Choose your fighter
I
Working out which character to main when you pick up a fighting game is hard. There’s a lot of factors that go into it: their aesthetic, their place on tier lists, their moveset. As someone who’s always on the verge of a character crisis as soon as they boot up a fighting game, I spend a lot of time thinking about why I play the characters I do. I try to focus on gameplay first, choosing someone that meshes with my fighting style. But one thing I’ve noticed across all the fighting game characters I’ve played for years now, is that they all have one thing in common: all of them are women.
Initially, I don’t think this was a conscious decision. The characters just happened to do what I wanted them to - control space in one way or another, while firing a lot of different projectiles, like Ivy in Soul Calibur, Poison in Street Fighter, or Skarlet in Mortal Kombat. When it comes to the gameplay, I understand why I’d choose them: each of the characters play in similar ways. But I began to notice they also share a similar visual style. While I was playing Soul Calibur 6 (Bandai Namco Studios, 2018), a friend said to me that I always play as “tops and women” in fighting games, and the more I think about it, the more sense it makes.
One of the things that makes choosing a fighter important - more so than say, the outfit you deck out a character with in an FPS - is that they feel like more of an avatar, more representative of The Player. Everything from the focus on one-on-one competition, to how games like Street Fighter V (Capcom, 2016) proclaim YOU LOSE on the screen after a defeat, bring the player and their character closer together. It’s about identification, being drawn to a character for what they say about you as much as for the things they do in-game.
There’s a scene early on in Looking (2014), HBO’s short-lived series on contemporary gay life, where Patrick (Jonathan Groff) plays a fighting game at a launch party and talks about how he always gravitates towards playing female characters; that there’s some connection between queerness and choosing a female fighter. And while playing as Chun-Li isn’t an act of solidarity, it does open the door to the strangeness of gaming spaces and the relationship between players and their characters.
I wanted to play as Poison in Street Fighter V because she’s trans. It’s not something I’d ever really seen before in a fighting game. She was released as DLC in the summer of 2019, the year I’d first start writing about my gender, and telling people about it. Two years later, I talked to an old friend on Discord about Poison, and the relationship that she has with representation in fighting games. They told me that “Poison was made for extremely transphobic reasons but sort of accidentally became a trans icon.”
Poison is the only instance of me picking a character exclusively because of what they represent. The summer that Poison dropped for SFV, I bought a pink wig to wear to fighting game tournaments. It felt like a moment of serendipity, like the reclamation of Poison herself; a kind of happy accident. Identification in fighting games exists that way. It isn’t quite fully formed like other kinds of media where you can go out of your way to look for something that shows a perfect reflection of who you are - or who you might want to be - and how you see the world. It’s more fragmented, more abstract; you find parts of yourself, things that contradict expectations, and embrace them, taking them - literally - into battle.
II
Spend any time with fighting games and it's hard not to notice that the community surrounding them is overwhelmingly male. There are a few players here and there that buck that trend - most famously SonicFox - but every time I’ve gone to any fighting game event, it's felt like a room full of men and then me. I don’t know if this creates any kind of conscious decision to play female characters, but it does become something I have a heightened awareness of. As if playing as women in every game is a way of sending a message about my gender. There’s a gulf here that needs to be navigated, between the person holding the controller and their avatar on screen, something that gets complicated by the difference between playing fighting games digitally versus in arcades, face-to-face.
I went to a local tournament for the Power Rangers fighting game, Battle For the Grid (nWay, 2019), with a team of three female characters, and ended up having a lot of conversations with people about the difference between online and in person play. This was the first time in over a year anyone there had been able to physically get together to play.
One of the things that came up the most was that, when you play online, you can forget that there’s another person playing with you. Your opponent feels less like another human player, and more the product of a matchmaking algorithm. It got me thinking about that gulf, and how much weight you put on the other person’s character to tell you about them. In all sorts of online spaces, playing a female character is seen as a signifier that the person playing them isn’t male (if my memories of playing MMOs a decade ago remain true).
For me, part of the appeal is finding a way to navigate the distance between me and my character. None of them, not even Poison - the only explicitly trans character I’ve ever found in a fighting game - feel like they necessarily represent me. And I don’t think I want them to. So much of my experience of playing fighting games while queer, non-binary, trans, has existed in that gulf between me and the character on screen. Representation in fighting games is a tricky thing. It’s more than possible to spend countless hours playing a character without learning anything about them.
I know nothing about Ivy’s story in Soul Calibur, or the Power Rangers that I use in Battle For the Grid, but I’m drawn to them and the fragments they represent; the parts of me they reflect in these environments much more easily than I could. It’s inherently fluid, as if by choosing a different character, I could change the parts of myself I’m putting out in the world. It makes every trip to the character select screen feel like a conversation. That’s one of the many metaphors I’ve seen used to describe fighting games; that you’re having a conversation with your opponent. But this is different, it takes place both in and out of game, and you’re talking to yourself in a way that's unique to just spending hours in training mode. It’s an act of navigating how you see yourself, how other people in the arcade see you, and how you want to be seen, all of it coming together in messy, imperfect ways.
Poison is the perfect example of this kind of imperfect idea, the ways in which we take what we can to try and see ourselves. Older games she appears in are littered with outdated and offensive language - her genesis as being trans even came from the idea that quote-unquote women couldn’t be in a beat ‘em up (Poison first appears in Final Fight (Capcom, 1989)). This idea of whether or not Poison is “really a man” has ended up haunting the character through many of her early appearances. It isn’t easy to look up Poison and learn how she was conceived or described. It all exists in that space of tension and expectation; how to find space for yourself, through a game, and a community that often feels impenetrable.
When people talk about fighting games, one of the things they focus on is how much of a time commitment they can be. Getting good at a fighting game is described as a journey. The dynamic between my gender, and the gender of the characters I play, is a different kind of journey, one informed by histories of problematic characters and the baggage of the fighting game community, all wrapped in the possibilities and limits of choosing an avatar. It isn't a simple journey, but I'm a fighter.
Sam Moore (they/them) is a writer, artist, and one of the founding editors of Third Way Press. They have written two books, "All my teachers died of AIDS" (Pilot Press), and the forthcoming, "Long live the new flesh." Follow them @Sam_Moore1994.
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