Representation for women in the competitive Minecraft speedrunning scene can often be scarce. Now a new tournament, Girloffs, seeks to change that. This weekend, twenty-four of the fastest female speedrunners will be going head-to-head in this exciting competition.
Girloffs was created to fill a previously unoccupied niche in the community. “I was watching midoffs, Tubbo’s tournament, and I thought there were a lot of girls in it compared to most MCSR tournaments these days,” Girloffs organiser Mollyyxy tells us. “I was looking back at previous tournaments that had a lot of girls in them. The main one I could think of is a tournament from 2021 that was called Hot Stuff, which was a girls only tournament at the time. There’s never been anything like it in the four years since, so I thought it would be great to have something like that again.”
“It’s weird to think about how I’ve been the only girl participant in Ranked Playoffs and the No Reset Invitational and such,” Oxidiot tells us. She is a competitor in Girloffs, having also played in seven Ranked Playoffs tournaments and competed in several other categories. “I’ve really only had good experiences with organisers and fellow competitors. Most negative experiences are just from weird chatters.”
“I think a lot of women get pushed out of or leave competitive gaming spaces in general because of misogyny,” Oxidiot says. “I also know a lot of girls who focus more on the non-ranked circuits of MCSR like All Advancements, where there aren’t nearly as many tourneys.” At a high level of competition, All Advancements tournaments often have a higher proportion of women playing in them than their Any% counterparts.
While tournaments like Ranked Playoffs showcase only the most talented and decorated speedrunners, they also end up having a roster of nearly exclusively men, only rarely featuring women. This is because most people running at the very highest level are men – and it’s important to question why this imbalance exists and what can be done to lessen it.
Like most other esports communities, MCSR is a very male dominated space. Girloffs competitor Dawn357x spoke to us about her experiences being a female tournament player. “Obviously the majority of other participants have been guys. There have been times where a friend of mine, CookieAddicts, and I were the only girls in the tournaments we were doing.”
There are more male runners in the community than any other gender demographic combined. The MCSR community census, organised by Ortho, surveyed hundreds of people and found that women only make up 14.61% of runners, so it follows that the gender demographics at the top level would be somewhat proportionate.
The MCSR community census also looked at the RSG (Random Seed Glitchless) personal bests of more than 600 runners, and found that the top 20% of women achieved very similar times to the top 20% of men. While far more of the fastest PBs (personal bests) are held by men, so were the majority of the slowest PBs, likely due to the sample size being larger for men than for women. This indicates that the difference could be attributed to there being more male runners than female runners, rather than distribution of skill between genders.
“A year ago, I think I would’ve definitely underestimated how many people in the top 150 are women,” Dawn says. “I would’ve guessed maybe three. There’s more than three.” It’s easy to understand where this assumption comes from – when looking at Ranked leaderboards it can be difficult or even impossible to tell how many people at the top level are women – but Girloffs is a chance to highlight more of those runners. “This tournament will bring an eye to that and show people that there’s women in the top 150 who are genuinely so good at the game.”
“A lot of female runners are more unknown,” Molly tells us. “Even if they have a PB or Elo equivalent to a bigger streamer who would get invited to more events, they don’t have the social media presence to match them.” She explains that part of the problem could be that growth is harder as a woman, due to people giving less attention to female streamers.
This is the reason that Girloffs is so important to the community. Not only will it showcase the skills of these incredible women in the MCSR community and uplift smaller content creators, but hopefully it will also inspire women who aren’t playing in the event. “There are definitely people who applied and didn’t get in, and they’ll be more motivated to try harder next time,” Dawn says, “so next season it’ll just make everything a little bit more competitive, which is awesome.”
The tournament will have a similar structure to Ranked Playoffs, with the first weekend of matchups consisting of best-of-three matches to accommodate more runners. “I wanted to have more players, just so that you can see more of the girls in the community.” Molly says, “so it’ll be best-of-three for the first weekend, and then after that there will be eight players left for the second weekend, where we’ll do best-of-fives.” Additionally, the top eight seeded players will not play until the second day of the tournament, so that every runner’s first match is as balanced as possible.
Players for the tournament were sourced through both invitation and application, and the runners with the fastest RSG personal bests were chosen. “I got 82 signups, so I went through and I chose players who were both fast and a good fit,” Molly explains. “I already had a lot of fast players, so I wanted to make it as equal in skill as possible.”
Despite some disparities in Ranked Elo, players are all similar in terms of skill. “I think it’s easy to look at me and say that I’ll win this tourney because I have the most experience in these formats,” says Oxidiot, “but there are definitely some other runners that I’m sure can win it all.” There are several other runners in Girloffs who are currently in the top 50 of the Ranked Leaderboards, so competition is sure to be fierce.
Over the course of the two weekends the tournament spans, Girloffs will be raising money for charity. The charity is called Mermaids, and it’s a UK-based group dedicated to supporting trans people, with a focus on children and families.
For those interested in catching these exciting games, the event will be streamed on Mollyyxy’s Twitch at 3pm BST / 10am EDT on the 20th and 21st of September, as well as the following weekend on the 27th and 28th.
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