Josh Melnick

The Fighting Game community (FGC) does not have a great track record as far as the treatment of women goes. Dating back to the earliest days of the first modern fighting game, Street Fighter II, gendered terminology has played a significant role in the language of the community. “Raping someone,” “playing gay,” and specifically gendered insults directed at female characters have always been commonplace. Women who choose to compete are simultaneously subjected to huge amounts of harassment and unwanted attention.

So where do these issues come from? Why are women a minority in an otherwise diverse community? The answer to these questions can be found between cultural norms of competition, in game representation, and the self-fulfilling prophecy of entrenched sexism.

In 2012, the FGC’s gender problem became a public issue when commentator and community leader Aris “Aris” Bakhtanians made a series of remarks about sexism and harassment being as fundamental to fighting games as the use of a basketball is to the NBA. Video game criticism and news publication Giant Bomb posted a lengthy article about Aris’ statements. During the lead up to the release of a fighting game, the game’s developer ran a community challenge called Cross Assault. Players auditioned via reality tv like video clips, and would be split up in to two teams. One player, Miranda “Super_Yan” Pakozdi, was selected for team Tekken, the team led by Aris. Over the course of the training for the tournament, which was live streamed not unlike a reality show, Aris made increasingly invasive and sexual comments to Pakozdi, a few times causing her to forfeit the games and walk away. His actions ranged from aiming the cameras at her chest and thighs to sniffing her while she was playing. Later, the community manager of the livestreaming service hosting Cross Assault interviewed Aris about his actions, and Aris defended them, claiming that the FGC is defined by how it treats women.

Unsurprisingly, this angered some members of the community, and sparked a discussion around why so many women feel excluded and in danger. After Cross Assault concluded, Pakozdi unregistered for a number of events that she had previously said she would attend. She made statements on twitter about how uncomfortable and unsafe she felt in the community following the incident, and a number of other women echoed her statements. Much of the FGC wrote off Aris’ comments as an extreme example of a sentiment not echoed by the rest of the community, but this is not the only example of women in the FGC being treated this way. While explosive moments like these are few and far between, with Cross Assault being the last time this discussion rose in 2012, micro aggressions and smaller scale harassment happens constantly.

Recently, this issue has come back in to the forefront of public thought. Competitive Smash Brothers player, Lilian “Milktea” Chen published an article for the TED website about her experiences in fighting games. She talks about the ways people demeaned her and made he separate from the community. When videos of her play would get posted online, they would receive comments like this.She talks about how she put up with this kind of treatment saying she “came to think it was normal” (Chen). Chen talks about the attention that she received at events. Not sure why she was receiving it, all she knew was that she enjoyed it. At the time, though, she was unaware that attention was part of what made some men around her bitter towards her. She goes on, writing “worse: I started adopting some of these boys’ attitudes toward women, thinking, ‘Why is that girl wearing a skirt to a tournament?’ ‘Why does she have to be so girly?’ ‘Why is she giggling?’ ‘Ew, is she even a real gamer?'” (Chen) She begins to touch on one of the main ideas that makes sexism in fighting games so hard to combat. Sexism and misogyny is so thoroughly embedded in the culture, that women become a part of it too. Without realizing it, they adapt to be able to survive in the system, and that adaptation can require women to think in harmful ways too.

But the lack of gender diversity had to have started somewhere. There have been numerous studies about the kinds of games that men and women tend towards; These studies give us insight in to why there has been a gender imbalance in the FGC since day one. One theory of the root of the imbalance is the idea “that girls like to cooperate in their gameplay, whereas boys like to compete” (Jenson and De Castell).  However, in examining that statement, they discover that the problem actually lies in our notions of competition vs. cooperation. They talk about ideas of benevolent competition, an idea that can also be found prominently in fighting games as well as the folly of placing “benevolent” competition in a dichotomy against “male competition.” They discuss studies showing that “many girls we interviewed (over 80) said that they enjoy the same kinds of competitive gameplay boys do” and specifically listing fighting games as an activity that they enjoy (Jenson and De Castell). 

Another study, conducted with girls aged 9-13, showed that among a selection of 30 odd games, the girls tended towards games with some element of competition in them, specifically a fighting game called Dead or Alive (Carr). Both of these studies show that women enjoy playing and wish to compete, and I was unable to find any studies that showed data to counter this idea. So why then, in the history of Street Fighter, the most popular and longest standing fighting game franchise, has there only ever been one internationally competitive female player?

This is where the issue of representation comes in to play. Dead or Alive is a game with a cast of characters evenly split between men and women. Street Fighter has, at it’s most representative, had about a third as many women as men. While there is a separate discussion to be had about the kinds of representation in Dead or Alive versus Street Fighter, much of the association between Dead or Alive and female competitors comes from the representation in its cast. Street Fighter, in its current incarnation, has 10 female characters to its 34 male characters. Of the 44 characters, two are queer. Featuring a gay man and a trans woman, interestingly, the two largest sexual minorities present in the fighting game community.

In small doses, though, representation can serve to reinforce some problems that it can help solve on larger scales. In games with just a few female characters, people who play those characters are subjected to similar kinds of gendered insults as female players. Players of characters like Sheik in Smash Bros. or Morrigan in Marvel vs. Capcom or Poison from Street Fighter are familiar with a small scale of harassment simply due to the characters they pick.

Language plays a large role in how harassment functions in the FGC. While physical abuse does happen, verbal abuse is much more common. Phrases that I listed earlier like “playing gay,” a term used to describe playing defensively and avoiding confrontation, is ubiquitous among all fighting game subcommunities. Similarly, the idea of “raping” someone, meaning to dominate them in the game, can be heard in tournaments and friendly matches alike. Discussion over the use of these terms gets heated, and even those with the best of intentions sometimes miss the problems.

In this clip, a documentarian covering the history of the competitive Smash Brothers scene talks to community members (Including Lilian Chen) about how the language affects them. While many of the statements do help illuminate how harmful the language is, the closing note of the section misunderstands how the issues actually harm people.

Wes, the player who makes the final statement about everyone being raised differently, fails to understand that, in spite of our different upbringings, the way that people use words like rape and gay not only separate those who are impacted by the use of the words, but also solidifies the idea that they are targets. When someone uses the term rape, they are forcing people who have personal histories with the word to deal with that history again. This is a reason why some women who have either been victims or simply know people who have been victims of sexual assault can’t compete. Additionally, while statistically less likely, men can also be victims of sexual assault. Regardless of any specific victims, these words also contribute to a hostile environment that makes people feel like it is an exclusionary space. Community, especially community founded on common interest, does not benefit from this kind of gating, and it is a large reason why we don’t see more high level competitive women. In order to become the best, you have to start local, and when local communities are unwelcoming, people don’t get a chance to grow.