creating level playing fields and how it’s affecting everything from prize money to the little puzzle in your phone that you can’t quite quit.

Changing from within: Gamezop

Gamezop, a multi-game platform, believes that women play largely for entertainment, rather than with an eye on competing professionally. The company licenses titles from game studios so third-party websites can use them. With popular casual-game titles such as City Cricket and Ludo with Friends, they claim to have engaged over one billion users over the last four years.

“We have found that companies with more women on the team create better versions of games,” says Gaurav Agarwal, Gamezop’s co-founder. A few years ago, the end goal of an in-game quest might have been to rescue a damsel in distress. Now, there are pots of gold, travel themes and furry aliens. The characters more wholesome, less likely to be hypersexualised.

Another crucial step in bridging the gender gap, says Agarwal, is to have women in leadership roles so there’s diversity in decision-making and new role models for others. Gamezop’s own policies now include anonymising resumes (so recruiters do not know the gender of the candidate), a diverse interview panel, equal pay for equal work and zero tolerance for discrimination and harassment.

“An increasing female player base means there are more women on gaming teams,” Agarwal says. “This will lead to the acquisition of more women developers to make games. This, in turn, will increase more women in the player base. With other measures such as better internet connectivity, and increasing smartphone usage, the number of women gamers will soon equal men.”

Shining the spotlight: Lumikai

“There is a prevalent idea that a typical gamer is a 13-year-old boy,” chuckles Salone Sehgal, co-founder and partner of Lumikai, India’s first gaming-focused venture capitalist fund. “It just isn’t true. Even grandmothers enjoy playing Farmville. In fact, the word ‘gamer’ is almost redundant, just like we don’t use the word ‘movieer’!”

Sehgal, 37, a passionate gamer, says that when Lumikai was founded three years ago, they consciously set out to tackle misnomers and misunderstandings like these. “We knew we had the ability to build something that would have a large impact,” she says. Lumikai’s team is 40% women, which is unusual both in gaming and venture capital.

Sehgal believes that the reason for greater female participation in gaming now is how easy games are to access. It’s not just fancy consoles, gaming rigs, and expensive new titles. It’s possible to compete on a smartphones, draw on community support for games such as Farmville, and spend only a few minutes a day on a game.

“It’s sad that despite a large female consumer base for casual gaming, only about 25% of gaming apps actually acknowledge that there are women players too.” The team attempts to address these gaps through their initiative Pathbreakers, a curated annual showcase of distinguished women in gaming-related companies -- founders, investors, gamers, developers and entrepreneurs. “The recognition of diversity in gaming is important. It’s not just to tick a box. Women are a part of gaming, and they deserve greater visibility,” Sehgal says.

Top cat: Saloni Pawar, aka Meow16K

Mumbai’s Saloni Shirish Pawar, or Meow16k, as gamers know her, is 23. She started playing online games 10 years ago. Then one day in 2016, her WiFi service conked off and she tried playing the offline first-person-shooter game, Counter Strike 1.6. She was hooked.

Coached by her supportive brother and encouraged by friends to create gaming-related content, Pawar is now one of India’s foremost esports athletes and game streamers. She has more than 60,000k subscribers on her YouTube channel @meow16k.

Pawar’s attitude to her skills echoes that of so many women, everywhere. “I didn’t know my own potential until I represented India in the Legion of Valkyries tournament as a player for Global ESports in 2019 for CS:GO,” she says. “I had never been in that situation before. I didn’t know who I was playing against. I thought I would be beaten. But we bagged second place for India,” says Pawar.

She has since shifted to playing Valorant, a free-to-play first-person tactical hero shooter game. She loves its versatility as it allows her to have a different experience each time she plays it.

With wins come the perks. Women-only tournaments offer a total prize pool of as much as $500,000 ( ₹4.12 crore). Brands take women content creators more seriously. One fan gifted her a state-of-the-art gaming PC. But she’s had to struggle more than a male player in her place would. Her parents initially worried about a young woman spending so much time gaming. And she’s been heckled by other players for being a girl.

She still does. “Male egos are so sensitive! In esports, it’s all about skill, so everyone has an equal chance. But people can’t come to terms with playing against girls. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve heard, “Tu ladki hai, khana bana” (You’re a girl; go and cook). Some men will even refuse to play if there’s a girl on the team, so women try not to speak or give their identity away,” she says.

The door’s been opened. But gaming still has a long way to go, she says. “People at home need to encourage girls to play and be more sensitive towards them, more tournaments need to be organised and male public figures in gaming need to come out in support of female players. Only then will things change.”

Real-world inspiration: Heena Sidhu

Heena Sidhu is the first Indian pistol shooter to reach number one in the International Shooting Sport Federation rankings. She’s the first Indian to win gold at the ISSF World Cup finals. She knows how to wield a gun. Naturally, she was the perfect muse to create the sharp-shooting bounty hunter with a heart of gold in SuperGaming’s upcoming title, Indus Battle Royale. The character is called Heena too, has a strong storyline and is only one of many interesting female characters in the game.

Roby John, SuperGaming’s CEO and co-founder says that female character representation in gaming is far from what it should be. Portrayals of women as helpless accessories are still widespread. “During community play tests, we ask women players their opinions on subjects such as the themes and the movements of the characters,” he says. Many found the idea, tone, and visual treatment of Indo-Futurism more welcoming than the gritty, dystopian fare typical of first-person- shooter games. Feedback on the two main female characters, Heena and Morni, has been positive too. Women players say it’s nice to see strong, powerful women as opposed to the usual sexualised tropes.

It helps that SuperGaming has women among their team of game artists, technical artists, designers, developers, testers, and marketing leads. John believes that two sureshot ways of bringing more women into gaming are by encouraging greater roles for them in game development, and by creating a universally loved, inclusive brand such as Pokemon or Minecraft. “This would open the floodgates.”