Breaking the Glass Screen: Why Female Gamers are Fighting an Uphill Battle in osu! 

if I'm not wrong, ikanyai was a top player before (can't remember their peak rank though) I also remember finding a research paper about women and games and rhythm games were apparently extremely appealing to women, having a neutral playerbase (I think it was in reference to DDR and its craze back then). I tried looking for that paper again, I couldn't find it anymore :/ I have NO idea how that paper came up while I was researching on those bemani pockets but life does amazing things (I also found the konami lawsuit during the session). Anyway, I'd say from experience, if there's a female osu player out there, they're also a terminally online woman lmao

I think the best game to see the gender disparity is minecraft. If you play competitive pvp you're gonna see the same amount of womans as other comp game, but then if you go and play on smps it suddently becomes way more balanced. And then you have building communities almost entirely driven by womans. And same thing goes with your fanfic point, just see how big the dream smp and things like that is for teenage girls compared to guys.

"The list includes: xooty" made me laugh really hard it reminded me of the alternatoin video with "list of notable alternating top player includes Azer..."

Female Verto was not something we deserved, but something we needed.

This is the best video that I ever saw explaining gender differences in the gaming space! You get to the point perfectly. Not only gaming, but the whole internet space. Well done solider

I’m a girl who plays osu, honestly i’ve received nothing but love from this community. i do have a high playtime and i consider myself a part of the osu community, i’m only like 130k tho 😭

Maybe because I'm 25 but I honestly know a lot of girls that play osu The difference is a lot of them like you pointed out don't take the game seriously, and they actively avoid talking about it because they don't want that attention If I needed to summarize they enjoyed the game, not the community

I can actually somewhat validate Verto's claim about "competition conditioning". My parents didn't want me to be fussy over losing, so they didn't condition me to be as competitive. Unlike many of my other friends who play games, I'm always the more, chill kind. I hated online versus arenas, even if they were casual. My friends played CS:GO, Bedwars, Brawl Stars, Clash Royale and the like, but I never got into those games. Oh and Fortnite, I got roasted by someone my age then, so I got even more petrified of online multiplayer games, especially those with voice chat. I gravitated towards games such as osu! which can be more casual, and Cities Skylines (my most played game). Anything not too hard I enjoyed, anything chill and relaxing I liked. My female friends in particular do enjoy their fair share of fanfictions and other fiction whilst my male friends... vary, but usually are more interested in games. Thanks for the analysis Verto!

This is a great video! I'd like to add that not only is competition not encouraged for girls, it's actually discouraged. We get told over and over again since we're young that when against a guy, we will lose. Of course, that idea also seeps into guys as well, but reverse. To add to that, with the sexually charged jokes that are often passed around by guys, it's nothing more than just that, jokes. For girls, it is very very different. I think I was around the age of seven when my mom started teaching me what to do if i was SA'd. We get told to assume someone will try it and multiple ways to dodge such scenarios to the point we go out of our way to do so and always have our guard up against men in general because while we know it's not all men, we also know that it's a large enough percent that we need to be careful. Essentially, it takes at least four times the work for a guy to break down our walls due to us having to protect ourself. Now, these things may not seem connected, but they can be. Competition breeds shit talk, shit talk will end up referring to our defining trait being a woman, and that can easily lead to sexually charged jokes or even things that aren't meant for that but end up setting off our alarms. This can easily lead us to clam up. Not to mention, with the afore mentioned conditioning on both sides that girls will not win in competitions, no one, including ourselves, expects us to do well. That means we not only get discouraged easily, but our literal ability goes down as our confidence and belief does as well, which is a psychologically proven fact. Anyways, sorry about the long comment and amazing video!! You did so well explaining things!!

As someone who usually roleplays female characters in mmos and similar games, its not the guys being cringe in whispers that surprise me but the amount of girls trying to find a friend. We dont realize it but we arent that lonely as guys on the internet compared to girls, sure we dont get girls but its the same for them. Imagine if it was the opposite way and we didnt have the amount of bros. I think thats loneliness too.

Watching this made me realized how funny my life as a "female" on the internet has been. I grew up with a lot guys as friends and I almost never had a single girl friend so everything that I've been doing with the boys have always seemed normal to me. I have revealed my gender to only a selected few people (right now I am using an alt account) and there are times when they still treat me the same afterwards. But there are also times when guys treat me differently even the slightest after the reveal, which I don't feel quite comfortable with. From this I've kinda hidden my gender as being known as a "he" feels somewhat more appropriate than being known as a "she" which makes me feel confined or irrelevant. Nonetheless, the reactions they give when I reveal it is still funny to me and I enjoy doing it. Though yes, some of them are quite "extreme" with the reactions but I respect those who still sees me the same. Being a girl do be hard sometimes lol edit: ngl this video is so accurate it kinda scares me, good job verto :)

I'm pleasantly surprised that you could talk about this topic without presenting an unfair agenda. Most people that research and present this topic do it with extreme bias one way or another. So it's rare to see a more objective view of the situation without forcing some unhelpful message that only serves to divide more. Good job.

just don't say you're a girl and nobody will know, worked for me

I'm pretty sure candy crush has the most top players as women due to all the mom's being there

*Disclaimer: stereotypes getting demolished* On my school I have, except for one dude, only female friends. I am a dude and play osu. Don't be shy talking to them, most of them are really nice and just let you join in. It's perfectly normal to hang out together. That's how I make female friends, just start talking to them and say hello.

Funny though, because I'm a cis woman and I've been playing osu since 2011 edit: after listening to your points I can confidently say yes, you are completely right! I've been in online spaces where most of the fans are all female. And I do tend to stay away from competitive (shooters) games, exept Splatoon and Osu. Both of which are competitive games I've played casually for ages. I like playing games casually. It gives me a sense of escapism, AKA a world I can dissolve into while forgetting about the real world. I do like multiplayer games, but only when A the people don't know I'm a woman or B the environment is 99% woman and it's fine to just say you're a woman outright without being casually sexually harrassed in the DMs by some randos.

As a female, i can say that i came to osu because of the game itself, and i tried my best to git gud but that just never happened, so I'm in a standstill in that sense, but i still come to the game to play the fun varieties of maps. I think your points in this video make sense

I have a slightly different experience I guess. Despite being a girl, I grew up hyper competitive, with no real friends and a bad home life. I’m not sure which it part caused it, but lashing out due to my competitiveness makes me miserable and turns others away (especially because I got kind of violent and was really strong) so I’ve avoided having that stress entirely by not playing games with others entirely and also not being myself in front of anyone. I’m trying to enjoy playing games with others but I still avoid competitive games where possible to be safe. I do think that parents are more reluctant to buy daughters gaming consoles/a pc than sons and I’ve heard about enough misogyny in voice chats for games that I have a bad opinion of them so I personally wouldn’t use them, even if I wasn’t uninterested in competitive games.

The problem with the osu community is that it's almost entirely made up of teenage boys. They don't know how to talk to women yet, so often they are either excessively nice to the point where its creepy, or they are disrespectful and mysogynistic. Some people just completely change their personality once they find out they're talking with a girl

I wanna preface this by saying that everybody’s experience is different, but as a female who has been fairly active on osu discord servers as of late, the people who I interact with (which all know my gender) have been totally normal and not acting weird at all. talking on open mics on valorant or csgo is 400x worse then anything you can experience in the osu community.

this is a very well put together video, props to verto the conditioning hypothesis is also very interesting, and made me realize why i didnt gravitate towards the same games my peers did

Yeah, just to add my own experiences as anecdotal data: As a female on the internet who plays osu, this tracks. Extremely competitive gaming experiences aren't appealing to me, in part because of the "threatening" feel of their communities. In male-dominated competitive gaming communities, there's always so much perceived stress to prove oneself and banter with the pack, and this doesn't really vibe with "gentler souls," such as many females. So myself, I've always gravitated towards single-player games, mostly JRPGs, that I sunk basically my entire childhood into, and still play whenever I get the time now that I'm an adult. Osu is probably the only multiplayer game I play at all, and even this game was introduced to me by a male, my very first "boyfriend" (whom I met on my old stomping grounds, 4chan, at the ripe age of 15 and proceeded to have an 8 month long Kik relationship with). Like another female commenter said, I also generally don't reveal that I'm a female on the internet unless it directly comes up in conversation. Actually, in a couple of cases where I have revealed it, I was hit with a, "Nice try, [trans slur], you type like a man." Lovely, right? At the same time, however, since I've been on the internet for such a long time (thanks to parents who bought a family PC, of course, a topic Verto brings up), and since I've been naturally asocial my entire life, I don't really have any female friends or social hobbies; so the female realm of pastimes also feels alien to me, and I self-select to more masculine pastimes anyway, like outdoorsmanship, PC/keyboard building, gaming, etc. Thanks for the video, Verto! Really well made, it provides a lot of food for thought.

One thing I've noticed is that when it comes to the tourney scene (not open rank) I see quite a few women, actually. I'd say like bout a third of my teammates were girls, which is a much higher ratio than the girls one would get in random multis or whatever. There are also quite a few staff members of various kinds, but especially mappers. I don't know why, but it's interesting I guess.

You have made many points and for the most part in the video I was nodding when you were talking about the experiences we women go through. I prefer that people assume that I am a man on the internet because I have already had experiences that they wanted to get closer to me in a romantic way or just jokes as if they had a lot of confidence with me. I didn't like that, I felt uncomfortable. You telling your childhood story about being competitive reminds me of mine. I was a very competitive kid and really wanted to be in first place, especially playing with my cousins. If I lost, I would cry. My parents always told me "sometimes you win, sometimes you lose" to calm me down. Although sometimes my parents secretly told my cousins that they will let me win to feel better. They told me this during my teenage years, lol I don't know if being competitive would be a flaw or a virtue for me, but I used to play osu! competitively and now not anymore because I didn't enjoy it and it stressed me out. Besides, I had to focus on my studies. I still don't have the motivation to play osu! because I want to focus on other things. I really liked the video, keep it up! ✨

I started playing osu in 2019 thanks to my bf who introduced me. I got my first pc when i was 20 and have been playing pc games ever since. But prior I’ve been playing games on my school laptop which i can’t do much on obviously as well as consoles such as the DS or Wii. I’ve always wanted to play games when i was younger but you were right in the parts that us girls never got the environment to fully be encouraged by it. I also went to an all girl school and was bullied for being a weeb so i ditched that lifestyle to try and be more social and appear ‘cooler’. I’ve now at a better place and have been enjoying all my degen gaming nights with friends. Honestly, i have to thank my boyfriend for introducing me and helping me with pc gaming. Hes been a pc gamer and just a gamer in general since he was very young and through him I learnt and got to experience the fun i was missing out on. So far i havent experienced any weird osu players whenever i play and stream on the official osu discord page! (As it should be) i’m trying to aim to be 5 digit hopefully! Currently 130K eeh wish me luck

as a girl who plays osu, i agree with everything here and you said it much better than what i could say lol.

This is interesting, as a female (cis), I tend to lean towards shooter games (csgo, valorant etc) but recently I’ve just been starting to play osu and I’m really enjoying it! But it’s interesting, even as a rhythm game, it’s still very male dominated (in my experiences). :)

My least favorite classes in schools are ones where the teacher talk about things like violence, abuse, or mistreatment of women in society and how common it is for women to be emotionally and physicially abused by guys close to them. Now, it's not that I think those classes are a waste of time, in fact I think they are very important; there's just one problem with them: those who need to hear this don't care. Everytime we have one of those discussion, all the guys do is be misogynist, try to disprove women's experience with abuse, etc. Now why is this important? Because the truth is that the majority of male dominated spaces online are filled with those guys. Sure not all men are like that, but many are. And it's actually worse online, because you get even little negative feedback from the people around you, and those who do critize your behavior can be easily dismissed as "triggered snowflake SJWs" making it easier for you to treat their opinion as irrelevant. How are women supposed to feel safe in spaces like this? The answer is simple: the majority of them don't. That's why pretending to be guys or just keeping your gender ambigious is (un)suprisingly common among women. That's why it's harder for women to get into spaces which are mostly filled with men. Another reason is that it's hard to keep friendship between guys and girls, especially during their teenage and young adults years, when more guys are looking for girlfriends and start looking at girls from a more romantic and sexual viewpoint. This also leads into the safety reason mentioned above (this may not entirely relate to women being less common in gaming and internet spaces but I still feel the need to mention it), but a lot of women don't just friendzone guys to toy with their feelings or to be bitches but because a lot of them feel unsafe rejecting guys. Not only do they not want to ruin their friendships with those guys, but there have been real, actual cases of guys murdering women for rejecting them or their friends. Now, murder is quite the extreme example, but even you go to the less extreme, it's very common for girls to slutshame women and call women all kinds of names for simply rejecting them. Girls from as young as early elementary school years learn to be cautious of guys including their classmates and TEACHERS from a very young age. So how can girls, who often cannot even trust the guys who they spent hours every day with, trust guys they barely know online?

Couldn't expect less from verto. Thanks for talking about this topic!

As a girl and ex-osu! enjoyer, I can confirm my first (also last) interactions with other osu! players (that were not my friends already irl) were with guys who only tried to get romantically involved with me. They were also borderline pedophiles and/or perverts.

i’ve been playing osu for 3 years and only know a small handful of female players 2 of them being my girlfriend (who i got into osu) and her friend. and then other then that i’ve met 1 or 2 but it’s so rare.

Why do i feel like i know what the general discord channel of verto will look after this video. The points sound logical enough, yeah

This is a fantastic video. Well done!

another month another banger, verto for a second i was worried about april fools but then remembered about timezones

ok off-topic but this jump section is perfectly mapped holy shit 6:02

Yo obtuve mi primera laptop recién a los 16 años, y casi a los 17 recién conocí osu!, es como que uno siempre desea haber estado antes en cierto lugar, siento que si tenía una computadora a los 10 iba a poder vivir las mejores epocas de osu, ahora con 19, si bien es cierto que soy jóven, osu ya no es lo que era antes y uno no puede volver atrás en el tiempo.

Women arent able to compete because im in the way

As a trans woman I appreciate you mentioning us in the beginning of the video, our experience with the game is definitely different from cis women in most cases unless we transitioned super early (god I fucking wish) but acknowledging us was just a really nice gesture.

best video to come out of the osu community ever. if only more people watched and researched more deeply into this topic because this covers pretty good ground, and can be used as an example of gender bias on a wider societal scale. exclusion of women from osu and competitive games is only one aspect of a larger issue. amazing video.

0:33 NAAAAAAAAAAH Who said kitchen simulator, thats messed up 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

0:54 Very clever reference Verto-chan :3333

Women and verto r based ❤ altho the story is sad and a tale as old as time this video still offers fresh insight for any1 who's looking. TY

Probably uncovered in this video I only skimmed through: Women are neuromuscularly slower than men. Testing for this is reliable.

But every osu pfp and map is full of exclusively women, surely that means the players are women as well! Clueless

thanks for the replay! 💕

Very well made video about the topic!

4:30 neko funfo pfp: that's a really random pokemon trainer card (sightseer) quite a surprise seeing it

started playing osu in 2008 though haven’t played in 5 years or so and a good amount of my favourite mappers were female.

nice vid! pleasantly surprised that u didnt do the weird biological determinism stuff

1:19 THATS WHY HE IS THE GOAT, THE GOAT

Super well made video! I'll join all the other girls in the comments section saying that this felt very accurate

nice kaminomi reference, one of my favorite anime series.

i got a fuckin AD right after 3:25 Bruh what a timing

15:32 KAMINOMI MENTION, LET'S GOOOOO

Giga based verto

most competitive games are harsh towards everybody because the brutal and toxic attitute towards newbies which can be really frustrating

i’m a female mania player (ultra rare) that’s kind of good (15k rank)

Now i wonder what the male:female ratio of an osu! fanfiction community would be

8:00 this sound actually scared me wth

The thumbnail game was on point with this video

fun fact: i put a little rainbow flag emoji in my discord status and when im talking to a guy online i alway out myself as a lesbian as quickly as possible just to make guys treat me like an equal human and not as a potential (sex-)partner. im lucky that i got into osu through a very queer speedrunning discord and i dont think i would have continued to play osu if i had had more contact to the "average" osu community when i started.

You sound almost exactly like Spazza

There are actually more girl osu! players than boys at my school, but all of them are casual players and don't play for that *fat pp* whereas boys like having *big pp*

Boils down to competition; males have in previous times in history and prehistory had to compete for a partner. We see this with other species as well. Males had to be competive to pass their genes on, so now we have a bunch of chronic male osu players!

20:47 this hit close to home ouch

This is somewhat unrelated to the video itself, but the funny thing is that I learned about osu from a cis woman who plays osu

Off topic besides this great and well explained video, where can I find the skin in 9:35 ty in advance and great video love u

very based video

wtf osu! player knows what grill is

My sister got me into osu but I stayed for longer :)

As a guy myself and i did try sim a girls try to played and i got bored so quick unless a hacked it for fun XD

3:31 scooty 👍

I'm foreign to OSU, I didn't knew there were sociology in it.

I'm a literal girl that plays osu! and I am not even popular or something so idk how community would react to me x3, well I'm like 75k or smth I don't remember well..

köszönjük ezt a nagyon jó videó t

Now that sold me your discord server, ill try the $pervert command.

In the first place a lot women don't play so there aren't a lot of women competing so theres that. A lot would rather focus on real life problems than compete in games and stay in their rooms 24/7. Also I noticed some players in other games who I thought were men turned out to be women, but just like u said, they wanted to avoid the weirdos and play normally like the rest.

shoutouts ikaNyai teh top 100 player from few years ago

i found an osu player the same age as me

for similar reasons it can feel isolating playing osu (and games in general) as a trans guy sometimes, tbh. good video

The game with a lot of women as top players is probably women’s basketball

Because testosterone is scientifically linked to competitiveness. Women don't have lots of testosterone. That's it. Literally nothing is holding them down.

Competetive Blade and Soul was heavily populated by female players when the game was aiive

"If osu! is male-dominated due to the competitive aspect, as opposed to creativity, which women generally prefer, shouldn't there be a relatively higher proportion of female mappers/modders?" There generally should, but as discussed at/around 18:06, osu! has a lot of anime/VN songs and lewd BGs/sources, and mapping these is seen as actively making the community unfriendly to non-otakus. Modding these is seen as complicity in the former. I'd consider myself a relatively moderate otaku by community standards, and I have tomatas95 in my kudosu history and LLSIF in my uploaded maps. Very few women would want to bring their friends into mapping due to these elements of the community risking their friendships.

7:58 - I apologize

Just a hunch but I think the lack of female players have to do with that more males have pcs than females, so many women don't even get the opportunity to try osu out lol

first skin?

hahahah yo this is actually true good cooking

not sure why but it seems like there are more women playing the minigames than std. i've met sooo many women while playing catch and mania, especially catch.

xootinator that wat i was thinking of this vid

This is clearly a very non-osu!-specific topic. However, I can't say I relate to any of it. I was never made to participate in any form of competitive activity, whereas all the girls at school engaged in several different sports. And yet, even as everyone had a computer capable of playing any popular online game, only the boys ever did, while the girls would play more social-focused games, like those on Facebook, if at all. There's also nothing more embarrassing than having any of my male associates see the cringeworthy games I play, or god forbid the Discord servers I'm in.

You can stop watching at 3:24 Because surprisingly enough that reason is quite significant for almost every other game with a competitive scene like League or CS. There are All Female esports team in those games competitive scene, yet they aren't long lived. Why? Because there're so few Female players to begin with, there's not many that have the potential to be a top player. You'll notice even more because the Higher in the rankings you go you'll find even lesser female players. And this is where the Paradox hits. Since less Female Players have reached the peak of the ranking or their potential, yet they still get hired by an Esport Org to compete. They end up losing to an All Male team. That ended up giving a bad Rep for Female top players, which makes the already existing Female Playerbase not wanting to reach the Top. This is what happened in League of Legends when the best female players they gathered were a couple ranks below the All Male teams.

Dayz has quite a few higher skilled women players id say, not sure why but my guess its cause its a calmer game even tho it would look at a first glance to be some random ass shooter.

i think mania has a lot less male populated community- i say male populated because most people i know who play it are either non binary or girls

SCOOTY LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL

Being a female 6 digit. I can agree

I had interactions with women in osu is where i was in a multi lobby with just me and her. Thinking the lobby is dead since i clicked ready a long while ago, I asked where at the time i thought was a dude (because of course why would i think anything else) if "he" was jerking off to hu tao R34s because of the pfp and she immediately said "God, NO! i dont have a dick" then explained she was doing something so obviously i did my apologies and stuff then in a few moments she asked what pronouns do i use? then retracted it after that its a regular lobby. Another one is an osu server i joined where one person there is just literally being a thirsty mf because there's a finnish girl in the server. since the server is mostly made out of males obviously she doesnt interact to it unless you do. another one is my friends GF but since its your homies GF... let us just say we were like in front of our mothers; wholesome, behaved and tempered

woah verto i didnt know you were based like that

Xooty god

scooty