Well, that first blog post about the FGC and Noel Brown drama at CEO got a whole lot of love from all over the Internet. Most of that was, I think, because I was able to explain how disenfranchised and alienated many FGC members feel whenever we see our community get in the news for bad stuff.

But part of it was, I think, because I was mostly focused on how the press got it wrong, and not so focused on how we should have been handling it better. I wrote that article to defend our community from unfair outside criticism, but I don’t think our community is perfect. So this post (which should be significantly shorter than the last one, don’t worry) is a plea for other concerned community members to speak up and be more vocal in holding ourselves and our peers to a higher standard.

I first entered the fighting game community 12 years ago. (I have a 2001 join date on SRK!) I know that our people are better than the way we’re represented in the mainstream games press. The problem is that we’re really bad about speaking up when someone acts like an asshole, and that hurts us all.

FGC community dynamics and the need to speak up



The FGC is a notoriously fragmented and anarchic bunch; we’ve formed mini-tribes around physical region, games played, different online spaces (SRK forum threads, subreddits, Twitch channels, etc.), and there isn’t really any overarching organization that holds us all together. The closest thing we really have is Shoryuken.com, but SRK’s leadership has repeatedly expressed zero desire to do anything besides what they’re already doing – offering a website for the community to congregate around, organizing Evo, and other assorted promotional functions, and not acting as a central organizing body.

Add that to the fact that fighting games were an incredibly niche genre for a long time, so anyone who has been around for a while is mostly used to being ignored by the rest of the video game world (and the rest of the world in general), and we’re just kind of used to being able to stay under the radar, avoid scrutiny, and handle whatever grimy shit we have to deal with in-house. We’re cool with our friends, drama works itself out, and we just kind of keep on doing what we’re doing.

That’s gotten us pretty far, and it shows no signs of stopping soon. But the thing is, this community isn’t as small as it used to be, nor as obscure. We can’t count on sweeping shit under the rug any more – which is good, because we’re going to have to own up to our own internal bullshit (or see it broadcasted all over the press). CEO 2013 had over 40,000 people watching two streams over the weekend. Battle by the Bay in 1996 had 40. We’re major now.

Here’s the deal: When we interact with each other through fighting games, we are representing the fighting game community to the outside world. Not just our town, or our local scene, or just ourselves and our friends; we represent the whole community. When we do good things – participate in hype events that make other people want to join, help each other out, and welcome new blood to the scene – it reflects well on all of us. When we do bad things, it reflects poorly – on all of us.

And since we can’t rely on a central governing body to make decisions for us – decisions about who can and cannot play, or the kind of behavior and conduct that is acceptable, it means we need to be extra careful to individually voice our approval and disapproval when something comes up. Because if we are silent when someone is mistreated, it will look as though we approve of that mistreatment – both to the victim and to the outside world.

Case studies in stepping it up

I thought I’d use some of the Noel Brown stuff as an example of how we could do things a bit better.

For starters: Kotaku shouldn’t have been the first to talk about the arrest story in a public venue. We should have been talking about it. Yes, what happened was a private affair that didn’t happen at the tournament, and no one in this community is responsible for anyone’s behavior besides their own – but we should have acknowledged that Noel did something fucked up.

And yes, breaking a door and getting into a fistfight and hitting his girlfriend is fucked up. I know it’s easy to downplay the situation; easy to think about what we’d do if we thought someone was cheating on us, easy to believe that he just pushed her, easy to say that it’s none of our business and we should just ignore it. But it's irresponsible to ignore it, because that sends the message that we’re okay with domestic violence – that we’re willing to ignore it because it’s a private matter. In case you didn’t know: That’s an excuse people actually use to ignore domestic violence in real life outside of fighting games, too. “I think she’s being beaten by her spouse, but it’s not my place to say anything because it’s a private matter” – no.

Yes, the police came and did their job, butthat doesn’t mean we can wash our hands of the affair; we need to be confident enough to say to the world, “Noel, that was fucked up.” Say it on Twitter, write blogs, email sponsors, whatever – just do it.



Later, a guy named Nick Goebel hit me up on Twitter asking me what I thought about Local Battles (a New Jersey venue/player group) trying to crowdfund a return ticket for Noel Brown from Florida, so I looked into it.

From what I could tell, it sounded like the Local Battles guy found out that Noel missed his flight home, figured he needed one, and decided to hit up the community for donations to get him back. Later, he found out why Noel missed his flight (he’s awaiting a court hearing in Florida for the domestic violence charge from the weekend), did his best to disavow himself from the situation, and appears to be in the process of returning people’s money (as of earlier today, anyway), which I think is the right thing to do. Because when you’re on the inside of the community, you might just think, “Hey, that’s a bunch of people who like Noel Brown donating to bring him back home,” but when you're outside the community, you see it as the FGC banding together to support a guy who was arrested for domestic violence.

I understand the desire to help out a friend from the community. Loyalty is important, and I think the FGC is really good at that. But holding our friends accountable for their behavior when they do something wrong – something which is really hard to do – is more important. If we can’t hold our friends to higher standards, we can’t get mad when people outside our community do so for us.

Misogyny, homophobia, maturity, and accessibility

Misogyny and homophobia are important issues in the fighting game community. Of course, they’re major issues in pretty much every community, in and out of video games! And they shows up in different ways – making uninvited comments about a female player’s appearance in stream chat, or using homophobic or gendered slurs while trash talking are probably the most common.

To be sure, we need to stay vocal about not doing that. I know that some members of the FGC – particularly UltraDavid and James Chen – have done an excellent job advocating for people to ditch the homophobic and misogynist trash talk. It’s hard! It’s hard, at first, to be the guy who’s willing to call people out on it and make them feel defensive or hurt when we’re all having a good time playing games. It’s especially hard because our community is so young (though we are getting older), and it can take a long time to learn the difference between “You shouldn’t say those bad words” and “You shouldn’t use those words because they might hurt people and you won’t even know it”. But we have to continue to clean that shit up.

Words are important. (Think about how much you’ve been affected by the words you’ve read about the FGC over the last few days.) The essence of FGC hype isn’t that we use words that make people feel hurt and unwelcome – it’s that we all take these games seriously and we’re unafraid to show it. So stay crazy and excited and put ridiculous side bets on everything – just don’t call people bitches or faggots or anything like that. I get it – I used to call people those things too, and eventually I learned how it made other people feel, and now I feel uncomfortable just typing them out like that.

Also – and this should go without saying – hacking someone’s Facebook account and posting screencaps of private correspondence is not cool. Not only is it incredibly low-class and fucked-up and terrible, but in this particular case, it’s definitely got some misogynist sex-shaming aspects to it, so seriously, cut that shit out.

…

I had a revelation, the other day, while I was writing that first post. I was thinking about how hard it is to get started in the FGC – learning how to play a new game for the first time, learning how to actually play a game seriously, getting used to the idea of meeting people and going places based solely on a common interest in Street Fighter, all that stuff. It’s a lot of work! Certainly harder than downloading a copy of League of Legends and playing online forever – butit’s so, so rewarding.

Then I thought: When we say or do messed-up, offensive shit, it makes it even harder to enter this community. Any woman who sticks around in the FGC has to deal with a metric ton of extra shit in addition to all the stuff about getting good and making friends – and it only takes one asshole on one bad day to make you not want to come back.

I don’t want that to be the case. I want this community to be more welcoming and inclusive, not less. And if that means I call people out on poor behavior, then so be it. But one person alone can’t do shit; this is something we all have to get behind. (Or if not all of us, at least the silent majority in the FGC that is similarly embarrassed by the conduct of a few folks but not confident enough to speak out about it.) Let’s be better people and make our community even better.

Because all this time spent writing about drama and bullshit distracts us from the real problem: Beating Chris G.

Time to step down from my soapbox for a while. Thanks for all the great comments and sharing and tweets and stuff. Happy July 4th, y'all.

–patrick miller