Support NeoGAF

[Delusibeta]

So, from my Twitter I came across this blog post. Caution: contains FGC drama. Disclaimer: not a member of the FGC.

Some samples, although it's probably best to read the whole thing.

"The fighting game community is a bunch of low-class misogynist assholes" has been a popular story for a while now, and it’s not fair. To be sure, we should be calling bullshit out everywhere, but the FGC gets a disproportionate amount of scrutiny.

One of the world’s best SC2 players, Ilyes “Stephano" Satouri gets arrested after DreamHack 2012 for being drunk and disorderly: No Kotaku story [although, to be fair, GameSpot did pick it up].
A spectator (?) straight up punches a dude in a wheelchair at MLG Dallas: No Kotaku story.
Korean pro-gaming [SC2] team WeRRA disbands following a sexual assault scandal: No Kotaku story.
A mid-tier [FGC] player who hasn’t really won anything of note gets arrested for assault after finding out another player is involved with his girlfriend: Front page on Kotaku.

Here’s the deal: I’m tired of only getting in the mainstream game news for the bad stuff because there is so much more than just the bad stuff. You should know how it feels; think about each time you see video games show up in the evening news. To their credit, games news reporters are doing okay at reporting the outright acts of charity from the FGC (funding scholarships, for example; we’ll see if anyone picks up on saving a STL Tekken player’s house from foreclosure). In other words, if Noel [aforementioned FGC player] is “newsworthy" but none of those other incidents mentioned about were, there is something seriously suspect with your newsworthiness-rubric.

And no, this is kind of work isn’t “shining light on gender issues". If you’re writing about gender issues, you write like this; you write from the perspective of the victim, because that’s who matters most. Not like you’re writing a tabloid story for a gossip rag — because that’s not news, that’s entertainment.

The problems come in when you start reporting on a story of a young man behaving badly—when he is a young man of color, from a community that is racialized as predominantly non-white and classed as working-class. Not because his behavior is defensible (from what little we know of the situation, it wasn’t) — but because your reporting contains a racialized and classed subtext.

Zolani Stewart mentioned it best on Twitter: “A mugshot of a white man is individual as criminal. A mugshot of a black man is ‘black men as criminals’." In this context, Brown’s mugshot isn’t just about him — it’s standing in for black men, and other men of color, and in this context, the FGC as well — though that’s probably the least important identifier.

With that in mind, I would offer one more point of emphasis: Pretty much anywhere in video games besides the FGC are racialized as white spaces; on the Internet, everyone is a white male by default, and certainly both the professional and enthusiast sectors of games are dominated by white men. So when you post a mugshot of a black man right smack in the middle of Kotaku, Stewart’s effect is even more pronounced.

At this point, I’m reading a story probably written by a white guy, on an enthusiast site that caters to a mostly-white-guy audience, about a man of color from my extended community who fucked up and hit his girlfriend after finding out she was involved with another guy.

Do you know why tabloids stay in business? It’s because they sell you stories that make you feel better about yourself. It feels good to read about how the rich and famous do things that you would never do. They allow you to pass judgment on people who make far more money than you ever well, because that feels good.

Dude has a point.

So, let's discuss, shall we?

 

[EscoBlades]

Crowding out effect inbound.

 

[Boogalogist]

Damn, I thought was about character creation...Race as in Orc, Elf, Ogre, etc...and Class as in Fighter, Wizard, etc.

 

[Azull]

Damn, I thought was about character creation...Race as in Orc, Elf, Ogre, etc...and Class as in Fighter, Wizard, etc.

Same here.

 

[Clawww]

that blog-post is spot on

it's going to be fun seeing the responses in this thread

 

[jschreier]

This thread is badly in need of context. First of all, here's the article that triggered this Tumblr post: http://kotaku.com/top-fighting-gamer-arrested-for-allegedly-hitting-his-e-635549540

Patrick, who wrote the Tumblr, argues that we don't cover "more than just the bad stuff" in the fighting game community, yet we have, plenty of times:
http://kotaku.com/5980896/fighting-gamers-raise-225744-for-breast-cancer-research
http://kotaku.com/5954935/fighting-game-community-gives-out-20500-in-student-scholarships
http://kotaku.com/5924351/here-are-evo-2012s-champions

And he argues that the fighting game community gets "a disproportionate amount of scrutiny," yet we've covered plenty of similar stories in other communities too:
http://kotaku.com/league-of-legends-player-jailed-after-terrorist-threat-610691101
http://kotaku.com/south-korean-pro-gamer-arrested-in-a-drug-bust-462484032
http://kotaku.com/5951516/professio...nded-for-saying-he-had-sex-with-a-14+year+old

I'll also post what I tweeted to Patrick:

Again you continue to act like we don't cover similar stories in other communities, and like we don't cover positive elements of the FGC. Both of those things are not true, as I've shown you multiple times. You speak from a position of feeling victimized. I get that. But you are lashing out at a reporter and a media outlet for covering a story. Not for unfairly covering a story, nor for inaccurately covering a story - for covering a story.

And it was fair. I was more than generous to Alex Jebailey, whose remarks I printed in full despite his antagonism towards our website. I didn't publish the story until I got my hands on the police report, because I wanted to make sure everything that I had heard from people in attendance was true. You may feel like the gaming media has been unfair to the fighting game community in general, and I can't speak to that either way. Nor should I be held responsible for it.

As for newsworthiness, if your question is, "why did you cover this story?" my answer is simple: because I felt like it was a story that should be told. I felt like it was information worth bringing to light. I discussed the story with my editor, and we both decided it was worth coverage on Kotaku. It's an important story that reflects some bigger issues in gaming culture that need to be discussed as often as possible.

This is the type of conversation you could have about much of the content on our site. Some would argue that conversations about race in gaming or sexism at E3 aren't newsworthy. Kotaku's staff would disagree.

I'm happy with how we approached yesterday's story, and if the same thing happened tomorrow, I'd approach it the same exact way. Ideally we'd also have coverage of other interesting things that happened at the same tournament, because we owe it to our readers to tell them about as many interesting aspects of the gaming world as we can. That's something we plan to work on, as you saw in this story: http://kotaku.com/yes-fighting-game-fans-please-call-kotaku-647166652 And we'll continue to cover stories like yesterday's as long as they happen.

Hope that helps.

 

[EscoBlades]

that blog-post is spot on

it's going to be fun seeing the responses in this thread

Don't expect much in the way of anything constructive.

 

[sibarraz]

My problem with this particular story is, how does this minor incident relate with gaming culture?

What I want to say, is how did gaming or the FGC for the matter, provoked the incident between noel brown and his girlfriend?

Couple Fights happen everywhere, are all of those a consequence of playing videogames? why should we care as ''gamers'' that noel brown punched his GF?. It was a really ugly thing to do, and Noel Brown should suffer all the punishment that the justice in the usa decides to give him, but in the end, why as a gamer should I care for that?

Wait I want to say, is that this kind of incident should be considered personal and not news worthy, since in the end, it doesn't reflect anything about gaming culture. The only thing that reflects is that noel brown was a big jerk and an idiot, but isn't a big enough incident to try to rally the troops about mysogyny issues in gaming or the fgc. Like the blog said, noel brown is such a mid character in the fgc that his doings shouldn't be of interest to anyone outside of it.

I know that the FGC has lot of despicable traits that should be fixed in order, but really, posting this kind of incident an ignoring other incidents for other gaming events really make it feels like an attack to the fgc, even though I believe that it wasn't the intention of kotaku to do it

Sorry for my english, I know that my redaction is bad, but hope that my point of view was understood

 

[Delusibeta]

Ah, Schrider. Not defending the accusation to tabloid journalism. I'll just leave this thing I blatantly nicked from Huw_Dawson's posts on the subject.

An immediate simplification of the problem. The complaints can be characterised by this, sure, but only if you want to ignore the actual complaint. As soon as people heard about this story, there were already jokes about how Kotaku was going to put up an article about it. This is because Kotaku is regarded as an arrogant outside website blackmouthing the whole community to stir up controversy and pad its click numbers. The article also forgets that Kotaku have a reputation for this kind of hack journalism far outside the FGC. “LOL Kotaku" is a common response to stupid Kotaku articles on GAF, Twitter and other public fora. Ever see that fake “Lego is sexist" article floating around the net? Guess what website it pretends to be from. This overal opinion of the site, especially by NeoGAF and folks that follow NeoGAF (many, many people in the FGC) colours opinions of the site and its motivations.

People are angry because this is another example of Kotaku using negative news coming out of the FGC for its own ends.

That, I feel, is ultimately the point: tabloid journalism, click-bait articles and the like. Sure, you're going to click on an article that says "The Xbone is dead, the PS4 is your next console" (cough cough Edge cough), and you're going to click on an article that starts with (and I quote)

Orlando police arrested competitive gamer Noel Brown Saturday morning, charging him with "domestic violence battery" for allegedly hitting his ex-girlfriend and another competitive gamer after catching them in a hotel room together.

I dunno, it kinda continues with Kotaku's "oh, the FGC is being misogynistic again!" trend. Bonus points for the less than flattering mugshot, which was omitted from your cited articles (with the exception of the LoL article, which a) had an artistic filter over it and b) was about comments made on Facebook, so it's about as much to do with videogames as the Robin Hood Airport incident. I'd argue that it's another example of Kotaku tabloidising, for want of an actual word. I could see it falling in Gizmondo's remit, but attaching League of Legends to the article strikes me as clickbait: it's an irrelevant detail included to attract fans and/or haters of the game to the article).

 

[Gentleman Jack]

This is because Kotaku is regarded as an arrogant outside website blackmouthing the whole community to stir up controversy and pad its click numbers.

I don't see that in the latest article. FGC can't react without overreacting, or is it just a few vocal bloggers?

 

[jschreier]

[snip]

Ah, I thought this thread was about race and class in games media, not "tabloid journalism." If you want to start a thread about tabloid journalism - and I'd be happy to participate in a thread like that - feel free. But if we're talking about race and class in games media, and "specifically Kotaku" as your thread title reads, then you should address what I actually said, or perhaps some of the many articles we've written about race in gaming. (http://kotaku.com/5987766/this-is-why-we-need-more-black-people-making-video-games)