Nullary Sources

Patrick Klepek at Giant Bomb has a transcript of a recent episode of Capcom and IGN’s webshow Cross Assault. The transcript is of an exchange between Jared Rea, community manager of the streaming video site TwitchTV, and Aris Bakhtanians, a competitive fighting gamer and head of Cross Assault’s Team Tekken.

Rea: Can I get my Street Fighter without sexual harassment?

Bakhtanians: You can’t. You can’t because they’re one and the same thing. 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—it’s StarCraft. There’s nothing wrong with StarCraft if you enjoy it, and there’s nothing wrong with anything about eSports, but why would you want just one flavor of ice cream, you know? There’s eSports for people who like eSports, and there’s fighting games for people who like spicy food and like to have fun. There’s no reason to turn them into the same thing, you know?

You can’t go to the NBA and say “hey, I like basketball, but I don’t want them to play with a basketball, I want them to play with a football.” It just doesn’t…it doesn’t make sense to have that attitude, you know? These things are established for years. That would be like someone from the fighting game community going over to StarCraft and trying to say “hey, StarCraft, you guys are too soft, let’s start making sexual harassment jokes to each other on StarCraft.” That’s not cool, people wouldn’t like that. StarCraft isn’t like that. People would get defensive, and that’s what you’re trying to do the fighting game community, and it’s not right. It’s ethically wrong.

You giant shitmonster.

1. Institutionalization of something terrible does not magically make said terrible thing not terrible. 100,000 people doing something terrible means that something terrible has been done 100,000 times.
2. If your community is so inexorably linked to something terrible that stopping that terrible thing will make it a different community, then have you considered that your community is actually just terrible (because it is).
3. Fuck.
4. I’m pretty sure the reason that people playing StarCraft wouldn’t like it if someone were to jump in and make sexual harassment jokes is because that’s a terrible thing to do, not because there’s some gentlemen’s agreement against it.
5. It boggles me how someone can conclude that “it’s ethically wrong” to tell people not to make sexual harassment jokes and not immediately recoil in horror at what they just said.
6. Seriously, I cannot get over that final sentence, “it’s ethically wrong.” What an abhorrent trainwreck of an argument.