Taylor’s book on Esports finally being an important part of competitions and not just a joke to people, like it used to be, is so refreshing. I’m sure that some people still don’t think of esports as a real thing but T.L Taylor is trying to change that and I think that they did a great job with their introductory book into competitive gaming. Raising the Stakes talks about the beginning of competitive gaming, competitive gamers and the community, why people play games competitively and much more. What I found most interesting though was the section on the people whom play and spectate the game as well as her brief look into females who play games competitively.

Taylor noted that among top competitive players there is trust between each other to not cheat, although there are plenty of referees watching the tournaments, and that there isn’t as awful behavior. Instead it is the lower end of competitive players and the spectators of the bigger tournaments that tend to trash talk each other and act poorly. I am really interested in why this is since I am a very bad melee player and experience this poor behavior from other people online.

Female players are pretty rare and many male gamers don’t treat the few female players with much respect, unfortunately. This is alienating other females from joining the competitive scenes and making the male gamers look worse. I am not sure why the male gamers are saying horrible things or why many assume, as Taylor noted, that they just think that a female player could never get as good as a male player. There isn’t any data that anyone had to support that claim and yet Taylor, and many other people, have heard this claim about female players before. Regardless Taylor’s book was a pleasant read about a community that I am a part of and hope to see said community grow in the future and become a more welcoming place.