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.
If this kind of sexual harassment and bullying were limited to gaming communities only, it would be a huge problem. And it’s not, of course.
Oh, I love fighting games!
RE: IR
Preggo Punchout doesn’t count as a fighhting game, dude.
“Get it the fuck together!”
– An unemployed blogger with preventable health problems.
Cool story, bro! I’m really craving a Caesar. This has been a nice chat about totally irrelevent things.
And when one of our delightful manboobz trolls DOES use a genuinely mean-spirited insult relating to someone’s mental health, gender, etc., Mags is suddenly no longer concerned about the expressive vs. repressive dichotomy and instead decides to focus on how the recipient parties are “cultivating their indignities.”
Thanks for demonizing people with actual mental illnesses. I myself have depression and it’s just hilarious when people say stupid shit about me and have no clue what’s it actually feels like.
Go back under the bridge, troll.
My only consolation for not being able to afford a new machine that can run Battlefield 3 is that I won’t have to suffer the bigoted little fuckers who play it.
I’d say it’s relevant that David knows how to manage everyone’s life but his own. You may now go back to talking about how smart you are and how dumb the rest of humanity is, based on intangible or superfluous measurements*.
* Such as how well someone buys into your dogma!
I can’t figure out why misanthropy is considered somehow to be OK, but politically incorrect misanthropy is not.
Actually there are lots of people who are very smart and are also complete assholes, whether sexist, racist, or otherwise.
Guess which one you don’t come off as, factfinder.
OMG, I’ve been put in my place by an eminent game designer!
Mags, do you ever challenge your MRA buds when they start going on about “shaming tactics” and “creep shaming?”
Wow, you certainly seem to know a lot about David’s life, IR. That’s totally awesome and not weirdly speculative at all.
Gamers desperately seek out validation of–and mainstream respect for–their hobby, but fly into a defensive panic the moment anyone holds video games to the same level of scrutiny to which other media are subjected.
True dat. Sadly, this is the culture that innovated the use of the word ‘raped’ to mean ‘bested in a meaningless competition’. I’m not sure movies or poetry would’ve captured the hearts of billions quite as effectively if they’d done the same.
So FF thinks he knows how well Dave manages his life?
One wonders how he comes by this knowledge.
Ah… it’s something he pulled out of thin air.
‘I just can’t figure out why chicks don’t like video games as much as boys! Sure there are fewer female characters in most games and they’re usually half naked, but that’s just fantasy. And, okay, some ladies who work in the industry get called fat counts sometimes, but it’s just a minority being obnoxious. And yeah I might threaten to rape you and constantly equate being a woman or having a vagina with being inferior or subhuman, but it’s just trash talk! Anyway, it’s so weird. it must have something to do with evolution.’
RE: Roscoe
You can hate everyone you want. It’s when you start ACTING LIKE A DICK to them where it stops being kosher.
You know what being politically correct is? Caring about how your words will affect others. It is attempting to not act like a dick.
What’s an example of each?
Off the cuff, I’d say “those [ethnicity/gender/people of superficial characteristics whom I have lumped together] are idiots” is pretty ugly and bigoted, whereas “humanity fails to live up to my expectations of it, the wretched slime that it is” is just pretty ugly.
63% of the population of the United States is either overweight or obese. So you’re saying that over half of the population cannot manage their own lives, correct?
Keep it classy, brah.
‘preventable health problems’ is how he’s saying ‘fat’ without using ‘shaming language’.
You really are that stupid, aren’t you? Not that this is what’s going on here, but philosophically, ‘politically incorrect misanthropy’ is just hating people who are marginalized already by society. Actual misanthropy (HAtred of the entire human race, as when I say ‘Just burn the planet from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure’) doesn’t discriminate based on marginalization, nor does it particularly further marginalization if it’s actually applied to all of humanity (as opposed to selectively, against the marginalized, as is so often the case)
So IR/FF/WFTBBQ is back trolling for hits for his blog that gets no readers?
Such a surprise.
IR still hasn’t found a publisher for Preggo Punchout, it seems. Why can’t he just learn to manage his life better?
(And also be less boring.)
I can’t figure out why misanthropy is considered somehow to be OK, but politically incorrect misanthropy is not.
Because ‘politically incorrect misanthropy’ is a bullshit euphemism for bigotry that you just made up. Duh!
Actually, misanthropy is pretty much never okay. Get with the program.
However, misanthropy that disproportionately targets the same groups that every other fucking misanthrope targets disproportionately, yeah, that’s extra bad.
Get serious, “I hate everyone equally” dudes, it’s been a long time since you hated someone for being white and straight.
This may have been stated already, but there is actually a video of Aris sexually harassing a female player. http://kotaku.com/5889415/this-is-what-a-gamers-sexual-harassment-looks-like