[-empyre-] week 2: user-based innovation VS the crystallization of a bro-world?

[Gabriel Menotti]

Thanks, Ian, for this closer view on the history and environment of
competitive gaming! From your report, it is clear how the community
engaged in this sort of activity share the same values and behaviors
across different levels of organization. Your description of fighting
games competitions suggests that the development of the community
structure coincides with the increasing self-preservation of certain
modes of playing – so that, as you said, participation “becomes
cyclical in nature.” This is particularly interesting if we consider
that this community is born from a deviation in the regular mode of
playing console games (e.g. playing in public, for an audience, what
was meant to be played in private).

So, what I'd like to do is to compare this idea of cyclical practices
with the notions of identity that you evoked in your text – both
individual and collective. At the beginning, you highlighted the
nature of competition as a process of self-discovery (that is, of
one’s own self). I suppose this could be compared to the kind of
character formation fostered by martial arts – which, to a large
extent, is carried through the disciplinarization of the subject – the
apprenticeship not only of certain skills, but also the
internalization of an ancillary code of ethics. Hence, my first
question would be: is mastery really a process of self-discovery, or
would it be a process of self-definition – one that, paradoxically,
depends on the accordance to a pre-defined system?

Likewise, you finish your post wondering if the growth of a subculture
would cause it to lose its original identity. According to the same
perspective as above, I would ask: isn’t this process of “growth,”
which structures a community and consolidates certain practices,
precisely the process of formation of a communitarian identity? In
other words, is there any original identity to be preserved? Isn’t the
resistance to new players and modes of playing the affirmation of an
identity that didn’t exist before them?

Finally, I think it would be really interesting to hear more about the
“transitionary state” the fighting game community is passing through.
Maybe it can shed some light on the way these socio-technical systems
are constituted.

Best!
Menotti