For as long as graphics in video games have been realistic, people have criticized video game developers for the vulgar or crass depiction of women. Comically hyper-sexualized female characters are usually written off as marketing tools to pander to younger audiences, and because (so the argument goes) nobody is really hurt in the process, it is often ignored.

Misogyny in gaming is often argued on the basis of pure aesthetics. But the issue of misogyny in gaming is not just predicated on character design anymore; it has grown into something more systemic that frightens me as a gamer. It took a blatant act of laser-guided abuse to understand how many layers there are to sexual harassment in gaming.

As part of their promotion for Street Fighter X Tekken, prolific game developer and publisher Capcom funded a reality show called “Cross-Assault” where competitive Street Fighter and Tekken players compete for $25,000. It only took one episode of the show for a female competitor, Miranda “Super Yan” Pakozdi to be inundated with lewd sexual comments from the live-chat viewers, fellow competitors and even from her own coach, Aris Bakhtanians, a well-known champion of the fighting game community. She went on to forfeit the match and lost her chance at advancing.

The video is painful to watch as she gets verbally harassed, and even smelled, by Bakhtanians.

After she tweeted about her discomfort, Bakhtanians’ justification for his actions made heads spin all over the Internet. When Justin Rae, Twitch.tv’s Community Manager, asked him on a later episode, “Can I get my Street Fighter without the sexual harassment?” He replied, “You can’t. You can’t because they’re one and the same thing. This is a community that’s, you know, 15 or 20 years old, and 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.”

The outlet that reported on this first, Giant Bomb, got its share of blowback from the community, criticized as being one-sided and unfair with their reporting. Many commentators argued that it was Bakhtanians just being Bakhtanians, and trash-talking really is part of the competition.

It takes only five minutes on Xbox Live and three comments on any video game-related YouTube video featuring a woman to realize that this kind of sexist rhetoric is everywhere gaming communities are. While many in the fighting game community are upset for being singled out, it is disgusting that this behaviour exists at all and that there is any sort of defence of this kind of conduct, excusing it as some sort of tradition.

Bakhtanians and the other guilty competitors have since apologized, and gamers have moved on, but as long as the industry grows to include more than just adolescent males, more of this insular fight club mentality will come to the forefront. Gamers know these attitudes are everywhere. Wait until everyone else does.

Is a public shaming good for the industry? Generally, no. Nobody wants to be represented by the loudest, craziest members of their community. But it might take just that for the 20-somethings who still use half-baked apologies to finally grow up and realize it needs to stop.

One does not have to look far for first-hand accounts of sexism, racism and homophobia in the gaming community. For years, feminist gamers and even peer-reviewed literature have expounded the types of discrimination in gaming but nobody really seems to care. When it is actually done in front of a camera and then blatantly brushed aside as “boys being boys,” that takes a special kind of entitlement.

To those who subscribe to Bakhtanians’ thoughts on the fighting game community tradition, it’s really this simple: sexual harassment is not a tradition worth conserving. I hope gamers, in all communities, realize that feeling entitled to malicious trash-talk is inherently repugnant and come to the conclusion that competition only gets this ferocious when you are not playing a game for fun anymore.

And we are at an unfortunate point where as long as abusive heckling is condoned, for some, games will never be fun.

—

Photo: Supplied