| Description | In recent year competitive video games and game streaming has become an increasingly popular medium, along with competitive 'Esports' tournaments. Fighting games such as Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, and Super Smash Brothers have their roots in early arcades and remain popular to this day. Video game communities are typically seen as being predominantly white, and when looking at game competitions outside of fighting games, this holds true (Paterson, 2017). While industry demographic reports gladly espouse the distribution of men and women playing video games, there is unfortunately a lack of racial demographics data however (Entertainment Software Association, 2017). Observational data suggest that fighting games seem to be different yet there is a lack of academic work examining this phenomenon. This study aims to answer if there is a heightened level of racial diversity within the fighting game community and explore what factors lead to it developing in this way. |
