Friday, April 24, 2015

Cross Assault sexual harassment controversy overshadows on-screen combat

http://venturebeat.com/2012/02/29/cross-assault-sexual-harassment-controversy-overshadows-on-screen-combat/

We have studied this particular incident in class and it is an old news, however I wanted bring back this issue because violence and harassment  in online communities are still presence nowadays.

On Feburary, 2012, Miranda Pakozdi was harassed by another tournament participant, Aris Bakhtanians. His comments toward Miranda were things like: “what is your bra size,” “take your shirt off,” “I will smell you very closely,” and so on. Unfortunately for Bakhtanians, these comments were streamed live on video as part of Capcom's Cross Assault reality series, which pits a team of Street Fighter players and a team of Tekken players against each other in a tournament for significant prize money. However, instead of an apology he blamed the gaming community. "Can I get my Street Fighter without sexual harassment?" asked Twitch.tv community manager Jared Rae of moderately well-known Tekken player Aris Bakhtanians during a conversation about sexist language at pro fighting-game tournaments. "You can't. You can't because they're one and the same thing," he answered. "This is a community that's, you know, 15 or 20 years old, and the sexual harassment is part of a culture, and if you remove that from the fighting game community, it's not the fighting game community." Miranda decided to give up the tournament after receiving on-going harassment by Aris Bakhtanians. From this incident, Aris Bakhtanians lost his sponsorship. The sponsor, Tom Cannon said “we cannot continue to let ignorant, hateful speech slide.” He’s since apologized, explaining that his remarks were made in anger, but that didn’t help much. However, as stated in the article, few voices supported Aris. Twitter user, Supre Arcade twitted “@Super_Yan the entire time you were giggling and enjoying the attention. Someone mentions harassment and not until then do you complain?”


I personally think that sexual harassment is not part of the culture, obviously. It exists, sure, but it's not mainstream. I just think that it's a universal truth of the internet, games and any online communities, from YouTube to political comments threads, that awful people feel more comfortable hurling abuse at you if you're female, gay or part of a racial minority. Even though this specific incident that I’m talking about is old news, but many violence and harassment are still presence in the online community. Are things like the Hepler and Cross Assault situations acceptable? No. Should we quietly ignore incidences of sexism in the gaming community in the hope that it might go away on its own? No. But is this a part of gaming culture? Absolutely not. We are not like that. It's important that we make our voices heard, too. 

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