Gamer asshole: “Sexual harassment is part of the culture. If you remove that from the fighting game community, it’s not the fighting game community.”

This may be old news to gamers, but a reader just brought it to my attention:

Capcom and IGN recently put on a little online gaming “reality” show called Capcom’s Cross Assault, based on the game Street Fighter x Tekken. The show, like the game, pits a team of Street Fighter players against a Tekken team.

During a live stream of the ongoing battle on day five of the tournament, Twitch.tv community manager Jared Rea made a few remarks  criticizing the assholish, and often misogynistic, comments of some of the fighters.

Here’s how the Penny Arcade Report summarized what followed. (I’ve taken the liberty of highlighting several particularly egregious comments in bold.)

“This is Aris,” a voice said on the feed. “If you don’t like onions, you get your sandwich without onions on it, man. This is the fighting game community.” He then stated that sexual harassment and the fighting game community are “one and the same thing.”

The voice belonged to Aris Bakhtanians, the coach of the Tekken team.

“The sexual harassment is part of the culture. If you remove that from the fighting game community, it’s not the fighting game community… it doesn’t make sense to have that attitude. These things have been established for years,” Aris stated. He then noted that making sexual jokes at StarCraft players would be inappropriate, so it’s unfair for anyone to tell fighting game fans they can’t viciously mock women. …

“That’s what you’re trying to do to the fighting game community and it’s not right,” Aris continued. “It’s ethically wrong.” This may be the first time in the history of video games that someone had said that removing sexual harassment is ethically unjust.

Later in the, er, discussion, after someone brought up the harassment of a guy playing a female character (“someone yelling the world “bitch” over and over … and then scream[ing] for her rape when she lost”) Aris responded with this:

“What is unacceptable about that?” Aris asked. “There is nothing unacceptable about that. We’re in America! This isn’t North Korea! We can say what we want.”

You can listen to the whole discussion on this video; it starts, with Rea’s comments, at about one hour forty-five minutes in. (Aris starts commenting about two minutes later.)

Many more appalling details in the PA report post.

Oh, gaming community! Get it the fuck together.