On Tuesday, a sub-reddit dedicated to the video game Hearthstone exploded with discussion. A Finnish e-sports tournament had just been announced, and the Helsinki event, scheduled for July 31, would include a competition based on the Blizzard-produced card-battle game, complete with a grand prize of €1,000 and free travel to the tournament's world finals in November.
While Hearthstone is a relatively young game, and less intense than other popular video games in the e-sports world, its inclusion in a big tournament was indicative of both its popularity and the quickly growing nature of e-sports in general. However, that's not why it was the topic of reddit users' conversation. Rather, user Karuta posted the tourney's rules and highlighted a strange stipulation: only men need apply.
As people dug in to the tournament's details, they found that the whole affair was divided into male- and female-only categories, and worse, women were invited to fewer competitions. Starcraft 2 will be played by both men and women in separate tournaments, while Dota 2 and Hearthstone tourneys were announced as male-only. (A curious separation came in fighting games, where men will face off in Ultra Street Fighter IV, and women will fight in Tekken Tag Tournament 2.) These stipulations were all due to rules attached to the eventual, final competition, hosted by South Korea's International e-Sports Federation (IeSF).
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