5 things I learned from being in a girl gaming team

One of the things I’ve checked off my bucket list is helping to found an eSports team. To be specific, I helped found an all-girls eSports team. It got off to a good start, but I quit early in the game because it wasn’t what I had originally expected it to be.

Surprisingly enough, it was not the nightmare many people think all-girl gaming teams turn out to be; on the contrary, it was a huge and valuable learning experience.

Here are some of the things I’ve learned from founding an all-girls gaming team.

1. Recruit the right kind of people

If you’re going for an eye-candy, short-skirts kind of group, then find girls who are comfortable with that. If you’re going for a full-on pro-gaming super-talented girl group, find girls who can do that. The team I helped set up (let’s just call it Team X from here on out) had the goal of becoming a professional all-girls eSports team that would be known for talents ranging from gaming, to organizing and hosting events.

We faced this problem early on in our first recruitment session, when we basically took in everyone who signed up. That included girls like A, who could barely play a game and was not interested in getting better, and B, who, when asked how she would contribute to a team, said she could “act cute”.

The better thing to have done then would obviously, have been to turn them down because one ended up leaving anyway, but it’s hard to make the decision because sometimes these girls can beall you have.

2. You need a good leader, not just a good player

The team captain we chose for X was and is a friend of mine. But she was not a leader; she was chosen for her prowess in her game of choice. She had no idea how to manage the team beyond simply being its figurehead, and contributed to a fatal blow to it when she quit because she felt the other girls had left her out of an event.

Girl-on-girl interaction is not the easiest thing in the world, and you need to be able to recognize your place, be confident enough to stay your ground, but not be so bossy that your female teammates are going to hate you. You can’t just be a good player; you also need to be a good player who knows how to get along with, and handle, your peers.

3. Looks matter