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, attracting a sizable and passionate competitive community. Today, however, first-person shooters, real time strategy, and multiplayer online battle arena are among the most popular among both viewers and players (Entertainment Software Association, 2017). Fighting games are typically games that are played in a one versus one format while physically in the same space as one’s opponent. These video games communities, online and shared in-person are typically seen as being predominantly white, and when looking at game competitions within these genres of 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. Thus, this study aims to examine the presence of minority gamers within the competitive fighting community. More specifically, this work aims to fill this gap in literature by first answering if there is a heightened level of racial diversity within the fighting game community, and then what factors lead to it developing in
this way.
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