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.
Sure thing Cloudy! 😀
The puncher of wombs was bemused.
He pretended to be just amused.
Lonely times at his blog
Left him in a fog.
The rest of us just … snoozed.
kirby, you are the zen master of poetry. Is that mixing metaphors, or is it something much, much worse?
Is this -> [http://i.imgur.com/mFwHv.jpg] the end of manboobz as we know it?
Will Rogers said, “I never met a man I didn’t like, until I met the Preggo Puncher. He’s kind of despicable.”
IR/FF, it’s difficult to pull off the “above it all” act once you’ve been caught making a game called Preggo Punchout.
I think that a lot of people think that “racist”, when applied to a person, means that the person is (at least) someone like a Klan member, and there’s no nothing between “not racist” and “Klan member”.
In former days he stood amongst the gnats,
A self-described locator of the facts.
But sadly most of his courageous acts,
Were quoting, out of context, silly spats.
His posts were bits of mold unfit for rats,
And his own self-appointed claim to fame
Was a derrogatory, fucked-up game
That only could appeal to sexist prats.
In vain he tried to change his title’s aim,
from researching the truth to just review.
But his opinions echoed empty too,
And he has him and only him to blame.
Put that inside your pipe and sit on it,
For you have just been burned by a sonnet!
@Mags: I lol’d (it’s funny because it really is the end).
@Kirby: Freaking sonnets up in here. I love you.
@Tulgey Logger:
^_^ They are much more fun than I thought!
Aww man… Just realized that L10 of my first sonnet isn’t iambicpentameter… 🙁 🙁 🙁
Should be changed to “How could you throw away all of my friends?”
There once was a troll called IR
whose lame barbs went not very far.
He always fell short,
just like his retorts,
yet thought himself thrown to the stars.
The rascal’s hoary formulations
were much like his shallow gyrations;
but insult his member
and you’ll see his temper
and recall that fact-finder’s poor ministrations.
Don’t worry, Kirby! The variation is half the fun!
Or so I’m told. I’m horrible at scansion.
I can only assume that IR’s silence implies that he is busy working on a come-back sonnet! The gauntlet is thrown! It’s about to get poetic up in here! Two rhymers enter, one rhymer leaves! It’s a verbal-bruising metre-slamming war in Shakespere-ese! Bring your best quill and parchment, shites about to go down! If you can’t keep up with Kirby then by Jove you’re gonna drown!
I’m sure he’s busy composing a new blog post about how formerly innocent video game characters have been corrupted by the gay feminist poetry agenda.
Shepard was on it
until she wrote a sonnet.
Kratos was Hell
’til he penned a villanelle.
Sonic was steaming;
then he composed a sestina.
Fallout was everywhere;
now haiku’s in the air.
Arrows and knees
don’t need no rhyme schemes
so GTFO FREAKING FEMINISTS GOD I HATE YOU
Classy… Like my new avatar!
Late into the night,
The comment section’s mirth roars.
Trolls cry silently.
Roses are red,
Violets are blue;
Fact Finder’s
got no facts
for you.
This is one of them ones that hurt my tummy. Comments look like they might be fun, tho… I’ll check em out.
🙁 ergh this is so head and tummy hurting, this gamer crap. No words.
This is competely unconnected to gamers and sexual harrassment, but I remember a little while back there was some stuff on the Titanic, Costa Concordia, and the ‘women and children first’ idea. A couple of researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden have just released a study the shows the women and children first concept never even really happened: http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2012/04/sea-disasters
Wow. I just watched the Day 1: Sexual Harassment video on the PA Report’s summary and it was…difficult. The team coach, Aris, just hammered one of the players, Miranda, incessantly for the entire thirteen and a half minutes of the video. He covered topics of general interest, such as:
-mud wrestling b/t Miranda and another female player
-Miranda’s bra size and, of course, breasts
-Miranda’s thighs
-Miranda’s smell
-Miranda’s trip to the bathroom (#1 or #2?)
-the presence or absence of cameras in the bathroom
-the possibility of installing a copy of the Mona Lisa in the bathroom (with cameras where the eyes should be)
-Miranda’s boyfriend
-playing for the players’ shirts
-buying or making a skirt for Miranda to wear on Day 2 (since she hadn’t brought one)
It finally ended with Aris announcing that if Miranda lost the practice match she was playing, she would have to submit to his sniffing her while saying her boyfriend’s name. She lost, he sniffed her, she left, and Aris said, “I hope she’s crying in the bathroom.” Classy.
“She lost, he sniffed her, she left, and Aris said, “I hope she’s crying in the bathroom.””
Wow…sniffing people…that’s totally not something a dog would do… I wonder if goes around sniffing all girls.
Aside from the vile misogyny described in the OP, I feel the most important point to consider here is that Tekken TOTES ROOLZ and Street Fighter, while hugely influential and great in its time, is some srsly played-out shit (as played out, even, as the term “played out”) regardless of what snazzy new graphics you bolt onto it.
It’s a shame about these little woman-hating fuckwads in the community because I always thought Tekken was quite good in terms of representation of women. It’s got what I think is one of the highest proportion of women fighters in a fighting game (25%), not all of them fit into the standard “moves-fast-but-doesn’t-hit-very-hard” model, and most of their outfits aren’t absurdly revealing. Some of them even wear pants!
Dear dumb asses of the internet: I know you won’t believe this, but if a man more handsome than Aris had done the same thing, it would have been an equally horrible thing to do.