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

"Testosterone is not going to help you click your mouse any faster," Jasmine jokes.

Jasmine Nguyen, also known by her gaming handle jsmai, has been competing in female-only gaming competitions for a few years now, and while she doesn’t believe males and females should be separated in the online gaming world, she recognises the importance of communities that help prop up female gamers.

"If you look at the ratio of female gamers to male gamers, it's quite low," she explains. "It's important to have those [female] competitions so we can encourage other girls to come out and try and create a safe space for them to want to play competitively."

Jasmine got into competitive gaming after years of playing titles like Halo and Left 4 Dead with her family. She later made friends online who convinced her to try out more serious competitions designed to push her skills.

"I'm quite a competitive person but I’m also quite shy as well so I never would have found myself in the competitive scene if it weren’t for the people I've met who encouraged me," she admits.

And since discovering the first-person online shooter Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CSGO) four years ago, she’s been hooked.

Jasmine is one of two captains for DarkSided’s women’s team. They’ve entered quite a few competitions and are making a name for themselves as one of Australia’s best female teams after scoring second in the first season of Australia’s first female-only CSGO league, WPGI .

Still, it’s not as simple as just playing her favourite game on a whim, for the allure of the prize pool. (The first season's was $9,000.)

While she works full-time, her training schedule takes up three-to-four evenings a week and starts when she gets home and lasts until just before midnight.

"It's pretty much just sitting down, learning how to play with each other, critiquing our play and just continually trying to improve, and learn, and get better," Jasmine explains.

And it's exhausting. Jasmine admits it’s pretty intense and that not making it to one of these training sessions feels like you’re letting the entire team down.

Training for eSports works much like training for a physical sport. They have an in-game leader who goes through drills and breaks down each map in the game to explain all the areas from which you can ambush and snipe.

"The more you play it out, the more you practise it, the more fluid it gets," Jasmine explains. "It's usually one entire night dedicated to learning just one particular execution."

After a brief stint in mixed teams a few years ago, Jasmine's noticed that the female competitions are a lot more fierce.

Photo: ViewSonic.Darksided

"I feel like the female scene is a lot more competitive," she says. "A lot of it is based on proving that they are good at the game, not just to other females, but to everyone else."

Jasmine thinks this might be because women in gaming are an easy target to criticise in terms of skills and play style. The same goes in other sports where males dominate the field in terms of visibility and sponsorship deals and overall participation, with women having to fight more aggressively for respect.

But the tide is changing, according to Jasmine. With newer games like Overwatch showing one of the highest percentages of female participation for a first-person shooter, it's looking like the boys club is becoming more of an inclusive club.

"If anything, I think girls are praised more for getting into competitive gaming than being abused for it," Jasmine says.

But while she is the captain of one of Australia's best women's gaming teams right now, she still only plans to keep online gaming as a hobby.

"I feel like it's really important that you have fun with playing games, otherwise it gets really stressful and it just, kind of, turns into a sour apple," she says.

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