Gaming While Female: We Ask Haiimbelle How to Run Your Own eSports Team

It’s not uncommon to encounter bosses while gaming, but Annabelle Harper gives the term a whole new meaning.

Just a few months ago, Annabelle founded Kings Gaming Club (Kings GC), a professional gaming organisation with teams who compete in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CSGO).

But it's not all fun and games. "It is 100 per cent a business," she tells Student Edge.

Annabelle admits she got into managing because she was never any good at competitive eSports. "I was streaming every day for three years, even on Christmas and my birthday, so I looked into eSports," she explains. However, she later realised it wasn't for her.

She got into streaming after an ex-partner thought she was funny and recommended that she try it out. "I thought it was something naughty, so I was like 'Nooo, thank you,'" she jokes.

"He introduced me to Twitch and I began streaming Star Wars: The Old Republic way back in the day."

She started out small, streaming three times a week, but eventually it grew into eight hours a day, every day, with CSGO.

"I started as a streamer for a different [gaming] organisation called Athletico and they introduced me to eSports and introduced me to that world," Annabelle explains.

"I looked at myself and thought I can do more than just streaming, I can do management and I can make my own organisation."

Though she's beginning to stream again with Overwatch for her 18,000 followers, right now, she's more focused on her pet project: being the founder of Kings GC and navigating the business administration side of the gaming industry. She manages her teams' training time, arranges spaces and equipment for them, enters them in competitions and wins them sponsorship deals.

She was given a deadline of two weeks by some of her players, which meant getting things up-and-running in record time.

"I was like 'Oh god'," she laughs. "I called up a lawyer to make contracts, and I was like, 'I need to get liability [insurance]'; we needed to get a logo, a name, we needed to get it trademarked."

"I was working 18 hours a day [to get it all sorted] and hardly sleeping," Annabelle admits.

It paid off. She landed an investor for the team, which has meant they've been given an office in the city of Sydney, which is where she works from during the week. "It was really hard for me not to wear Game of Thrones leggings in [to work]," she laughs. "I had to get real business attire."

The boys' team has already risen in world ranks to the top 100; an impressive feat for such a fresh team in a world where thousands of teams compete for top rankings.

Kings GC also has a female team, which is faring just as well. They've been competing in female as well as mixed competitions.

Some competitors have taken to forums like Reddit to complain about women's leagues, declaring them unfair by saying there's no 'male-only' league. (eSports mixed competitions have a minuscule amount of female competitors.) It reeks of the fallacy of reverse sexism. These arguments also don't take into account the fact that prize money available for women's competitions is usually a tiny percentage of what the major mixed (and predominately male) competitions receive. 

Annabelle agrees that female competitions need to exist until eSports reaches a point where females can compete with the males on a more equal playing field.

"Some of the [female] teams honestly can't compete on the same level as the guys," she admits. "The industry just doesn't put enough attention into them."

She explains that women's leagues give females a chance to hone their skills in an otherwise heavily male-dominated environment. 

"Look at ESL One [a major eSports competition]; there's not one girl in there," she says. "That's because that girl hasn't had the chance to practise that hard, to have the coaching, to have the analysts, to have all that support behind her."

Annabelle has a message to anyone who thinks females can't game to the same standard as their male counterparts: "Don't underestimate girls in eSports, because they just might become the number one undefeated female team really quickly."

As if she hasn't proven that already.

Want to read more about Australian women taking on the gaming world?

Gaming While Female: Meet the Ladies Making a Name For Themselves in Australian eSports

Gaming While Female: We Spoke to Jsmai About Competing in Australia's First Female-Only Gaming League

Gaming While Female: We Talk to Anomally_xx About How She Made Streaming a Second Job

Photo: Twitch (haiimbelle)