Shoryuken announced the line-up for Evo 2010 yesterday and surprise surprise, all the games you expected are on the list. I Play Winner has a post with the list. But that’s not why I’m posting this because you probably already heard about the games.

They are adding an all-female tournament to the roster and so the controversy begins. You may remember that over the summer, Arcade Infinity hosted the first Ladies of SF tournament and that was all fun and good but ultimately, nothing really came of it after it was over.

Gaming industry expert Jared Rea has a really interesting blog post about the whole thing that pretty much sums up the way I see it. From the article:

While I can sort of understand the idea of nobility behind wanting to open the door to female Street Fighter players by giving them an accessible taste of what competitive play is all about, at the same time you’re essentially regulating them to a sideshow in the worse sense of the word. You’re saying that because they were born with a vagina, they’re clearly inferior and not competent enough to compete with the boys and this type of thinking — whether its intended or not — is bullshit and a slap to the face to all the women currently playing the game to even suggest this.

Head over to his site to read the full article:
Foxy Boxing: A Terrible Idea Then…

Also, Shoryuken and Evo co-founder inkblot has posted a thread on SRK about it.

UPDATE: After thinking about it, I have a suggestion and haven’t seen it mentioned anywhere else. It’s so obivous now in retrospect, I don’t know why I didn’t think about it sooner. But in my opinion, if you really want girls to enter, you have to treat them like any other target market you’re trying to cater to: you give them a discount to try your product. Maybe the solution is to have some sort of “ladies get in for half price” type of promotion like you would see at a nightclub. That way, they’re getting the same product and experience and they aren’t being put in the spotlight or objectified and they are competing with the same level of players as everyone else which solves the equality problem.