« Cognitive Dissonance: A Lack of Perspective »

The fighting game scene has changed tremendously since the release of Street Fighter 4 in 2008. Where once gamers were struggling to fill 32-man brackets, now there is hardly enough room for all the entrants at many venues. Players are regularly able to not only pay for their tournament expenses by winning, but also pay some bills or make a profit. And as the flood of games has increased, niche scenes have been able to reemerge and grab some of the spotlight. However, a disconnect is growing between the mindset before the fighting game revival and after. Veteran players, unable to remember the old days, and new players who only know a post-Street Fighter 4 era are placing expectations on a gaming community that never before had them. In doing so, they are creating an environment that is becoming hostile for smaller games in the very scene they wish to promote and expand.

Before 2008, a tournament was considered amazing if it got more than 100 people, and the game was still considered alive if it could pull 30 consistently. Now, Wednesday Night Fights gets more than 100 entrants for Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 as a weekly tournament and people assume that is the norm. Maybe it is for the big two Capcom games, but the rest of the fighting game scene has not ballooned proportionally. While there are certainly more people playing fighters than there were half a decade ago, those players have not spread to all games. Mortal Kombat has been maligned in recent weeks as a dead game after being announced as part of Evolution 2012, but it is a game that consistently gets good turnouts if the scene were to judge it by pre-2008 standards. The game gets, on average, 50 to 60 entrants at most big tournaments, which would have signaled a very healthy scene five years ago. But it is simply not on the same level of popularity that the Capcom games are; in fact, no game is on that level. Outside of Evolution, almost no other game can garner more than 100 entrants on a regular basis. Yes, there are big turnouts at certain tournaments–Final Round is a great Tekken event–but while it's always good to aim high the scene should accept these numbers are not normally attainable and should not be the basis for whether a game is alive.

The reason this expectation is so damaging is that it causes animosity between scenes, which in turn causes players to play one game instead of another. Blazblue players were quick to attack Mortal Kombat as undeserving after the Evolution announcement, and tempers flared as both scenes argued about who was 'less worthy' to have the Evo spot. Kombat players, meanwhile, were already spoiling for a fight after months of promoting their game, crisscrossing the nation and still getting told the game was dead by people online.

image courtesy of Monique MendozaAnd while I cannot begrudge SF 4 and MvC 3 their popularity–their successes have helped us all–there is a very real and damaging myopia in the current scene that centers around them. As the 2000s wore on and few new fighters emerged, players began to specialize in only one game; they would play others casually, but often not enter tournaments or progress past a certain skill level. It was during this time that many current scenes got their names: anime, Capcom, 3-D. This was, of course, a huge sea change from the times when Street Fighter stalwarts such as Alex Valle were winning the Tekken Tag Tournament nationals in America. That trend has continued its downward slide, and now those hardening walls between scenes have solidified to the point where there is the Capcom scene … and then there's everything else.

This separation of scenes feeds into the animosity between them because it produces one-sided arguments. With a few notable exceptions bridging the gaps–people like Arturo 'Sabin' Sanchez–the only words exchanged between the Mortal Kombat and Capcom scenes are normally words of derision or, even worse, pure ignorance. What were once isolated digs and arguments online have become accepted as valid reasons to avoid one game or another. These beliefs can hurt the scene by scaring off new players. When once a gamer might give SoulCalibur V a shot because a casual friend seems interested in it, now many players might tell their friend to play another, 'better' game. For a casual player, this is basically an 'un-vitation' to the community. Sometimes playing a different game brings new people into the scene and sometimes it doesn't, but there is no real cost to the veteran player other than time.

Finally, money has fed into this separation and stigmatization as well. While the payouts for placing at games such as MvC3 and SF4 have increased and therefore given greater benefits for players' hard work, some players have abandoned other games and do not play new games unless there is a potential payout reward. This makes sense given the mounting pressure and amount and depth of competition these big cash prizes have brought, but it has again left many other living communities considered dead. Paid player sponsorships only further this division, as companies want their players on top of the biggest games and may tell them to not 'waste time' on smaller titles. 

The fighting community has indeed changed. While a bigger scene has brought more rewards and varied competition to each tournament, many smaller games with active communities are now being kicked aside and chewed up along the way. This is, of course, the nature of business but has never been the nature of the community in terms of games that have national support. And as more older players leave the scene and money enters it, the ties to the old days, good or bad, are diminishing. Maybe this is simply inevitable, an evolution of the scene. But hopefully the scene can find a way to keep its character and move into the future.