For a long time, gaming was considered a male domain. The reasons for this are diverse. Now, however, one can increasingly perceive changes in the industry. TECHBOOK spoke to the first professional Brawl Stars player.
Current statistics suggest that the proportion of women among video game users is not only growing steadily. He is now even slightly larger than the male portion. On the one hand, this is due to “new” gaming media such as smartphones, which are more easily accessible. On the other hand, the stigmatization of the entire area as a male domain and of gaming as a niche product is increasingly disappearing. Nevertheless, women in eSports are still a rarity. But why is that?
“sunny‘, whose real name is Dilana, is the first woman to play the popular mobile game ‘Brawl Stars’ at a professional level. She now coaches the first all-female team in the league. With TECHBOOK she shared her experiences as a player, but above all as a coach, and told what she thinks is important in eSports and how gaming can have a positive effect.
“Brawl Stars” as a random product of the lockdown
The story of the young Swiss reads adventurously. The 24-year-old actually comes from athletics, likes to climb and is also available for any other activity in the fresh air. Through her family, there have certainly been points of contact with video games, but she would not have thought that she would play so much and then professionally. “In fact, I ended up getting into gaming because of Covid. Before that I was very active in sports, the main thing was outside. When I tell people from before who haven’t seen me in a while that I do eSports, their jaws drop. I used to have nothing to do with gaming,” says “Sunny”.
In fact, the corona pandemic has given the entire gaming industry a powerful boost. Many have had a similar experience to Dilana during lockdown; Video games, especially mobile games, have become even more popular since then. In Dilana’s case, the choice of “Brawl Stars” was not a conscious one. She simply downloaded the first mobile game from the App Store that looked interesting to her phone. The Swiss, who is also currently studying medicine, quickly discovered her passion and a certain talent.
The path to becoming a professional eSportswoman
Her good in-game stats caught her attention from an organization that was still looking for players for a tournament. The young woman finally prevailed in more than 20 tryouts. “The first phone call I had with them (the requesting organization) was pretty funny. It was like: ‘Huh, you’re a woman?’” Dilana still encounters these or similar reactions to this day, although not as extreme as in the early days. On the one hand, this has to do with their own reputation, but also with the general change in the industry.
Especially at the beginning, her gender in combination with her work as an eSports athlete was always the central topic.
The first two weeks of playing “Brawl Stars” I still said “Hello, I’m Dilana, I’m a woman.” But then I already had the first negative experiences in the direction of “Okay, then bye. You’re a woman, you’re bad anyway.” And then I even got requests from 14-year-olds to be their virtual girlfriend. At some point I said that I’m also a 16-year-old guy. It stayed that way for a while until it came to eSports. Of course, my teammates knew that I was a woman, we were on the call every day. But in the very first competition I entered, gamer pics were released. This led to quite funny reactions, also from the audience: “Hey, is that a guy with long hair now? Or is that actually a woman?” And until today, until Telekom founded the Equal eSports initiative, I was always the only woman in the whole world who competed professionally in Brawl Stars tournaments. I didn’t know that for a long time, but now I find it quite shocking.
Dilana “Sunny” on TECHBOOK
Despite these successes, it was not easy for them to find a team in the long term. Dilana said in the TECHBOOK interview that she encountered specific hurdles due to her gender when she wanted to join a team in the top league. Both from the players’ side and from the coaches, who didn’t want to have them there due to the allegedly disturbed team chemistry. And supposedly well-intentioned sayings were not uncommon: “How often I’ve heard: ‘You’re super good for a woman.'”
Also interesting: How do you actually become an eSports player?
First experiences as an eSports coach
In general, the former player and now active “Sunny” as a coach sees no differences between the sexes when playing. Only when it came to communication was it a bit difficult at the beginning with your four-person team. Unnecessarily many words and mutual consideration are not necessarily beneficial in a real-time game. Clear announcements are needed as to who is going where and what has to be done. When it came to assigning roles, it was especially important at the beginning to lure your team out of their comfort zone and introduce them to brawler types that they might not like at first glance, such as a somewhat more robust tank that can sometimes face direct confrontation looking for the opponent. But that changed enormously within a few weeks, says Dilana.
She had also coached athletics for two years before she started gaming. And even before she took over the women’s team at SK Averosa, whose members are between 18 and 20 years old, she was already active as a coach on “Brawl Stars” – but only for men. The decisive difference in coaching the different teams was not necessarily the gender, but rather the experience. “These two male teams that I coached before were very different. It was very different in the sense that the six players I coached had been in eSports for a long time. I think that the longer playing experience was much more important than the fact that it was men. They were there longer and already knew, for example, how to communicate in a nutshell in order to reach their goals faster.”
Women’s and mixed teams in eSports
Also, what no one expected was the reaction to the all-female team taking part in the Equal esports initiative came about. The initiative is the result of a cooperation between Deutsche Telekom and the well-known German eSports organization SK Gaming. Right from the start there was quite a lot of attention for the project and also for the people taking part. The reactions were consistently positive, says Dilana. However, many would have been more interested in us because of this and “because of the girls’ looks and less because of their playing skills (…). That was also an issue for us, because nobody expected that coaching in this direction would one day become important. We then did a two-hour call with everyone, discussing how to handle attention from so many guys. We also gave tips on what the players shouldn’t do.”
In the long term, however, there should also be mixed teams at the tournaments. That would also be Dilana’s goal. In gaming in particular, it is more possible than in almost any other sport to implement something like this, since the physical differences between the sexes are almost irrelevant. In her opinion, strategy, interaction within the team and communication among each other are much more important.
Gaming skills are universally applicable
Incidentally, these are all skills that can be important outside of video games, in work and private life. The skills she learned would have brought her a lot, especially in interpersonal relationships – but also on a very practical level. “I once had a conversation with a surgeon who used to gamble a lot. He then noticed that with laparoscopic interventions (…), where you can’t see what you’re doing directly, but only through a camera (…), he was able to deal with it much better right from the start than someone who hadn’t gambled .”
This is exactly what a 2013 experiment showed, which proved that surgeons could train and improve their hand-eye coordination by regularly playing with a Nintendo Wii. And there are actually various other studies that prove that other factors are also positively influenced by video games. For example, the general reaction time to external stimuli was significantly reduced in gamers. Reaction in this case means both reflexes and precision as well as the ability to make decisions quickly. Gamers also often have an advantage in terms of multitasking, cognitive stamina, and even creativity.
It was not until 2022 that researchers at the University of Tübingen were even able to prove that regular and frequent video games train the so-called number sense. This is about being able to quickly estimate the number of objects. The researchers therefore assume that it is easier for gamers to direct their attention in a targeted manner than for non-gamers. Dilana also shares her personal experience and ability to become aware of the team around her and her own role in it – something that is very useful in her day-to-day hospital life.
»Up to now I haven’t seen myself as a role model
However, she does not yet know exactly how things will continue for herself and the team. At the time of the interview in mid-January, it was not yet clear whether there should be a mixed team. Dilana’s big goal is to place at least one of her protégés in such a team. For herself, she is not considering another career as a player for both time and personal reasons, but as a coach. However, she had to turn down a good offer because of her studies.
She is aware that she herself is a role model for others with her career. Her team also reflects that. “My goal and also my drive to do eSports at all is to be a role model. However, so far I have felt less as a role model and much more like a colleague. It was only as a coach that I really realized that I could be a role model for others. We had a number of tryouts before SK Team Avarosa started and a lot of these girls said to me: ‘Hey, I only started this because of you.’ Or ‘I only applied here because I heard that you coach.”
Since the equal rights and representation of women in the technology sector is particularly important to us, we are dealing with the area of women in tech professions in a separate series. We want to educate, but also create new opportunities.