Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

The far-away 5Love team, and what they brought.

Video games, as well as e-sports derived from some competitive games, are generally regarded as male-dominated industries. Because of this, those female contestants or teams who have achieved excellent results in e-sports 's competition are undoubtedly subverting the traditional stereotype, which has often become the focus of our attention.

This sounds like something that has only happened internationally in recent years, but in China, female players have been active in e-sports for longer. For example, as early as the beginning of the 21st century when the e-sports industry just started, China had the first women's e-sports team-the 5Love team.

In 2002, in a "counter-Terrorism Elite" (CS) competition held in Beijing, 5Love made its debut as the only women's team, standing out among hundreds of teams and reaching the top 32. Since then, 5Love has participated in a number of events, including the World e-Sports Competition (WCG).

Although the earliest photo of the 5Love team was taken only a year later, 5Love announced that it would stop its activities, but the "ghost" of 5Love remained. The girls who once participated in the team continue to form new women's teams and are active in major CS competitions, even winning world championships. Until "counter-Terrorism Elite: global offensive" (CS:GO) replaced CS, we can still find these female players in the competition, and occasionally see the name 5Love reappear on the field.

It is inevitable that there are deficiencies and faults in Internet data. In order to learn more about the development and heritage of the 5Love team, we interviewed the two founders of the team: Vc and Vm.

Vc (top) and Vm (bottom) Vc and Vm are twin sisters. Sister Vc is in Beijing, while sister Vm now lives in Guangzhou and is now regarded as Internet practitioners. They will use "stubborn" or "strong" and other words to describe each other, more than 20 years of touching and rolling, so that Vc and Vm have the capital to call themselves "experienced people". They not only shared their memories of the name 5Love, but also gave some insights into the status of women in e-sports.

The bloodshed caused by a post in November 2000, version 1.0 of CS was officially released. It will be three years before the classic version of CS1.6, which is regarded by countless players, but in these three years, CS has become popular in the streets of China, and it has also affected the hometown of Vc and Vm in Guangxi.

Compared with now, the means of entertainment at the beginning of the 21st century are quite scarce, the Internet and personal computers are not so popular, the Internet is not convenient to surf the Internet, and there are no smartphones. Players are used to sitting around the small rooms of Internet cafes and playing online with the rest of the audience through the local area network.

At that time, games and Internet cafes had not yet shut out minors, of course, they still had to touch and play, and once they were discovered by their families, they had to be "spanked." According to Vm, the "CRT" monitors in Internet cafes reflect images that are popular online games, such as Thor Hammer, StarCraft and Red Alert.

Thor Hammer, an Internet bar in the early 21st century, is a very manipulative shooting game, while StarCraft and Red Alert are more manipulative real-time strategy games. These games have a history of at least a year or two, and the group of players has been stereotyped, leaving behind all the great gods, so it is difficult for newcomers to enter the pit.

At least compared with these games, CS, which comes from behind, is easy to operate. CS is not popular for long, most players are novice, the game is easy, no one will lose. Coupled with the fact that CS is suitable for teaming up and playing together, Vc and Vm can give full play to the advantages of sisterly cooperation. When they were young, their family bought them a "red and white machine", and they also played old games such as "Contra", "Super Mary" and "Adventure Island". They thought they had certain game talents.

But CS is not the only thing that attracts Vc and Vm. In addition to their status as students, they are also shooting players in the city. They have practiced pistol shooting. When they see CS, a game that uses "live ammunition" to fight, it is like dozing off and touching a pillow.

They asked the "brothers and uncles" who played CS: "what kind of game is this? how to play it?" These "brothers and uncles" also give answers patiently to satisfy their curiosity. Slowly, the two sisters integrated into the CS player circle, got in touch with the Internet, and established communication with other players on the BBS forum.

Based on the popularity of CS and the popularity of broadband networks, the Internet war in China began to rise. CS does not have a ranking system such as ladder, but in several mainstream domestic servers, those players who are recognized as high-level players can always stand out from the crowd and attract the attention of other players. At the same time, the CS team, which is still in its infancy, will also set up a number of CS servers on its own to expand its influence and recruit potential seed players.

CS1.6 's list of servers one day, there was a post on BBS about whether games are suitable for girls, an issue that would have sparked a heated debate even two decades ago. Faced with the question that some male players "girls should not come to play games", Vc, Vm and other girls involved in the debate collectively proposed a dating war to the boys and rented an Internet server to fight.

The date was more or less youthful, but the result was to be expected: the boys' team was defeated miserably.

This result gives Vc and Vm a lot of confidence. In the battle, they found that they may not be able to beat the top-level male players, but in the face of most people, they are absolutely capable of fighting. They worked with several female players who met online and from all over the country to set up a relatively loose organization and began to play some online games. It wasn't long before they had the ambition of the offline challenge.

At this time, they inevitably have to face, first of all, the level of parents.

Parents, like most adults at that time, could not understand the question of "how to play video games and a career". They are not for or against it, but only give them advice, such as "you are at your best age, in the golden age of life, you are not advised to take such an adventure", "go to school first, read a good book" and so on.

However, Vc and Vm are so independent that they may be trusted by their families. As their parents were very busy at work, they supported each other from childhood to childhood, developed a certain ability to take care of themselves, and learned to cook at the age of seven. The two sisters often travel far away when they practice shooting and take part in competitions, and they also know how to take care of themselves outside.

In addition, this group of female players who met and got together because of CS all have a "stubborn" personality similar to the VcVm sisters, eager to prove themselves through an offline game. This, in turn, strengthened the sisters' faith.

"you find your place in a field, you think you can shine, when you have such strength and ability, you will have this impulse and do not want to miss such an opportunity. This game is in front of you, you want to play, you want to see what your strength is."

In the end, Vc and Vm succeeded in persuading their parents to agree to give it a try.

5Love and their "Ghost" were in 2002, and the domestic e-sports environment is still in its infancy. A group of sponsors have organized offline events at the national level, and official or unofficial game media have also ushered in the spring.

E-sports team is springing up like bamboo shoots after a spring rain, and they are the embryonic form of today's major professional electronic warfare teams and clubs. Although both Vc and Vm admit that most teams are "neither formal nor professional", they are at best semi-professional and cannot be compared with modern clubs.

The sponsors of the team are mainly Internet cafes, and Internet bar owners attract ordinary players to play in Internet cafes by sponsoring the team. The owners of Internet cafes are generally not responsible for the operation of the team, and the players in the team often have to play multiple roles, and at the same time serve as the leader, manager, coach and other roles in the modern team, which is "quite hard." Hard work is hard work. At that time, only by looking for sponsors to set up such a half-bucket water team, can we have a chance to get a stable salary and provide targeted training for the competition.

"League of Legends" contestants Yagao and Knight9 are from an Internet cafe team in Pingxiang, Jiangxi Province. In 5Love, a Beijing girl is in charge of the team's "personnel" and "public relations". She contacted an Internet cafe in Beijing in advance and received necessary support such as food, accommodation, monthly salary and training venues.

When Vc and Vm arrived in Beijing, they found that the Internet cafe they contacted was actually very small, and the training room arranged was even smaller. "with five machines and five people, there was basically no room." Their dormitory is three kilometers away from the Internet cafe. It is a small room located on the third floor of the ground floor. It is less than 10 square meters. Four of the six girls in the team are from other places. They all live here.

Fortunately, e-sports in Beijing has superior location conditions (better than Shanghai in the early years), can organize compliance events and activities, e-sports has a strong atmosphere, and the infrastructure and network are relatively developed, and there is a lot of information from the outside world.

The most basic requirements such as hardware and network are complete. Vc and Vm can easily compete with the top players in some of the top servers in China to test their strength, or download videos of strong teams directly, so as to find out their strengths and weaknesses. The girl in charge of "public relations" can also invite a group of players who have played in the World Series through the Internet to learn from them advanced international experience and tactics.

It wasn't long before the 5Love team began to take part in scattered folk competitions. The competition is mostly undertaken by Internet bar owners or enterprises. in order to appear more formal and enhance popularity, well-known domestic teams will be invited to participate in the competition. Even telecom, Netcom and other network operators in various provinces are also keen to hold competitions and promote their own broadband networks.

The scale of events sponsored by big companies is particularly large. For example, the Melinda Cup, sponsored by Pepsi, is only held in Beijing, but it also brings together more than 200 teams from all over the country. More formal than the Melinda Cup is the Samsung-sponsored WCG 2002. WCG held qualifying competitions in various provinces and cities, played the national finals in Beijing, and finally selected the top two to participate in the world competition. Then there is CPL (professional e-sports league). For CS teams in those years, CPL's competitive position is comparable to that of today's ESL and Major leagues.

When 5Love took part in the WCG 2003 photo contest, the winner's prize was about 20,000 to 30,000 yuan. WCG's bonus was higher, in fact, it was not even enough for the whole team to share, not to mention the possibility of not winning the championship. In today's words, a large number of teams, including 5Love, are "using love to generate electricity". Of course, no matter how small the mosquito legs are meat, like some amateur teams with strong utilitarian intentions, in order to ensure that they get the bonus, they split and arrange themselves into various "teams" to participate in the competition. As the saying goes, "eggs cannot be put in one basket."

In 2002, only a few mini-competitions were specially prepared for women's group competitions. In the large-scale male and female mixed match, 5Love has never won the championship, and the best result is the top 8. This is because at that time, eight male teams in the country were particularly strong, and they could only rank ninth in the country, but "because the men's team would lose to us if they did not play well," and sometimes ranked eighth.

But they didn't get the chance to continue the game because the "golden age" was over. The arson case of Lanji Speed Internet cafes in 2002 contributed to the management and rectification of Internet cafes across the country. Tens of thousands of Internet cafes were closed and 5Love lost a stable training ground.

Several girls' desire to prove their strength by playing games has been met, and they also understand that a pure career is obviously not something to eat. In addition, each member has his own things to do, such as Vc and Vm have to go home to continue their studies. So in 2003, 5Love announced that it was dissolved.

The SARS epidemic may also have had a certain impact on the e-sports industry, which sprang up at the beginning of 2003, saying that it was disbanded, but the loose groups they formed still exist. Over the past year, several members who share weal and woe have always been in touch, and they have even attracted more female CS players. They gang up with CS online as usual, and occasionally coordinate training for some domestic and international offline competitions.

The only difference is that when entering the competition, former 5Love members will no longer play with the team name of 5Love, but will form or join different teams in order to ensure food, accommodation and stable wages. They may become teammates or even opponents in the game, which sounds a bit like the trick used by some teams to throw eggs into different baskets. But they have their own insistence: the participating team must be a women's team made up of only girls.

A few years after the "dissolution" of 5Love, it was a golden period for the development of e-sports, China's CS. There are more CS women's teams not only at home, but also all over the world. The size of the team is still not comparable to that of men's teams and men's competitions, but the quantity and quality of the major CS events are enough to organize women's events.

China's women's team has achieved ideal results in the World Championships, and there are some 5Love members in these teams. The CPL World Tour was held in Spain in May 2005, when only 17-year-old 5Love member Valen (Zou Xuan) led the women's team Swan [5] out of his own pocket to compete abroad, winning the first world championship in the history of China's CS.

The group photo of Swan [5] after winning the championship, the third on the left is VaLeN, which seems to be a short-lived 5Love, but in fact, as the pioneer and founder of the women's e-sports industry, it has left the spark of inheritance, affecting the CS e-sports project in China like a ghost.

"reflect the value of the women's team." if we hadn't done this, we might still be in our hometown, doing things we might not like very much. at least we started a new experience from the direction of the game, and I think it's a good choice. "

Vc and Vm's career plans have also changed with their life experiences. When the "big ass" in the Internet bar was replaced by an LCD screen, the two sisters also got a degree in journalism, found a suitable job in games and e-sports circles, worked as a commentator, worked as a host, and worked as a professional anchor after the rise of the live broadcast industry.

In 2014, CS:GO national service was officially launched, while the domestic CS e-sports project fell into a slump. However, with the domestic e-sports industry as a whole on the right track, Vc and Vm sprouted the desire to participate in it, freeing up some energy during the work to continue the cause of 5Love.

It took them two months to get used to CS:GO. CS:GO not only has an exquisite and gorgeous picture, but also equates to a big version update in gameplay. There is little difference in operation, but there are differences in maps and parameters that need to be re-familiar. Play and tactics that are in line with international standards should also be learned from scratch.

Since 2016, the name 5Love has appeared again and again on the CS:GO field. In addition to the first few founders, there are many girls who have joined the ranks of Vc and Vm. Although these newcomers are new to CS:GO, they are in the "golden age" and have a more advanced understanding of the game than their predecessors.

Since the restructured 5Love participated in the PGL 2016 photo epidemic, Vc and Vm have almost stopped working in front of the stage, but stood behind the scenes to support newcomers, turning participants into witnesses. In fact, they have little time to care about the operation of the team, seldom play games, and have little contact with the women's team or female players who have recently achieved results.

Vm spoke bluntly about the fact that they were out of date: "if there are fans who can brush it (in the studio), aren't you a team?" (I think) he may already be an uncle, and so am I. our time is over. "

But the "uncles" still hold certain expectations for the industry: they hope that women's e-sports will be further recognized, and they hope to see more female athletes join the industry and get better and better rankings.

So far, e-sports is still a male-dominated industry. In the fixed public concept, "girls seem to be just playing with them, in a position of icing on the cake." In their view, it is "ignoring the pursuit and desire of girls for the competition", which can not fully reflect the value of the women's team.

The women's competitions in the major e-sports events are still not as professional and formal as men's competitions, and most of them are amateur competitions such as invitational competitions or exhibition competitions, which are more entertaining than competitive, and cannot get as much attention as men's competitions.

This puts the women's team in an awkward position. Due to the lack of professional competition experience, lack of competition results, unable to attract investors to inject capital, the establishment of a women's team has become a loss-making thing. No one invests, which further magnifies the gap in the training system for female athletes, making the "vegetable constant dish".

Capital distorts the woman e-sports 's appearance rather than strength through a pan-entertainment strategy, which quietly becomes the standard to measure the strength of the women's team, and the word "Beauty team" has become a commonly used publicity stunt.

The advertisement of an e-sports variety show that female contestants have a certain advantage in the commercial promotional activities on the outer edge, but this does not bring them an average income and fame higher than that of male contestants.

Ranking of the total income of female contestants so far

In the ranking of contestants' income in the past year, the top ten are all male Esports Earnings websites. This phenomenon has something to do with the impetuous industry presented by e-sports. From outside to the industry, regardless of the gender of the project, people pay more attention to the fame and high income of the top e-sports players, rather than their results. "in order to earn more money, but do not get the corresponding results, or income and performance are not equal, I think it will become like Chinese football."

Twenty years ago, the situation was very different. At that time, e-sports 's industry did not have much money and bonuses were not high, few families would support professional players to play games every day, and the monthly salary of teams from Internet cafes or enterprises was only a few hundred yuan.

Even from the perspective at that time, we would feel that the e-sports industry had no prospect, and there were still tens of thousands of people who devoted themselves to their youth for the cause they loved and their blood. In 2002, the girls in 5Love just wanted to get a reasonable result, to go abroad with this sense of honor, to prove that girls were "fit to play games".

Vc and Vm believe that women's e-sports has the same development potential as Chinese women's football, because women's events are purer, more competitive and sportsmanship than men's events. The lack of financial resources and the low degree of commercialization of the women's team make them pay more attention to the results of the competition.

As self-proclaimed "people of experience", they feel that they are comfortable with the problem. E-sports 's practitioners during the so-called "golden age" were actually very embarrassed. In the end, neither Vc nor Vm put "e-sports" in the first place and obediently completed their studies.

"if I were 20 years younger, I would definitely be a professional." In the face of the stable and standardized e-sports industry, they are happy for the industry as witnesses, and are optimistic about the improvement of the women's competition system, but they also have their own small regrets.

But just like what the 5Love team brought to this past, e-sports is not destined to go far for them. So when asked if their original goal of joining the business had been achieved, they blurted out "mm-hmm" and added:

"there are so many things that girls can achieve, this is just one of them."

This article is from the official account of Wechat: game Research Society (ID:yysaag), author: Zhaoyue

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