Smash Sisters: Fostering Camaraderie from the Ground Up

[Music] hey guys hey y'all hey thank you so much for coming out to here at the Harris Hawk I'm Emily this is lil and we're here to talk today about smash sisters so series events that we do for the game that we love Super Smash Brothers so well I guess else what is smash sisters yes the Dyan so smash sisters is a series of side events that we run a different tournament featuring the smash brothers franchise games and these events are designed to bring both new and veteran women together and also important to feedback into the overall competitive community so our organization is progressive and we are constantly down to change our format and adapt to the changing needs of the women within our community we have now been up and running for just over a year not up here saying we're the pinnacle of success but we've learned a lot in that year and here we're going to kind of delve into our knowledge so first a little bit more about how we

started about a year and a half ago you know some people were talking on Twitter surprisingly they were shit-talking on Twitter and and why a prominent smash share Reno was like hmm what about East Coast girls versus West Coast girls it was like whoa hmm first of all I'm from New York so obviously East Coast had it and we started talking a little bit about you know let's do a crew battle and we did this at a Genesis 3 which is one of the biggest grassroots smash tournaments of all time about a year ago and in this Facebook event page for Genesis I posted hey any any East Coast any girls interested in an East Coast versus West Coast crew battle and you know it didn't it didn't seem to take off quite at first there wasn't a ton of interest and at that time you know I talked to low like I reached out and she seemed a little she seemed a little trepidatious about it yeah when Emily first pitched the idea to me I immediately just shot it down and was like pretty apprehensive about joining

surprisingly and it was very ironic of me and I'll explain why actually just a few weeks before Emily had pitched this idea to everybody else she I had written a blog post I was titled stop asking about all-female tournaments and I'll give you the TLDR which is pretty much can we please stop bickering and hypothesizing about the success or failure of these and just do it and then see what the outcome is and go from there and so in that moment when Emily reached out to me I was like oh man I'd be such a hypocrite if I were to say no so yeah let's just do this and so Emily came in with the strength of her event organization background I came in as social media and branding and together the ventures blew up like tons of women started reaching out to our surprise to engage and participate and we've still been running since so for today's talk we're going to talk you all through a little bit about through our adventure from the past year which includes branding laying preparation laying the groundwork and then part of our

community and how complex the the women's community is and then finally walk you through some of the iterations and feedback that we've had to go through you know it's a lot to cover but yeah just worth noting we're going to speed through all these topics but we will be around after to answer any questions you may have so hang tight cool so the first part of it is branding blowing prep and groundwork and our first piece of advice I suppose is that you should be a part of your community first this means that well first of all you know I started competing back in 2007 both law and I have been in the smash community for over a decade you know I started running events in Dallas like 5 or 6 years ago and now I run tournaments in New York and I'm one of the heads of nebulous eSports there and one of my focuses has always been to you know lower the barrier of entry for newcomers this is all about community growth so one thing is pioneering the

amateur bracket that allows you know players that have additional competitive matches or giving a free venue fee or free entry fee for first-time newcomers and this allows you know these little things go a long way in terms of retaining members and bringing them in in the first place so smash sisters was kind of like a natural extension of you know bringing people into our group well rip oh no all right don't know what's going on here but I have a little slightly different history from Emily I started competing back in 2006 back then I took competing a lot more seriously than I do now I also traveled nationally several times throughout the course of the year and unlike Emily I actually distanced myself from the smash brothers community for a while because I fell there are a lot of obscure behaviors that I noticed were directed towards me may or may not have been due to my gender who knows and so I actually came

back like a year later after the resent has faded to kind of move towards activism and raising awareness around these topics which really lent itself to you smash sisters believe it or not and that segues perfectly into the next section which is learn the history of your target demographic specific to your scene all the things that we understand in all decisions we made were based around our knowledge having been in the community in the first place so I will lead with the most annoying question a female Smasher could ever be asked which is who's the best female Smasher and to give you some history there the Super Smash Brothers Brawl community actually dealt with a lot of this I believe they actually tried to run singles bracket format events and what this did was it pitted a lot of the women against each other so that being friends was a little odd they're constantly being compared to each other and there's a lot of weird underlying tensions and so we haven't been there to hear about this knew that we needed to avoid this at all costs when we were

running smash sisters so we're going to go through a lot of our core philosophies and formats and why we chose what we did yeah so here are the core philosophy that we're about to go through we'll go from one by one the first part of it is the crew battle this is our event format now in a normal tournament you have you know one versus one singles bracket in a smash sisters event you have the crew battle series this allows you to create a team where you pull your stocks or your lives together and you work together you have four or five people how many other strategizing you know talking about like who should go in and really working together and building that camaraderie and teamwork in order to beat your opponent and then our our next pillar here is oh geez hmm okay - can you sure imagine there's like a really pretty picture there and so the next piece of it is that we're also always a sight of

it inside a main tournament so these aren't standalone events by any means you can go to your main stash for this tournament and often find smash sisters there which means that the majority of our women enter the singles bracket anyway and then you know have fun in art and we smash sister side event and it also provides a fully integrated structure meaning that you have men and women coming out and participating and so far as like cheering on people you know providing commentary or helping with the stream so it is our you know it's one of our goals that this side event feeds back into the competitive co-ed scene you guys can get our slides in the presenter packs at leas yeah it's cool so another core pillar that we abide by is we do not have prizes because we're not interested in having a separate prize pool where people win based on rank one rank to rank three our whole points through the promote collaboration and teamwork so if the image were there it would have been a social media graphic that showed you a

temple storm methyl that we recently did to give away to participants now super cute leggings series which I don't have a storm but uh we provided incentive that way without the pressure of ranking women arbitrarily in these events and we deliberately do things in a raffle format for this very purpose a next color that we go by is participant safety first so um this is an interesting topic because you're probably wondering what is she talking about it's about video games what do you mean safety so an interesting point in an example to illustrate this is when smash sisters was first up and running people reached out asking hey do you want this to be stream let's get the word out and if you're a regular tournament I would make sense like let's get revenue let's get viewers let's spread the word for us it's about do we want to introduce the toxic online chat rooms to our participants it's about their comfort first and so we hold them and see what they saw another example is

that when we run these events we actually have private Facebook event groups where people can improve the join and then talk there so that there's no trolling or anything whatsoever involved which we also have seen before the next tenant that we want to go over is about inclusive e and you know for one of the smashes events I asked one of my friends hey you know why don't you come out and play you're really good and you'd really add to the East Coast team and she was like hey I wasn't really sure about this I'm a trans woman like can I participate I was like flabbergasted by this question yes you absolutely can participate so anyone who identifies as a sister can totally come out to our crew battles it's a very inclusive of it and then finally is up cool hey our focus is on gameplay which means as as a side event our goal is not to solve harassment issues we're not a social justice group either and you know just because we we talk a lot about women

doesn't mean we're we're there to I guess like protect them in a way I don't know if that's like a weird way to say it okay you know smash is a competitive community and we're always here to to remember that you know we're not here to to baby our players we throw them right into a competitive environment where they have to really work for their team and and we're all out here to win it's also worth clarifying that it's not that we don't want to help harrassment or like help these issues it's just that they happen to be a byproduct of smash sisters as a whole and it's not our initial prerogative to do this so this brings us to our next point prepare your community mentally so what do we mean by this back then before it started I think I mentioned earlier that there were I'd ran a blog posts about hey stop asking about women's tournaments just do it and see how it goes and additionally that year itself had there have been a lot of circulation around the topic of women

within gaming specific to Super Smash Brothers community now another girl reached out to me once asking hey I'm really interested in smash sisters and I want to do this for my scene I believe she was from the street fighter community and she asked how can I do it and I mean I told her alphabet like it really depends on the landscape of your community you can't kind of take what we found to be successful and apply it there really understand your community first and understand how they'll probably react to something like this and then thankfully for us it was okay because we kind of laid down the mental groundwork if that makes sense and part of laying down the mental groundwork is understanding your community and understanding that the event or the people that you see IRL are super different than like the entirety of the internet so you know when we host events our participants are people around around hey that was so great it's super fine that was ultra positive and then we see what people write online and it was not the same you know people hear these little tidbits or pieces or they

get misinformed about what smash sisters is and they might you know they might start talking a little bit critically so when this happens you know we try to kind of convey our message a little bit more positively so when we host a recap of our post a recap of events which we often do on reddit we'll say like oh you know we had this many players come out here a couple pictures it was super fun we also include an FAQ in the FAQ it'll often say well what is smash sisters why why do we why do we even do it what can you get out of it in this way we can control the message a lot better and so we're always trying to respond constructively by saying this is exactly what we're trying to say old enough ask that we're going to jump into is branding yourself carefully so if you look at this photo below this grid of women are various avatars of people who have participated or supported the first messages event a year ago Genesis 3 if you look they all distinct color wash

they all the same Super Smash Brothers logo in the bottom corner and this is completely a deliberate decision on our end as a social media campaign again there's a lot of controversy when there's a lot of all women's events going on and we knew this going into it so we wanted again teamwork and this time we did it was something as simple as giving everyone a very similar-looking aesthetic in their avatars which kind of took over Twitter and Facebook at the time and kind of helped us in a way generate even more hype something else that we again try to remind people and this large block of text is our wine themed mission statement but the key point to focus on is the bolded part that says this is a progressive organization and format that is excited to adapt this comes and stems from the blog post I mentioned we constantly remind people that hey while we are both the founders we don't have our completely figure it out like we're not saying we're completely successful it's an experiment and we're working iteratively and this has bought us a lot of leeway to make mistakes try new things so people aren't immediately like oh well that was a failure the next point is be

careful about media outlets you work with and curate recently I believe a really reputable female gamer was interviewed by a really reputable larger platform and they effectively took her story and painted her as purely the victim which she was extremely not happy with and we see this happen from time to time and so for smash sisters we've taken the time to actually ask people who reach out hey what are you trying to accomplish here what's your goal and what do what story are you trying to tell we've actually turned down people who have like reached out asking if we can purely talk about harassment and being victims because it's not something we're interested in anymore and then furthermore we always ask if we can review what they've written before they publish it online cool so that pretty much wraps up the the branding and the foundation piece and now we're going to talk about the landscape of the female demographic you know one of our mission statement kind of talks about you know addressing the needs of women like what exactly are those needs and who exactly

are these women because I mean I think we all know this not all women are the same not all women are us not all women want the same thing so it's crazy when we talk about a women's organization where you have to deal with the the preconceived notions that come with that you have to deal with all the baggage that comes with dealing with you know modern-day feminist issues which there are a lot of unfortunately and of course we're not saying that you know feminism is bad or anything by it that means but there's a lot of baggage that comes with it we have to deal with the other groups that deal with women you know there are women's weaves out there or brackets and we have to answer to them we have to be we're responsible for the both the positive and negative parts of that when you know it's not necessarily fair but it's something that we are a part of sometimes people see smash sisters as the de facto women's organization or women's leadership within the smash community and we don't

necessarily like that because we're a series of side events but when you talk about women that's kind of what you automatically become so here are a couple of examples of some I think there YouTube and reddit comments about a recent video that was posted by Yahoo eSports with an interview and you know at the very top it says as long as they don't do stuff with the toxic aspects of feminism I'm mostly for this like alright thanks dude more like hey I was somewhat skeptical when I first heard about smash with se yes I was somewhat skeptical about smash sisters but you know what they're doing is great for the community full support or I think this was my favorite I didn't like the idea of smash smash sisters because I guess I got all my information from someone who didn't like it glad I came to read this it's just like a lot of these comments like what the heck you know Lo and I wondered at first like why are all these people like so crazy about you know these ideas and because

it's it's because of what it represents it there's a larger picture here yeah at the same time we do understand this is what comes with the territory and we're fully ready to address it so this brings us to the next topic learn to embrace true diversity as you scale and so usually when you hear the word diversity especially in like context of affirmative action you're kind of thinking marginalized groups helping them out etc when I say this statement I actually mean the next level deeper so different types of women is what I'm referring to when I say diversity if you take a look at the co-ed smash brothers competitive community at large oh man I'm going to hate each other and they like rip each other apart mine and they don't agree and that's diversity in a nutshell correct so an issue we face with smash sisters is because we were small initially and we're still pretty small we banded together kind of as a unit and with a lot of like-minded women and so as we started to scale up we started to seeing you women participate who didn't necessarily see eye to eye with our original participants and this is something we want to fix we want to make

room for them we don't want to feel like they need to align to every single other girl who is already in smash sisters and I'm not saying we have solved the issue yet but it is something worth noting because it is something we're going to inevitably continue to face and then like one of the part of why diversity is great is the more diverse your community is the more innovative you can be this is what allows us to continually evolve and make things better when we get new ideas from different people the next point is we promote camaraderie but we are not a cult so because I know it sounds funny but because of all the attractions smash sisters has gotten a lot of people have missed mistook us as like the governing body for women and smash like any it we have to come almost a noun or a group rather than a series of side events this is yet again another branding issue that needs to be addressed and needs to be fixed and need to be reiterated amongst everyone else cool so so our final final pillar here

is to listen to and filter feedback we are always getting feedback from you know our demographic we want to make sure that they know that they're being heard too and you know we've changed our events based on a lot of their feedback Lo and I also conduct a post-mortem after every single event to say hey you know what did we do right what did we do wrong what do we need to change and what can you know how is the next event going to be better one example of the feedback that we've we've heard is in how we determine these these crew battle rosters these teams and you know we can have a draft pick you know you just figure out who exactly you want to be on your team or you can do it by region and you know first we identify draft pick we said to in order to balance what the teams would be like but we we also heard that you know a little bit of sensitivity there a lot of girls felt like they didn't make the cut or something like that whereas if you have a region based crew you have a lot of pride you have something that you can fight for you know there's a couple of pictures of people waving flags for

Arizona or the East Coast saying like this is our region and we're super proud of it and like they can really fight for their team oh hi Lea funny he loaded so the next part is a part of listening to feedback and addressing is accepting help and I think this is the perfect time to shout out one of our sponsors any key which is initiative that's partnered with both Intel and ESL that focuses on inclusivity with an eSports how perfect and also you'll see in the photo no you won't but there was a photo there that was a bunch of girls on us with smash sisters shirts on and because like we've learned that through running smash sisters this is an opportunity to actually empower and help others and let others kind of get involved and you'll see in these photos we have people come and do the local recording we also have we invite people to come do commentary and some of them have never done it before also a ton of smash women have emailed us being like hey I'm really interested in running my own event

they've never used an organized event before and we've seen some of them now consistently doing this and then on the international level too I think there's like a smash sisters Francis group it's been in Sweden and Norway even across like the US and it's really great too because when you empower and enable others they also feel emotionally invested in your products I guess you can call it and then they're there with you as teamwork working together yeah so so finally in conclusion you know one of one of the biggest parts of this is to to get to know your community once you know your community you like you as an individual can understand how you can impact them we do this through the power of events when you have a single event it creates like a single rallying point that people can get excited about you know we'll talk to our friends and say hey are you going for the next Smash Brothers tournament or going on like CEO this year and people get hype when they're like oh there's a smash sisters event there we're going to be there and that also helps us to to like send

our have a single point where we can Center our message around to yep and again we're not here to say hey we are the pinnacle of success but more so we've been up and running for a year and we're still going to run into many more obstacles and hurdles but what we are going to do is stick by these three pillars that we've donated for you guys today to make future decisions and thank you for coming sorry for the slide issues give us a follow on our Facebook Twitter or Tina so it seems like we have seven minutes left first note to point out is please fill in your evaluations you get a chance because we would love to hear your constructive criticism as to how we can do such a complex topic more justice and then secondly we I think we have some time for Q&A correct me if I'm wrong yes thumbs up okay cool great and if we don't get your question I think there's a wrap up room around the corner where we will be there ready to answer

questions yes I know you're not super focused on women's issues and all that stuff and gaming but I guess I'm just kind of curious as a semi outsider how some of the previous efforts at these types of communities organizations or teams you feel like has impacted you or just other you know future efforts and like for example I saw the other comments about siren look at that baggage or um it's kind of learnings and baggage I guess baggage is like the worst way you could call it but it's something we knew we would have to deal with and we that's what informed us with why we had to be extra careful with our branding because we knew if we like tripped any wire it would just be like and then come crashing down and I make sense yeah and then part of that is like

how do you answer certain people online to like you make one wrong tweet and you're like that's just going to blow up and it's just like oh wow okay this sucks so I guess it caused us to be a little bit more cautious all right so in Findo is typically hands-off when it comes to events but over the past ten years we've seen the actual game companies kind of take a hold of events do you think that the game company should actually be supporting things like smash Sixers directly or should they just kind of leave it open and allow the community to kind of spring up with things to support female players I don't think I have a strong opinion on this because a grassroots theorists have been doing pretty well I mean yeah at least the smash community has been fun so I think it would be great if if companies did do that if that aligns with what their interests are so it's really hard to

speak about or speak for a corporation and to say something like Oh Nintendo should do this I think the more important question often is you know what can you do to impact your community to do you think that the response would be coming from someone who is like your peer compared to someone who actually does work at the company is kind of what I was going for what do you think the community would reject something if they felt like it was being forced upon them and not like an organic group guess we'll have to find out how's it happened that you've like tweeted something incendiary or like put up some message that people have blown up on and then you've had to do damage control on it and if they're like how do you go about doing that happily yeah I have to push it out of my memory because I can't remember right it wasn't it too bad I I

was actually having a private conversation with a Smasher and you know she was asking me some clarifying questions about what smash sisters it oh no and you know it's like it's like Facebook Messenger so we're just like talking to each other I thought was pretty candidly I think a month or two later I saw screenshots of our conversation tweet it out to all of her followers and she wrote I think she was like we're not to go into her yeah I mean it was it was just like oh the smash sisters girls once what's this and it was like a very small snippet of what I had written like what the like but we were having a conversation but every time like this kind of stuff happens we learn something from it so like in our presentation we mentioned that our like two things we focus on is getting the bringing women together but also feeding back in the competitive community like that moment definitely helped highlight that yeah thanks hi talked a lot about branding and how

specifically your branding has sort of been shaped by you know the environment that we are in right now how do you balance like staying true to your values and integrity as like standing up for women but also not like you know making sure that your branding is still on point and getting the message that you want to cross I think what we want and then also our branding our Justins aligns with each other directly I don't think there's ever in neat a point where they disconnect from one another I think we're just as transparent as we can be and as upfront as we can be and I think as like the founders being like hey we're still making mistakes and messing up I don't know how much more direct we can be does that make sense yeah German had nothing cool being told anything else where one person oh and more efficient do you have

any just like numbers or maybe anecdotal like anecdotal evidence of like increase of participation or anything like that you know we what we were asked this before I guess if we say a number here that's technically going on the record correct so record um it's actually quite a low number I mean in my opinion it could be anywhere between like 70 to like a hundred fifty women like that's a pretty big range and you know a reminder that the smash brothers community is is fairly small in the first place I think the the largest tournament that has that ever happened for smash was maybe like 1,800 people that there's a tear well thank you it might have been around 2000 people let's say and but if you have a hundred women out of let's say 2,000 people in a group like for us that's

amazing but anecdotally we've heard a lot of feedback what people reaching out saying like this has like this is amazing thank you so much I probably wouldn't be in the community tomorrow I got involved because I saw this but next year we do want to actually like get more data so we have more stuff and then um you know one of one of my favorite stories is about this young girl she's I think she was a tall bounder girl yeah she means Bowser one of the you know grimy Asst like turtle guys like in the Smash Brothers game like he's for any pretty gross but she's just like she's just rocked it and you know she came out to play and her her parents would come to tournaments and she doesn't have a Facebook so I was there like texting with her dad like okay you know you know let Jaden in you know she can come in and stuff and like her time to play and they were really excited for her yeah fun story that's why we consider participant safety we didn't want her parents to have to read through the chat so yeah cool thank you everyone I think we'll be at the wrap-up room somewhere

on this floor if you guys have any more questions back there okay thanks [Applause]