Week 13 of classes connected to the themes I want to present in my final research paper. Firstly, there were a lot of interesting themes within the Examination of the Relationship Between Gender, Performance, and Enjoyment of a First Person Shooter Game. Firstly, I want to talk about the gender differences within video game selection due to the game design and content.  “Preference research suggests that woman value media content that features considerable amounts of meaningful dialogue and character interaction rather than the action-oriented structure that is often featured in most popular video games” (Hopp, 342). This makes me think about the esports universe. Since esports revolves around the games that the most people play, does this limit esports in a sense. FPS shooters dominate the esport scene as well as MMORPG’s; FPS focusing on the action-oriented structure, whereas role playing games use that action-oriented structure but with an emphasis on teamwork and other aspects of the game. Within Hopp’s article, it presented a research study surrounding the game counter strike. Not going into too much detail because I want to save it for my paper, but Hopp then went on to include how inexperienced men who never played counterstrike before would still perform better than inexperienced women at the game. This interests me because it makes me question if the esports scene will soon have a growing female audience. If none of the games interest females due to the action-oriented structure of the content which then correlates to personal performance, will we see a new genre of esports come into fruition that is dominated by the female genre? Like how the NBA and the WNBA exist but with esports. Don’t get me wrong, I know that a vast amount of female gamers have already busted through the action-oriented esports scene, but my question is will there ever be a new esports genre that is based around new themes that relate to aspects that female gamers enjoy?

Based off Hopp’s article, the new genre would have to consist of games that utilize dialogue and character interaction; but how will those themes be designed to meet the competitiveness of esports. Would it even be possible to create genre like that and will it work? I believe that as time goes on, more female gamers will continue to break through onto to the scene, and eventually join and form teams. But then the question is what will be the future of esports. Will there be a separate women’s and men’s league or just one big league for each game. In my opinion for gaming, being a specific gender does not give advantage to an individual, and simply relies on the person playing the game; so I think one big league consisting of both female, male, and mixed teams for any gender, would be pretty cool. I believe that this can make esports even bigger than it already is, but do enough girls really want to play games professionally. Time will tell.