“Okay, it has to be said: fighting games are categorically bad.”
Thereby hot video game outlet, Mika, a Twitter user with less than 200 followers, left fans in a frenzy on social media. Even now, she is a little puzzled by the passionate conversation that she inadvertently started. “I was thinking about the game design from a competitive point of view,” said Mika Inverse.
Hot photos cost ten cents a dozen. In the age of social media, you can’t roll the mouse wheel without finding an opinion that will surely put someone on the wrong track. This is especially true in video game circles, where passionate gamers are no strangers to criticizing and defending online games. But a deeper dive into Mika’s post and the speech that emerged from it highlights our strange tendency to pile up strangers when they deign to criticize something that many love.
The topic of 30 tweets is an odyssey that is in parts furious and hilarious. Mika destroys an entire genre, without taking prisoners along the way. (It is a family pleasure to see people’s brains in short circuit with the opinion of someone who dares to be different from their own opinion.) She spits everything from awkward movements to insurmountable skill imbalances, and makes a few short sentences about some of the most loved games in the genre.
“Any genre where the highest quality games are Dragon sphere and Soul Calibur it doesn’t deserve the embarrassment of existing, ”she writes.
In just a few days, thousands of people flocked to Mika’s Twitter account to fill out their responses and direct messages with furious comments. Some laughed like a speech from someone who is bad at fighting games, while others resorted to negligible transphobic attacks. Inverse spoke to Mika, who chose not to give her full name due to the doxxing she received in the fallout, about why she thought it made people especially excited.
“I think it comes from an attachment between people and the things they like and play as a kind of identity,” says Mika. “In a way, I feel validated. If the topic of the tweet did anything, it exposed some negative elements in the community. “
Speaking to Mika on the phone, she is nowhere near as aggressive as her tweets suggest. She is warm and balanced throughout the conversation, offering thoughtful yet pointy criticism, full of knowledge and nuances. What’s interesting, while not surprising, is to hear that she grew up loving fighting games.
“I grew up playing a lot of fighting games with friends and family. My first video game was actually Mortal combat on PlayStation 2, ”says Mika. “As I grew up, the fighting games were in the background. I tried to go back to Super Smash Bros. in 2015, and I just realized how different fighting games were from my perceptions of them when I was younger. “
Mika’s opinions come from a place of love, not hate. She thinks there is a lot of value in games with a high level of skill, she just would like fighting games to do a better job of welcoming newcomers with more elaborate tutorials or content for an intentional player.
The great barrier to entry for fighting games is a recurring theme in all of Mika’s criticism. When she criticizes how fighting games deal with movement, for example, she is framed in the context of how little intuitive it may seem to newcomers. The same goes for the genre’s dependence on complex entries, which leaves little intermediary space between casual and high-level play.
“For younger players trying to get into those games, it is very scary,” says Mika. They will not be familiar with extensive combos. It enters an environment where if a player wants to play on a more than casual level, many of the best aspects of fighting games go to waste. You just have to choose a character and throw your life away by crushing it. “
It is a very reasonable point of view. But rationality tends to fly out the window when it comes to large online spaces. Twitter is not suitable for individual conversations; was designed for maximum visibility. Personal opinion can be transformed into public speech with a click, opening the floodgates for a furious crowd of responses. Mika is still unsure how verified Twitter accounts with tens of thousands of followers ended up finding her profile virtually unknown.
She admits that some of her own language choices have obscured some of their nuances and exacerbated the response.
“If you play Smash you’re honestly just a pedophile, ”says one of his particularly impressive tweets.
While Mika intended it to be a criticism of the Super Smash Bros. community. and her recent revelations of sexual abuse, she says it is not something she would have written if she knew that the post would attract so much attention. She just thought she was falling into the abyss, but there is no real void on social media.
Mika found a strangely moving silver lining amid the flood of direct Twitter messages. She received numerous messages from fans who invited her to their own communities to play some games in a more friendly environment.
“There were a lot of really cool people who weren’t trying to start a firestorm, but to provide an inclusive space within the fighting game community that was safe, rather than more reactionary,” she says. “Finding these communities and elevating them is the best thing we can do as fans of these games.”
This disclosure in good faith contrasts sharply with the thousands of insulting responses that still pile up under the thread. By understanding where Mika was coming from and offering a welcoming hand, these fans show that human connection is still possible on social media. Engaging meaningfully with other players, rather than blindly entering the rage wave, can enrich our online experiences and form communities for the better.
To put it in terms of Super Smash Bros .: 1v1 me, no item, Fox only, final destination.