A couple of days back, as I was checking out the Eurogamer website, I came across an article called, "It's time to kick back against gaming bigots". I was taken back by what I read.

Now if you're lazy/busy/not bothered to read the article, here's a brief summary of it. Cross Assualt is an online reality show by Capcom that hosted a Street Fighter x Tekken tournament. It consists of two teams - Team Street Fighter and Team Tekken.

The captain of Team Tekken, Aris Bakhtanians, made a ton of disgusting comments on a member of his OWN team, a gamer called Miranda Pakozdi. Comments included, "Miranda, I wanna know your bra size!" and "How does Miranda smell?". There are far worse comments but I'm not going to post them here. Now from the tone of his voice, he meant them for fun but eventually escalated and resulted in this entire debacle.

Miranda laughed along with the others initially but then came to a point where she couldn't stand the regular bashing so she gave up playing properly and lost each fight by not even fighting back. She stopped fighting and just moved the stick forward. Clearly, she just wanted to leave and quickly. And I know people are going to say that she shouldn't have forfeited but think of what she was going through. She was being made a sexual spectacle and harassed in front of people. What started out as fun ended as this.


Miranda (left) and Aris (right)

Now I don't what Capcom was thinking when they hosted this tournament/show because they didn't even have/enforce a code of conduct. They could have atleast stopped the tournament and warned participants about the use of language. And NO, giving out a statement telling participants to "behave better" is NOT going to make things any better.

What Capcom needed to do was to strictly implement rules regarding the behaviour and language used by participants. Violaters should be warned once and disqualified on further violations.

Aris defended his actions saying, "This is a community that's, you know, 15 or 20 years old, and the sexual harassment is part of a culture, and if you remove that from the fighting game community, it's not the fighting game community--it's StarCraft."

Every community has its share of idiots but generalizing that this the attitude borne by ever member of a community is plain idiocy. Regardless of where you are, there is always a need to behave properly. Blatant disregard for basic rules of conduct is not acceptable. You don't need to swear to be a part of a community and no, you don't need to sexually harass anyone to be a "part of culture".

Fortunately, Aris did release a statement apologizing for his behaviour but sadly, the damage has been done.

The mistake was on everyone's part. Aris shouldn't have spoken like that, Miranda shouldn't have entertained Aris' way of speaking to her initially and Capcom should have done what they can to stop this from blowing out of proportion.

The gaming community already has a bad rep. Seeing more fuel being added to a fire is just depressing.