Earlier this year, I created Valorant as an Institution, a multimodal story-sharing presentation for CTL1110 at OISE. The course invited us to examine how our experiences are shaped by larger social, cultural, and institutional forces. For my presentation, I wanted to explore an environment that had taught me a great deal about identity, credibility, and belonging, even though it would not ordinarily be described as an educational space: competitive gaming.
I have played video games for much of my life, but my experiences in Valorant made me increasingly aware of how differently players can be treated based on who others believe them to be. In a game where communication and teamwork are essential, simply speaking in voice chat can reveal a player’s gender and change the dynamics of an entire match. I had experienced teammates questioning my ability, suggesting that my brother must have played on my account, or blaming a loss on the fact that there was a woman on the team. I also noticed the pressure I placed on myself to perform exceptionally well so that I would not confirm what other players already seemed prepared to believe about me.
From individual toxicity to a recurring system
Initially, I understood these moments as examples of sexism or toxicity in gaming. That explanation was accurate, but it felt incomplete. Describing each encounter as the behaviour of an individual “toxic player” made it difficult to account for how predictable and repetitive these interactions were. Different players, in different matches, often reproduced the same assumptions about women’s competence, legitimacy, and reasons for participating in gaming spaces. If the incidents were so consistent, I began to wonder whether the problem could still be understood as a collection of unrelated individual choices.
What changes when we examine Valorant not only as a game, but as an institution?
I was not arguing that Valorant is a formal institution in the same way as a school, government, or legal system. Instead, I examined how its community functions institutionally. Gaming spaces develop recognizable customs, hierarchies, roles, expectations, and consequences. Players learn how they are supposed to communicate, what counts as legitimate skill, whose directions carry authority, and what happens when someone disrupts the group’s expectations. These rules may not appear in the game’s official instructions, but they are repeatedly communicated and enforced by other players.
Learning the rules of belonging
This perspective allowed me to reconsider my experiences as part of a broader process of socialization. Women entering voice chat may learn to anticipate harassment or doubt. They may avoid speaking, change how they communicate, or feel that an average performance will be treated as evidence that women do not belong in competitive games. Male players are also being taught something through these interactions. They encounter a culture in which women’s competence can be questioned more readily and where gendered comments are often treated as ordinary humour rather than as a way of regulating participation.
The most difficult part of developing the presentation was recognizing that I was not standing outside this culture simply because I could critique it. I had also internalized some of its rules. My desire to outperform male players was partly driven by the belief that I had to provide additional evidence of my competence. I sometimes understood succeeding against men as proof that I belonged, but that response still accepted the underlying idea that my presence required justification. This realization moved the presentation beyond documenting what other players had done to me. It required me to examine how institutional expectations can shape a person’s behaviour, self-evaluation, and sense of possibility, even when that person consciously rejects those expectations.
Why the story needed a multimodal form
I chose a multimodal format because I wanted the audience to encounter this argument through more than an abstract description of sexism in games. I used moments from my own gaming history, examples of the language players use, and analysis of the social patterns connecting those experiences. Moving between personal narrative and institutional analysis was important to the project. The personal examples showed what these norms felt like in practice, while the institutional lens helped explain why the same patterns continued to appear across different interactions.
Representation is not structural change
The project also pushed me to think more critically about representation. Valorant includes women as powerful, skilled, and visually prominent playable characters. However, their presence does not necessarily transform the culture surrounding the game. A community can celebrate fictional women while continuing to distrust, sexualize, or silence the women with whom its members actually play. Representation matters, but representation alone cannot undo the social structures through which credibility and belonging are distributed.
Competitive gaming as informal pedagogy
This led me to the educational significance of the presentation. If players learn from repeated interactions, peer expectations, and community norms, then gaming is not separate from education. It is an informal pedagogical environment. It teaches people whose voices matter, what competence looks like, how authority is established, and who is expected to adapt in order to participate.
For me, this raised a broader question about education itself. Pedagogy cannot rely solely on inclusive content, diverse representation, or the good intentions of individual educators without examining the structures in which learning takes place. Education is never neutral. Every learning environment, whether it is a classroom or a competitive game, communicates ideas about power, identity, credibility, and belonging. When those structures are left uninterrogated, apparently neutral practices can continue to reproduce institutional oppression.
Looking back, Valorant as an Institution was not ultimately a presentation about whether individual gamers are good or bad people. It was an attempt to understand how ordinary, repeated interactions become a system of informal education. Developing the presentation helped me connect my personal experiences to a larger structural argument and recognize that meaningful pedagogical change requires more than correcting individual behaviour. It requires us to examine the environments, norms, and relations of power that make certain behaviours appear natural in the first place.
Course reading that informed the presentation
I used Sensoy and DiAngelo’s chapter on sexism to help distinguish recurring, structurally reinforced patterns from isolated acts of individual prejudice. The rest of this reflection develops my own analysis of Valorant, gaming culture, and informal education.
- Sensoy, Ö., & DiAngelo, R. (2017). Is everyone really equal? An introduction to key concepts in social justice education (2nd ed.). Teachers College Press. Sexism chapter.