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.
@Falconer: William Carlos Williams! You just made my day. <3
I am often amazed at my capacity for letting such persons ruin my entire evening,even after I have shut down my browser.
Still, thank you for taking on an asshole in the street. I so wish the Kitty Genovese effect was just something made up for Watchmen.
Actually, would you mind if I framed this and hung it above my fireplace? It’s oddly gratifying.
@Petra Lorre: Thank you! It seems to have been a big hit.
RE: Falconer
Au contraire, mon frere. It was by being angry at this troll (who insisted I was not a human being and did not in fact exist) that I summoned the self-righteous anger to stand down that bully! I realized that yea verily, trolls DO have a useful purpose in society! They inspire us to stand up against the assholes OFFline as well!
Then I went home and got drunk. It seemed an appropriate thing to do.
Bravo, @LBT. Reckless and probably totally irrational, but a compassionate act nevertheless. Boston (or, let’s just say, Eastern Mass, wherever) needs more than a little more of this.
The thing that I get hung up on thinking of this poor kid is that Chestnut Hill is only a few feet deep. Right? I mean, I guess there’s always the got-falling-down-drunk-while-on-the-running-path possibility… but does that ever happen, really? Isn’t throwing water in someone’s face one of the things you do to bring them around when they’re passed out?
And, ooh.. yeah, the seagull.
For those who are newish to the man boobz poetry scene: one of my favorite threads of all times, starring Mandolin.
Hehe, go for it.
Also, I was just chatting with a friend (who happens to be an English professor who specializes in 20th-century poetry) a few minutes ago, and told him, “By the way, you might be amused to know that on one of the websites I hang out on, someone in the comments just rewrote ‘This Is Just To Say’ to be about internet trolls.”
He answered, “…that’s fantastic. How do you always manage to find the spots on the internet where people stop being idiots and start being awesome?”
RE: PDA
*shrug* It succeeded at my intended purpose, which was to get him away from the woman. That’s about all I care about. In the end, my hunch about him proved right: he was only willing to behave like an out-of-control ragewanker when it benefited him. Turned out he could totally restrain himself from hitting someone when the whole thing was being recorded by the police. Also, seeing as it was an extremely public place, I was willing to take my odds that someone else would intervene.
As per the reservoir… I dunno how deep it is, but the slopes of it are pretty steep and rocky, there aren’t really lights at night I think, and February might still have been cold enough for things to be icy. I have no problem imagining someone falling in late at night and having a hard time getting out, even if he was sober and DIDN’T get hurt in the fall. Still, how horrible. Poor guy.
That’s…that’s just…wow. In a moment of anger, right now, so forgive what I’m about to say: I hope he dies. In a fire. And not from the smoke.
Poetic Fates no. 5,347: Aris Bakhtanians – beaten to death by real-life women martial artists.
Polliwog: At ML (which Falconer and both referred to) that poem is a staple. It’s the only poem I’ve translated into Russian (I’ve translated a few out).
ML is a hella clever place for poets. Villanelles and sonnets being the preferred forms two of the regulars, but pastiche is also common.
My name is Paul Elam, King of the Beta Males:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!
As someone who deeply loves video games, and was involved in the fighting game scene in the past, this shit deeply pisses me off. That being said, it’s sadly not surprising. The sexual harassment in gaming communities (particularly the fighting game community) was a huge elephant in the room, and it is about damn time it got exposed for what it was. The counter reaction from the community was sickening in a different way.
Not counting those who opposed the sexual harassment of Miranda, the reaction seemed split in the following ways.
1. “It’s the host’s fault for baiting Aris with that line of questioning” (bullshit, it was a completely valid line of questioning, and Aris is responsible for the sickening shit he said, nobody put a gun to his head and made him be a misogynistic ass).
2. “It’s the game journalists fault for blowing it out of proportion” (again, bullshit, this wasn’t blown out of proportion at all, they did their job and reported what was said. That’s being a good and ethical journalist).
3. “You’re just trying to make us look bad!” (as someone who counts zirself as a member of the fighting game community [despite being removed from that world now], people like Aris make us look bad. People who reflexively say misogynistic shit on the chatstreams whenever a woman is up in a tournament make us look bad).
One of the most perplexing arguments I’ve read is “we’re not bad, we tolerate Kayo Police [a trans woman model and tournament regular].” When I was watching EVO and her match was up, the chat feed was saying things like “don’t lose to a girl” and other stupid shit like that. When someone mentioned she is trans (although they used…less acceptable terms), it was bigotry squared over there. I’ve never rage-quit WATCHING a game before, but I just couldn’t take how vile things got there. The closest thing I’ve seen to tolerance from the community at large is treating her like a damn fetish object. Even then, it often comes in the form of backhanded compliments that reveal both transphobia and possible homophobia (many comments don’t register her as a woman). Not sure if the lesson here is that tolerance is only rewarded to those who are exceptionally conventionally beautiful (and Kayo Police is), or that the operational definition of tolerance in their eyes is declaring how they would like to have sex with someone and occasionally mentioning that she also plays fighting games. Either way, that’s utter crap.
I think things like this need to be thrown in the faces of people who defend this bullshit. It’s easy (well, easier) to defend it in the general, to say “everyone gets trash talked” or “everyone gets called a bitch.”
Not everyone gets fucking sniffed. Not everyone gets that fucking litany of shit Aris piled on Miranda. And I think when you start looking at the specifics of sexual harassment, at what actually happens, instead of soft little generalities like “made a female player uncomfortable,” it’s a whole lot more disgusting and harder to defend.
The only thing sadder than the sheer amount of bigotry in nerd culture is the speed at which nerds will leap to defend it.
This.
All this gamer shit just reminds me of my first D&D play, back before coming out. I was playing with two guys, both of whom wanted to bone me, and they were upset when I wanted to play a male character because then they couldn’t hit on me IN campaign, as well as out. When I refused to back down, they simply introduced a ridiculously overpowered item right off the bat to forcibly genital-swap my character.
And those guys were “nice” about it. Funny enough, I haven’t played D&D with much of anyone since, with the exception of a nice couple anarchists who weren’t decidedly NOT interested in boning me. (Or if they were, they didn’t show so.)
Christ, assholes like that chap my ass. And I can’t make them not be assholes >:( Get out of my hobby, assholes! Or at least stop being assholes!
I hope you at least enjoyed D&D with the anarchists.
RE: Falconer
Anarchist D&D was AWESOME. It was a very small campaign (was leaving the country in less than a week, so done in a weekend) with only a couple players. We played wizard librarians protecting a magical library from an anti-magic mob.
Just to be silly, I chose an uber-lawful half-orc bureaucrat abjurer. Through luck of the dice roll, pretty much everthing she did backfired, failed, or was undone within a few turns; if she wasn’t such a tank, she would’ve died, and it was really touch and go near the end. She was stuffy, pompous, and obsessed with paperwork, and she became the campaign favorite. (I think the anarchists found her a refreshing change of pace.) I still have her sheet! Good times, good times.
@LBT: That sounds awesome indeed. I should try something smaller-scale like that. Everything I try to keep going turns into save the world … again. I think some of my groups kind of expected it.
RE: Falconer
Yeah, I gotta give the DM kudos; she set up her campaign to be pretty tight and small. It was specifically a time limit campaign: it took X hours for the NPC head librarian to make our portal out of there. And it was a library surrounded by an angry mob, so no way we were getting out of that library any other way. She set her time/space boundaries really well, had lots of random rolls to add flavor, and we had a blast!
Aw man. Now I wanna play D&D again…
Me too. I’ve had the misfortune of never really being able to get a good group together to play with.
RE: Dracula
Yeah, I haven’t played since the Anarchist Weekend, and I lack the resources for a long-term campaign. But I’d love to have a quick play for the fun. My roomie plays, but not sure I want to deal with doing Trans 101 with his buddies.
Everybody I’ve talked to has trouble getting a group together.
And yet D&D is the biggest-selling RPG out there. I guess buying =/= playing, but I still want to ask, who’s playing this thing?
Although I have been pleasantly surprised to spot the PHB in the possession of students at schools here in the Bible belt on two separate occasions.
Well, when I was younger (about thirteen), the people I knew that actually played were my sister’s boyfriend’s friends. I just kinda tagged along sometimes.
It wasn’t all that much fun, since they were A) in thier twenties and B) kind of jerks.
Then when I got older, most of the friends I had that were interested in playing lived in other towns.