Amy Brady, a professional gamer better known as Valkyrie of Ubisoft Entertainment's team Frag Dolls, planned as of the first week of June to play competitively at the World Series of Video Games event in Louisville, Kentucky. As of the second week of June she planned to compete and protest: as part of WSVG festivities would be the selection of a Miss World Series of Video Games. Brady's first recorded reaction was an expletive. That was "all I have to say," she wrote, "what the heck is this crap?" Brady went further, however, castigating the event's organizers after confirming that Miss World Series of Video Games was model search, and declaiming to young women who would be present in Louisville the moral imperative to boycott. Once in Kentucky, Brady took part in a parody, Mister World Series of Video Games, and as the next WSVG event — one to be held in Dallas — approached, it was rumored that models booked for flights to Texas might have to settle for becoming Miss Something Else.
The weakness of Brady's argument was the unfathomable cause for indignation. Brady cited three offenses the WSVG organizers committed by hosting a beauty contest, on premises, the winner of which would receive a title derived from that of the gaming event itself: first, a thematic departure from gaming; second, a damaging association with women in professional and semi-professional gaming; and third, the high valuation of physical beauty. One week after Louisville, it's still unclear what got Brady so animated as to foment a boycott of the pageant. The first two purported crimes proved non-applicable, while the third remains one in which Brady and her fellows are partially complicit, if only to demonstrate that it isn’t much of a crime after all.
Brady wrote that in Louisville "all the other 'festival' activities" were "gaming related." Presumably her difference stemmed mostly from the event's elevation of "the hottest chick." The WSVG Dallas agenda heralds such "extra-gaming" activities as a tug-of-war, a paper-airplane contest, poker and something called Duct Tape Wars. Not yet forthcoming from Brady has been a warning that an unassuming public will mistakenly and indelibly believe the competitive gaming circuit to be riddled with musclemen, delinquents, gambling addicts and adhesive fetishists.
If Miss WSVG had supplanted the gaming competition one might move to call the "world series" a farce. It didn't. As Brady noted, the pageant was indeed marketed to regular women, those involved in an industry older and eminently more respected than gaming — modeling — and if headlines are any indication, Miss WSVG was crowned in Louisville without having been recognized as heir apparent of electronic entertainment. Brady appealed to WSVG organizers to arrange "a real contest for girl gamers based on all things: a complete package that includes gaming skill and knowledge." There was such a contest, titled Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter: Double Elimination.
There were no entrance restrictions for the double-elimination event but that entrants a) register a two-man team and b) come up with fifteen dollars each. Girls could enter, right off the street and, ugly or not, win the Ghost Recon tournament. Now it so happens that three of the teams were pairs of girls, two of them from Brady's Ubisoft-sponsored Frag Dolls team. The Frag Dolls, for anyone who cares to look closely, are as faithful to the concept of the pitchman as Lucille Ball when she was hawking Philip Morris between skits of home-life burlesque with Desi Arnaz: talent sells. Members are contracted by Ubisoft to be equal parts gamer, editorialist and good looker; which is to say none of them is awkward or thoughtless or unattractive.
One of them acknowledged, when asked, that cause for her hire rested partly on her prior triumph in a contest whose superlative was "sexiest," from scoring that weighed beauty over gaming ability. The contest was "superficial," she remarked, but hardly a reflection of her authenticity since her vocation and avocation alike are gaming. Would she have come as far as she did without the contest? No reason why not, though she wouldn't have gained much had she refused to enter. In addition to a Frag Dolls contract she works in the video gaming industry — despite having once sashayed up and down a catwalk to win one of those contests that are, as Brady put it, "based on looks but appear to be based on gaming."
Girls are not boys. They giggle and groom, and like to be pretty. Occasionally, they try, in public, to be prettier than the next. Brady celebrated this immutable law of biology and culture in her first paragraph. She should have stopped there.