This week I've been sat at my desk working a full-time job in Greater Manchester but in a few day's time, I could find myself vying for a medal to prove I’m one of the best competitors in the Commonwealth.
It all sounds a bit surreal, especially for someone like me, I'm usually interviewing people about the incredible things they've achieved - not the one being given the opportunity to achieve greatness myself. My life revolves around a full-time job, a mortgage, planning a wedding - all very adult and responsible things that I'm leaving at home whilst I take a week off work to play video games for my country.
On Monday I’m heading off to one of Nottingham’s student accommodation blocks to join the rest of my team for the Commonwealth Esports Championships, the inaugural competition that gives the best players from Commonwealth countries to go head-to-head with each other in three different titles. The games include Rocket League, essentially football played with miniature cars, eFootball, also known as Pro Evolution Soccer - a football simulation game similar to Fifa - and Dota 2, a multiplayer online battle arena game which I'll be competing in.
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I know the most about Dota, having only dallied in the other two titles, with over 4,000 matches played since I started in 2016. Each game takes an average of 40 minutes, with additional drafting time available to pick five heroes for each team from a pool of 123, and ban out heroes you don’t want to play against.
The 5v5 game has a deceptively simple win condition - destroy your opponent's base building before they can destroy yours. But protective towers that can attack players, a range of items available for purchase, and abilities on each hero complicate the game into matches full of twists and turns. All of the competitors have spent a lot of time playing this game, and it’s something we’re all extremely passionate about, which you have to be in order to dedicate so much time to practising and building on your own skills in order to feel even somewhat ready for the competition to come.
With an open and women’s category there’s going to be a lot of us there, from hosts England to players from places like Trinidad and Tobago, Malaysia, Nigeria, and New Zealand flying in to compete. I’ll be part of the Welsh women’s Dota 2 team alongside four others and a substitute, and over the last few months we’ve spent a lot of time together preparing for next week’s competition.
From playing random party games like Codenames and Gartic Phone to queueing up in games of Dota to practice our strategies, a lot of work has gone into the competition, particularly for the Welsh squad which had to be built up from scratch by Esports Wales, the national body for competitive gaming.
There are four other women’s Dota 2 teams competing, England, Malaysia, Australia, and Singapore. The England squad is predominantly made up of the Great Britain women’s squad from the Global Esports Games held in Singapore in December 2021, where GB and Singapore went head-to-head for the win, with the home team snatching the gold.
One of the former GB players, Naomi “Soong45” Jones, is captaining our squad in this tournament, but for the rest of us this is the first time we’ve been given a chance to compete, and it’s been a tough adjustment. Last weekend some of the team spent the day in Swansea for our final bootcamp preparations, practising and speaking with a coach to get tips on how to manage our nerves, which are certainly starting to grow as the days pass.
As many of us have full-time jobs, practice has had to be slotted in around work, which has been a challenge as we get closer to the event and want to spend more time preparing for the competition. In the last few months I've tried to play at least two or three matches a day to refine my skills, something which can take up to three hours out of my free time. Juggling that alongside my other hobbies, chores, and exercise has been extremely difficult, and many of my favourite non-gaming hobbies have been put on the shelf.
Of the five teams, one will be knocked out in the group stage with the other four progressing to the main stage in Birmingham. The competition is going to be pretty tough, as both England and Singapore’s squad have proven to be very tough competitors in the past, and a number of high-skilled players on the Malaysian team too.
It’s impossible to say what’s going to happen next week, and what our chances of making it through to the top four is, but even if we’re knocked out in last place we’ve still come further than dozens of other nations who couldn’t even find enough women to submit a squad, regardless of how well they could perform.
With other esports adopting women’s pro leagues and organisations fielding all-women squads in titles like Valorant and CS:GO, Dota is quite far behind when it comes to the opportunities available for women to make it in the professional scene, but I like to see the upcoming games as a sneak peak into what the Dota scene could look like if there was more support for girls to make it to the highest levels. There are hundreds of women out there in the UK who are playing the game, and playing it well, but without the grassroots opportunities to play competitively it’s impossible for them to see a way into representing their country.
It’s a huge honour to represent my country, but it’s an even greater honour to represent the other women in the game I love and give them someone to look at and know that they’ve got opportunities to represent theirs too. I don’t know what’s going to happen next week, but I do know it’s too early to give up hope that we might come home with a medal to top off a massive helping of national pride.
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