4Game

Dear Twitch Chat from the past 2 weeks:

All you guys do is spam about Moxxi, and then complain that you get banned for negative comments about her, compared to being able to say anything negative about Jenkins. I’ve seen the question posed basically as “Why can I say negative things toward male talent, but not toward female talent? That’s unfair.”

That’s actually because FAIRNESS and EQUALITY are fundamentally different realities. Let me explain with an example. Consider a team of workers: a manager, an analyst, and an intern. Who would get the most say on a project? Well, in terms of equality, all of their opinions should be heard equally. However, in this particular context, we lean toward fairness instead, where the person with the most experience (likely the manager) would get the most say with the person with the least experience getting the least say (the intern).

Now consider the world at large, is it equal? Of course not, there is economic and social injustice, concentrations of wealth, etc. But is it fair? Well, if you go back far enough we all have ancestors that were cavemen. Some gained an advantage, passed it on to their kids, and over thousands of generations over thousands of years this led to the world as is (more or less). No one would consider giving your children what you have as unfair, its pretty much how we all operate.

Fundamentally, fairness requires a “hands-off” approach while equality fundamentally requires additional inputs, or a “hands-on” approach. If a person has a medical condition, they need additional medical resources to be equally abled compared to someone without that condition (like a wheelchair to enable someone’s mobility).

Female talent in the Dota scene faces unequal levels of scrutiny compared to men in the scene – due to being new, possibly lower MMR, or whatever other biases are at play. Now some may claim that MMR is a fair metric, but it in no way promotes equality, because under that logic only former pros should be in the scene. However, one of my personal favorite personalities of all time (sorry to drag you into this) KOTLguy was never high rank. So, we clearly already do not operate on MMR alone (i.e. fairness alone). Banning spammers that disparage female talent may sacrifice some fairness, but it vastly promotes equality – which I think most people are okay with (given the fact that this is the direction we are trending). 

So please just recognize that fairness and equality are sperate realities, and that they are often in contention. But as a community, we strive for equality because life is already oppressively fair, and this game and community is meant to be a release from that, and the stresses of life overall.

In conclusion, if you are spamming in twitch chat lamenting for fairness, your kind of missing the bigger point.