Speedrun Event General - AGDQ Up! - Exceptional people play games really fast

[Cyber Bowling]

For an event that promotes inclusivity, there's a severe lack of women. (troon women are not women)

Despite being the biggest speedrunning event, GDQ has always been lacking in female runners. It isn't that they don't exist because other events have them. Actual women, at that, not any troons.

I can't really think of a reason why that is. In the past, I heard all of one person mention they didn't feel safe going to a GDQ, but even if there were other runners who felt that way, the last couple of events have all been digital. I don't think it's GDQ denying them because they love diversity and host their own smaller version of GDQ exclusively for women and "women".

Might be a scheduling thing? I don't think it's a stretch to say a lot of the big speedrunners are guys, and they'd presumably get the primetime slots. Could be they're getting accepted but give a "thanks but no thanks" when they're assigned a 3 am timeslot in the middle of the week. I wish it was something more malicious because that'd be infinitely more interesting, but it's probably something fairly benign.

 

[whatever I feel like]

Despite being the biggest speedrunning event, GDQ has always been lacking in female runners. It isn't that they don't exist because other events have them. Actual women, at that, not any troons.

I can't really think of a reason why that is. In the past, I heard all of one person mention they didn't feel safe going to a GDQ, but even if there were other runners who felt that way, the last couple of events have all been digital. I don't think it's GDQ denying them because they love diversity and host their own smaller version of GDQ exclusively for women and "women".

Might be a scheduling thing? I don't think it's a stretch to say a lot of the big speedrunners are guys, and they'd presumably get the primetime slots. Could be they're getting accepted but give a "thanks but no thanks" when they're assigned a 3 am timeslot in the middle of the week. I wish it was something more malicious because that'd be infinitely more interesting, but it's probably something fairly benign.

Contrary to what most of this thread thinks, GDQ does try to get high ranking runners for whichever categories are being ran. That tends to mean males.

 

[You're The Man Now Dog]

Contrary to what most of this thread thinks, GDQ does try to get high ranking runners for whichever categories are being ran. That tends to mean males.

I don't think it's a stretch to say that 90% of speedrunners are men to begin with, so even if GDQ had perfect gender parity with the speedrunning community almost every runner would be a man regardless.

90% is actually probably low. In order to be a speedrunner you have to have a specific kind of autism that you don't see in girls too much. The very concept of speedrunning is very male brained. I have no doubt there are female runners, but they almost certainly lack the robotic precision and patience required to actually be good at it. I would never be able to summon up the patience to even try.

 

[Vodyanik]

Contrary to what most of this thread thinks, GDQ does try to get high ranking runners for whichever categories are being ran. That tends to mean males.

I think it mainly comes down to women being more reasonable about how much time they invest into a game. I've seen good runs by female runners, but few, if any, women ever become "speedrunning legends". You know, the kind of people who get heavily featured in those summoningsalt videos, who are complete degenerates who robotically smash themselves against the same challenge for hundreds if not thousands of hours live on stream, day in day out, just to maybe take a very temporary world record from some other guy. I've actually never seen a woman do that, and it's probably to their credit. You can become a reasonably good runner in a reasonable amount of time, but those last 5% require a whole new level of autism.

 

[Mike Stoklasa]

Speedrunning is built on the pure merit of the individual. I can't explain why there aren't many (any) real women at the top of the speedrunning game. But I can say that unlike pro gaming teams, you can't force a woman into the role as a gimmick or boobies and roll the dice when it comes to her actual ability. You can't manufacture a high-level speedrunner because they would be exposed immediately. The best you've got are sneedrunners that take hormone blockers and ruin womens' fashion.

 

[Cyber Bowling]

A lot of the female speedrunners I can think of also run lengthier RPG style games, which are harder to fit into a marathon. Usually, you only get a few of them slotted into the late hours, and it's typically done by the same group of people. Might also be why they're more common at ESA/other marathons were they're a little more open with their schedules/games. I can't remember her name, but there's a Dark Souls runner who usually runs at ESA (think she even opened one year) and I think she did one of the distanced GDQ. That also isn't meant as a slight at their abilities as much as it is my memory, I think I could maybe name one or two speedrunners off the top of my head.

 

[whatever I feel like]

GDQ has had a female in person Souls runner before too. I think that was the girl you were talking about. True on JRPGs as well, where they won't get as much credit since most of those are "community" runs where they switch off after changing disks (less weird than you might think, most of them learn the game by disk anyway for PS1 game and it is a natural "pass the controller" moment.)

 

[AnotherPleb]

To be fair to female speedrunners, when GDQ was live would any woman want to be around that many speds?

Also, I can't be the only one here thinking that GDQ lost the last bit of spark it had when they went all distanced. If I wanted to watch speds streaming I'd just look for the vods.

 

[Vapewizard]

To be fair to female speedrunners, when GDQ was live would any woman want to be around that many speds?

I think it's funny whenever I see twitter SJWs complain about gaming spaces making women uncomfortable cause they think it's the mean nazi chuds saying slurs and not the grownass men larping as anime girls.

 

[Dumpster dived waifu]

To be fair to female speedrunners, when GDQ was live would any woman want to be around that many speds?

At least one did since she cheated on her boyfriend with another spedrunner that was attending.

 

[Sinner's Sandwich]

I can't explain why there aren't many (any) real women at the top of the speedrunning game.

Because even autistic women have something better to do.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

To be fair to female speedrunners, when GDQ was live would any woman want to be around that many speds?

Dick-cheese for clout. Not the actual speedrunners though but the hanger-ons getting frisky with someone that has any kind of name in the community. Can you honestly say there's not 10 or 20 Zoe Quinn's in that community waiting for their big break?

 

[FarCentrist]

To summarize, I think the reasons we don't see women in speed running is because:

1) women and men have different interests. They're not interested in speedrunning

2) even if women were interested in speedrunning, they're not as autistic and obsessive as men about it so in a competition based purely on merit, men will dominate the top times anyway. Like men dominate chess.

3) even if women had the best times in a game, they're not women, they're troons

4) women are not sexually attracted to male speed runners so they can't even do it for social reasons. The rare biological male speedrunner that has a healthy weight and not hopeless social skills (eg Caleb Hart) are blacklisted from attending. If we see more Chads at agdq, then that will attract women like flies on honey.

One question I have though is why not give up the meritocracy? Just give 50% of the speedrunning positions to women, even if they're not in the top 3 fastest times. 4th place is good enough for the sake of diversity. The left hates meritocracy so they would be on board with male speedrunner erasure.

 

[Cyber Bowling]

One question I have though is why not give up the meritocracy? Just give 50% of the speedrunning positions to women, even if they're not in the top 3 fastest times. 4th place is good enough for the sake of diversity. The left hates meritocracy so they would be on board with male speedrunner erasure.

That's the interesting (and I use that term loosely) thing about it. It's weird that smaller events are able to generate more female runners and GDQ, which is definitely known for being woke, can't. Doubly weird when you consider they also run an event specifically for female runners. I think the scheduling/popularity theory holds the most water. I personally want to believe it's because they're all skeeved out by GDQ staff/attendees, but that seems more like wishful thinking and doesn't hold up with all the distanced events.

Also, I can't be the only one here thinking that GDQ lost the last bit of spark it had when they went all distanced. If I wanted to watch speds streaming I'd just look for the vods.

Live GDQ definitely started to feel lifeless, but it at least made for solid background watching. The distanced events struggle to even pass those standards. To give the faintest of credit to GDQ, other distanced events suffer from the same issue, so it isn't just a problem for them specifically. I might be mistaken, but I think ESA is supposed to be live this year. Not sure if that was for their upcoming event or the summer one. I've only like two or three GDQ runs this year. They were...fine, pretty forgettable overall. I've heard they've had more races this year which were supposed to be decent, but I haven't caught any of them.

 

[whatever I feel like]

Live GDQ definitely started to feel lifeless, but it at least made for solid background watching. The distanced events struggle to even pass those standards.

It got awful at the end. Woke, smug, corporate shill assholes on the mic but with enough production standards that the true cringe was gone. The auditorium either 90 percent empty, chanting the same non-nonsensical phrase regardless of context or both. And the games being run, themselves, started to get repetitive. These guys might have the stamina to play Wind Waker 100s of times but I can't stand to watch it more than twice.

 

[Massively Strong Greed]

 

[Punitive Castration]

I could be crazy but I think thus far I may have seen more women than overt transwomen? For once?

I saw Lizstar had a block, and there was a troon on Eternal Darkness, but right now Skybilz is on YuGiOh, there was Rosecurel last night, Cyprian (self identifies as a nonbinary but who gives a shit) on Sonic, a woman got a WR on Kuon, RebeccaRE during Tormented Souls... I dunno, it seems like barring the fact I've skipped watching some on purpose the troons have faded into 1:1.

If I had to guess why I think the reason seems pretty obvious- you all were talking about "trying to get that final 5%" and how women aren't prone to take it that far- they may have just lowered the requirements. Most people who run on GDQ aren't the best. They're ranked and presentable. It makes for a better show to have less gibbering drooling beasts on camera so this is a sensible compromise for the show.

 

[Cyber Bowling]

I could be crazy but I think thus far I may have seen more women than overt transwomen? For once?

I saw Lizstar had a block, and there was a troon on Eternal Darkness, but right now Skybilz is on YuGiOh, there was Rosecurel last night, Cyprian (self identifies as a nonbinary but who gives a shit) on Sonic, a woman got a WR on Kuon, RebeccaRE during Tormented Souls... I dunno, it seems like barring the fact I've skipped watching some on purpose the troons have faded into 1:1.

If I had to guess why I think the reason seems pretty obvious- you all were talking about "trying to get that final 5%" and how women aren't prone to take it that far- they may have just lowered the requirements. Most people who run on GDQ aren't the best. They're ranked and presentable. It makes for a better show to have less gibbering drooling beasts on camera so this is a sensible compromise for the show.

I think the number of troon runners at GDQ was one of those things that always got joked about to the point it became taken as fact. The actual number of troon runners has always been about as low as the actual percentage of troons you'd run into in the wild. That's one of the reasons why the pronoun tags was seen as useless, because 99% of them are exactly what you'd expect.

One reason I think it felt way more prevalent was Proto being a host/staff member/whatever his official title was. Troon runs were also usually noteworthy for how bad the runs were, with many suspecting the runner only got accepted for diversity reasons. I also think troon attendees were treated as runners, especially since they were usually the ones complaining about discrimination and other nonsense by hotel staff/anyone in the state. There's also the "trans rights" donators and that one runner who infamously brought up his troon partner out of nowhere.

But yeah, I'd place most of the blame on Proto because he really was so annoying/vocal that he basically counted as 20 people, and a lot of the troons that followed him were also pretty loud on social media. I admit I've barely seen/listened to any of this GDQ, but I can only recall 3 troons, and only 1 of them was running, the other was a commenter, and I think there was another on someone's couch.

*Edit* Oh yeah, and the fact that there are normally so few women also made the troons seem more prominent

 

[Punitive Castration]

I think the number of troon runners at GDQ was one of those things that always got joked about to the point it became taken as fact. The actual number of troon runners has always been about as low as the actual percentage of troons you'd run into in the wild. That's one of the reasons why the pronoun tags was seen as useless, because 99% of them are exactly what you'd expect.

One reason I think it felt way more prevalent was Proto being a host/staff member/whatever his official title was. Troon runs were also usually noteworthy for how bad the runs were, with many suspecting the runner only got accepted for diversity reasons. I also think troon attendees were treated as runners, especially since they were usually the ones complaining about discrimination and other nonsense by hotel staff/anyone in the state. There's also the "trans rights" donators and that one runner who infamously brought up his troon partner out of nowhere.

But yeah, I'd place most of the blame on Proto because he really was so annoying/vocal that he basically counted as 20 people, and a lot of the troons that followed him were also pretty loud on social media. I admit I've barely seen/listened to any of this GDQ, but I can only recall 3 troons, and only 1 of them was running, the other was a commenter, and I think there was another on someone's couch.

*Edit* Oh yeah, and the fact that there are normally so few women also made the troons seem more prominent

That's the thing, the number of troon runner is never going to rival the number of non troon runners, I am just hyper aware of the times that women are outnumbered by men who claim to be women. It used to be very one sided, all troons with women only having a presence on the donation mic, but this year has really seen way more women running for once.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

One question I have though is why not give up the meritocracy? Just give 50% of the speedrunning positions to women, even if they're not in the top 3 fastest times. 4th place is good enough for the sake of diversity. The left hates meritocracy so they would be on board with male speedrunner erasure.

I would take an entertaining diversity quota woman that is 70% as good at the game over any of the personality blackholes they usually schedule.

I may have seen more women...

...right now Skybilz is on YuGiOh

Homely women with the AGP smirk can't have it easy these days. Everyone assumes they're stunning and brave.