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The short history of eSports and streaming has seen many heroic performances and dramatic events, but it’s also seen a worrying amount of bigotry and toxicity aimed at its most successful exponents. Few of those early protagonists have experienced as much toxicity as Rumay Wang, better known as Hafu, whose remarkable feats as both a competitor and streamer made her a target for the most toxic elements of gamer culture. She has withstood these inequities with remarkable stoicism, and in the process opened the door for many more female gamers to join her in the gaming spotlight, a Secret Superhero who is as legendary as the golden Hearthstone cards she has deployed to great effect.

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A RELUCTANT GRADUATE

Hafu was born in 1991 in Massachusetts, the child of Chinese immigrants, and grew up in the leafy Boston suburb of Lexington. She recalls her parents struggling financially while she was younger, with her mother having to support the family through her job in computer science, while her father studied for a Ph.D.. In addition to struggling financially, the Wangs had ambitions for their daughter that did not involve video games, and consequently Hafu’s introduction to gaming came relatively late on when she finally acquired a Game Boy Color at the age of 14. As she tells it, she wasn’t very good to start off, but enjoyed gaming and improving her skills through practice. Soon after, friends introduced her to World of Warcraft, and Hafu began competing with other players online, before graduating to tournament play. This was the only sort of graduation Hafu was interested in; she even skipped her high school graduation ceremony to play in a Warcraft tournament. As Hafu later recalled, her parents were not pleased about the direction she was taking:  “I grew up to be everything they didn’t want. They wanted me to study really hard because that’s how they found success. Instead of studying, I just played games all day.”

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Hafu’s success at Warcraft eventually won her skeptical parents over. “It wasn’t until I showed my mom the world leaderboard. I was like, ‘Look mom, I’m number one. Isn’t that something?’ That’s when she started letting me play, once I finished my homework.” If her parents had known more of their daughter’s experience of competitive Warcraft, they’d have been substantially more concerned. One opposition team that qualified for the Blizzcon Regionals - a major competition organized by World of Warcraft’s publisher, Blizzard Entertainment - had the registered name of “Gonna rape Hafu at Regionals”. She was just 17 at the time, and had already qualified for the Regionals event. This was an extreme example of the toxicity that was rife in the competitive scene, but also one that was enabled by the pervasive sexism of eSports at that time. Hafu’s achievements were routinely attributed to her male teammates - in gaming terminology, she was said to be “carried” - by her team. Hafu’s response was to keep winning, but she also returned to her studies, enrolling at Bentley University and deciding to pursue a career in finance. She later explained that “I have this appreciation for money because I remember being poor. The best way I knew how to become an adult was to do school, get a career in finance, do that path.”

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MISTAKES WERE MADE

While at college a new way to be an adult presented itself, in the form of Twitch. Hafu began streaming regularly and quickly built an audience, and also a regular income from subscribers. She took the decision to drop out in her third year and focus on streaming full time, telling her appalled parents that “if within one year, you don’t think I’m successful, I’ll go back to school.’” Hafu was extremely successful, and her popularity on Twitch grew enormously in 2013 when Blizzard released Hearthstone, a strategic card game similar to popular offline games such as Magic: The Gathering, and one which was ideally suited to eSports competition. Hafu quickly established herself as one of the best Hearthstone players on the planet, and throughout the game’s heyday - it was consistently in the top five most watched games on Twitch from 2014 to 2018 - she was also one of its most popular streamers. 

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Streaming requires a different skillset to competitive play, and Hafu’s success was as much to do with her engaging and insightful presentation as her skill as a gamer. Most top eSports competitors struggle to hold an audience’s attention, and very few of Hafu’s competitive rivals were able to match her streaming success. Those that did had less success in competition and online season rankings, but received more respect from the community than Hafu, who was still perceived by many as someone who succeeded because of her gender, despite the wealth of evidence to the contrary. 

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While frustrated by this lack of respect for her skills, the abuse and bigotry she faces on her own channel is a greater concern. She described her daily experience as a streamer in a 2016 documentary about her career, Trials Of A Female eSports Champion. “When you have seventy thousand people watching a stream, and all you see is horrible things being said about you… [IT makes you think] ‘why am I competing? It just makes me unhappy.’ It’s hard to be part of something when I don’t feel welcome in the community… they know to press where it hurts, right? And when you show where it hurts people will just keep pressing”. 

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THE POGCHAMP SUPERHERO

As Hearthstone’s popularity slowly faded, Hafu moved on to other games. In 2019 she took up Riot Games’ new autobattler TeamFight Tactics, becoming the game’s first champion during its initial beta release. The following year she also demonstrated her skills at a more traditional form of gaming, winning Chess.com’s Pogchamps tournament, where online celebrities are coached by top Grandmasters including Hikaru Nakamura and Daniel Naroditsky. Hafu crushed a tournament field of almost exclusively male competitors, winning every game with both white and black pieces, once again proving her competitive skill in an arena that traditionally does not favor women. 

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This is typical of Hafu’s career, in which she has consistently proven her abilities in a wide range of disciplines, from the frantic teamplay of competitive Warcraft to the highly strategic calculations demanded by Hearthstone and TeamFight Tactics. While the world of streaming and eSports still suffers from toxicity and bigotry, Hafu’s successes have helped to change perceptions of women in gaming and made the path to success much easier for those who have followed her. This Secret Superhero has laid vital foundations that enable other female gamers to flourish in the eSports and streaming arenas, and taught a lot of male gamers that trash talking and abuse can often lead to humiliating outcomes. 

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