The last few days we got news stories that fuel people who think the video games community is for man-children with a “no girls allowed” policy.
We get an interview from Giant Bomb with professional players, the Tekken Team, in which Aris Bakhtanians said “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.”
I always assumed it was the, how you say… the FIGHTING GAMES that made the fighting games community. The sexism part is the antiquated nonsense we need to get rid of, with out the games though there wouldn’t be a fighting games community, hence no monkey laser tag community (maybe one day).
Listening to the exchange you can tell that Bakhtanians is agitated, but that is no excuse for the statements he makes in trying to defend bigoted remarks of any kind. He goes on to say how it is unethical to try and add such remarks to other gaming communities (True) and the same applies to trying to removed such remarks from the fighting games community (Do I even need to tell you this one is false?) His argument is clearly coming from an angry standpoint since this is not logical and just a man getting upset and defending for the sake of defending. Chris Sims says what I’m trying to say about all that’s wrong with this so much better than I can.
Bakhtanians later issued an apology in which he admits that how he phrased his argument was entirely off base and did not convey his original intent. His is definitely right on the off base part.
Anyways onto the second story, Kotaku decided to do a humorous article, too bad it never felt like anything but sleazy with many never finding the humor in it (I still can’t find any). In it, writer Kris Kail tells his story of how he had sex in his bedroom of Sonic the Hedgehog merchandise. The article doesn’t have that tone that many of Cracked’s articles do (you know, the humor) and shows why Kotaku is not Cracked, we never got the knowing wink or a good joke beyond “I had sex with a lady in my Sonic bed!” That’s it, the whole joke. I just saved you all that time of reading that article. I heard people calling it “Tucker Max” and “Maxim” style writing, and those words were not meant to compliment the article, in case you enjoy those things (I ask in seriousness, why do you? I’m fascinated to understand.)
So there we go, two stories from the past couple of days that I hope those who wish to detract from games never learn of and only see the rest of the communities ire at such events.