The Pretender and Good vs Evil.
New Litany rough draft, feel free to shred to pieces as always:
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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 commented on how 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 and 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 misconceptions people have about us when it comes to our behaviors as well as being able to identify actual members as opposed to people who bought the game and have an opinion.
The fighting game community does not exist in the mind of some of the commentators and 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 and that for the most part have lost it.
The place of which I’m writing is the arcades. 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 these were 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. In a very real sense, card games have a similar problem 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. A card shop going under for a Magic: The Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh or Pokemon is a much a devastating loss to them as was the closing of Arcades. The often ignored part of arcades is that they were not housing one particular community, they were housing several communities much like a card shop can have Magic, Yu-Gi-Oh and Pokemon players.
My experience with arcades was in Puerto Rico and from what I have read it seems that the experience is similar in arcades across the world: every fighting game in an arcade had its own community. This means that 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 players who bounced from game to game because they love fighting games. But those who jumped from game to game were not many.
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 again is a bigger time investment. The second is that finding the game you like leaves you in a state in 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 played 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.
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. Personally these are all culturally distinct as such calling all of it one FGC ignores the difference as much as the aforementioned example of calling groups “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).
A issue of calling us an FGC is that it does not make distinction between a website like Shoryuken and the subforum at Gamefaqs about the game 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 planned on writing, 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?
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. 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. [/details]
