This Sunday I woke up in time to watch the Soul Calibur 5 finals for Final Round. I got to see a player from the Dominican Republic take the title and get his pimp cup all the while two commentators constantly mentioned that this is what the fighting game community is all about. Thankfully I had ample coffee as I watched all this because I was somewhat sleepy and the matches well worth staying up. But the one problem with the commentating is this constant talk about the Fighting Game Community (FGC) and how we are this and that. We need to take some time to explain that we are not a fighting game community; it was not that way before and it certainly is not now. This is not a bad thing. I do not intend to start a feud with the world at large who thinks they have an idea of what is going on inside of this part of the hobby. I do wish to throw some grenades at the erroneous grouping of all the different communities into one homogenous group. This is a disservice to our different communities which do not play the same games nor behave in entirely the same ways.
The FGC does not exist as it is portrayed by commentators and the comments of some members of the community; it certainly does not exist in the way it is portrayed in the general video game media. The way FGC gets used is as much a blanket statement as saying using the word Indians to refer to all the native peoples which were here before the European migration to the Americas. The communities which are referred to as the FGC are the adaptation and transition of various groups which shared a common gathering place at arcades. They were all the same genre; but the people who continually played those games created cultures for each of them. In a very real sense, every time a new fighting game gets released a brand new community gets created. The one thing that these groups have in common is the near complete loss of their gathering place.
As arcades died, so was the hobby of the fighting game player. Yes there were ports of the game for home console at the time, but often times these not ever quite up to par (that was until the Dreamcast for some games). Similarly the arcades provided had the right version of the games, it had by default the equipment which everybody used by means of the sticks and it was at a neutral place with, sometimes, plenty of space for bystanders. Arcades had their own hours; therefore meeting up at them did not depend on one person’s schedule. Card games have a similar quirk in which the place of business (card game shops or comic book shops that sell the product) often times becomes the meeting place of the community. The difference with card games is that people who play Magic: The Gathering are understood to be a different group than those who play Yu-Gi-Oh. With fighting games that distinction has not been made quite clear. Even though the people playing Alpha 2 were not the same people playing Tekken 3 who were not the same people playing X-Men vs Street Fighter who were not the same people playing Virtua Fighter. You had some people who play multiple games just like you do with card games, but these are an exception more than a rule. Most people at arcades were going to find the game they like and stick with it.
There are a couple of reasons why there was not and there continues to be a lack of transition between games. The first of them is practical: becoming good at one fighting game is time consuming. Learning match ups , combos, general strategies, and several other things takes time. Doing all of this while having to wait for your turn to come up made learning a fighting game a big time investment. The second is that finding the game you like leaves you in a state that is a combination between a drug addict and falling in love. While I was at the arcades, I loved Soul Calibur, Tekken 3 and Tekken Tag Tournament. When I got out of high school, the local community college had a Marvel vs Capom 2 cabinet which became my school girlfriend. There are some very strong emotional ties to the games we play and the ensuing dedication to them. I doubt there is a fighting game in the world that Justin Wong loves more than Marvel Vs Capcom 2. Similarly if you know why the famous Third Strike player Kuroda plays the game, at the very core of it is probably an intense emotional attachment to it. This also works in the opposite directions as there are players who have an intense distaste of other games. One of the big issues with eSports is that people want to think of it as a blanket group when instead they are engaging a community as well as engaging players of a game.
What happens after arcades die is that you have several displaced communities trying to keep each respective game alive. Out of these communities Shoryuken.com is probably the biggest and the best known. Similar communities can be found at TekkenZaibatsu.com, Dustloop.com, Meltybread.com, and 8wayrun.com. These communities serve three purposes: 1) they try and gather all the players of the game to make it easier to find opponents, 2) they explore their games to the fullest and 3) organize competitive events for their respective communities. These communities each have their own memes, jargon, leaders, gatekeepers, etc. While superficially these all look very similar, these are all culturally distinct groups. As such calling all of it one FGC ignores the differences of them as unique groups as much as the aforementioned example of calling pre-columbian natives “Indians.” Inside of some of the places the communities get split further apart under the name of the place. For Shoryuken, the people playing Capcom vs SNK 2 were different than those playing Marvel vs Capcom 2 who are different than those playing Super Turbo and who are different than those who play Third Strike (even further the needs of these groups differ and the culture around this game also splits apart from each other into more defined groups).
The issue with calling us the FGC is that it does not make distinction between a website like Shoryuken and a fighting game subforum at Gamefaqs; even though both have different goals and the people who are part of those communities have very different behaviors. There are plenty of people who buy the games but do not participate in any of the respective communities whether this would be a casual posting on a site or going to one of the local play groups. But at the moment all of our separate communities are held responsible for the actions of somebody at a tournament as well as a person who sends hate mail over X-box live or PSN. While doing research for another article I came across a video which had this in the description:
To a lot of us this really would leave us with our head scratching as we wondered why it would need to be discussed. The person who won is the person who won. Fighting games have a very black and white way of deciding these things. But this is just one way in which our separate group deals with the game compared to those who are not part of this community. While the outside worlds calls this cheap, in our own communities we may wonder how good of a thing this really is for the game, whether or not it would be good, and the most important three question we ask ourselves are: how do we replicate it, how do we prevent it from happening and if we cannot prevent then how do we beat it? Similarly the people who communicate with the producers of games are an intermingled mass between those who play with their cousin, to members of this community, to people who do not know you can hit Blanka out of his electricity therefore Ono should nerf it. The more our communities become exposed to the outside world, the more nuanced we need to be so people understand how to approach us. The transition of Shoryuken from pre-Street Fighter 4 into its current community is still showing growing pains. Had we made a better job information people about the community goals and culture of this particular community it would have gone over easier (I do intend to write a guide for new people). Shoryuken tried to be an FGC when at its heart it is the Capcom Competitive Fighting Game Community. This does not mean that if you are not competitive, you should not be part of the community. But that we are going to work with the games at a higher level than you are used to playing. This is a similar case for the rest of the communities.
As I had most of this sketched out I could not settled on a good name for explain the different goals of all of our different communities because it does include some of the casual players who never go to tournaments and people who go hard at their games without stopping to play for fun. The two names I had for our groups were either the Post Arcade Community or the Competitive Fighting Game Communities. I could also use the Post Arcade Competitive Fighting Game Community but that is a really long name and not all that sexy to the outsiders. But now that the MLG has picked up Soul Calibur 5 and King of Fighters XIII, more new members will come to these communities. These new members, as well as outside media, need to understand that the history of each game and their respective communities is different, nuanced and unique. The easier we are able to make it to the public those disctions and how the find the information, the better we will be able to absorb new members into the overall community. Even though we are united by tournaments (more on this in a couple of weeks), we each go home to different house and do things in different ways. These houses are all awesome and worthy of being respected.
Some of you may be wondering why I needed to write this and other such good stuff, this is the base for other articles in the future.