Re: esport trying to be real sport
@Charles Manning: Defending your point slightly, given the downvotes, this is exactly what the IeSF said to justify the gender-specific competitions: it makes them seem like a more legitimate sporting federation.
It's an interesting point, but a terrible defence; they're essentially saying "well, the others discriminate (rightly or wrongly), so we should too", without looking at whether they need to.
The reality is, though, why do they have different games for different genders? That would be like men competing in 100m sprint, while women get hopscotch.
Arguably, they could run a year where women can compete separately on the same games to "prove" (in my hypothesis) that there's no innate reason that a combined games won't work - ignoring their hypothesis that women are more likely to compete if they know they'll compete against other women.
I'm guessing that their view is that once they have a few world female champions, it may encourage other women to try their luck...