3. Sexism Isn't, Or At Least, Shouldn't Be Part Of Our Identity
This is more in response to a statement made by an expert Street Fighter player a while back. Aris Bakhtanians got into some hot water by essentially verbally abusing a female contestant Miranda Pakozdi, as part of an online show called Cross Assault. In it Bakhtanians responded to the question "if there could be a fighting game community without the sexism?" by saying:
You cant. You cant because theyre one and the same thing. This is a community thats, 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, its not the fighting game community.
Clearly this is an incredibly extremist view and not one I hold up to everyone who says they are uncomfortable or think the push for female representation is extreme. However, the fact still remains that there are people within the community who think that sexism defines what the community of the medium is. This is often built on an idea of tradition or people who think "that is just the way it is and always has been." The fact is though that things are changing. We should be accepting a wider audience into our community and the female demographic is probably the fastest growing in gaming. We are no longer exclusively a nerdy male past time. We are becoming a sophisticated and artistic medium and to really fulfill our potential and achieve that legitimacy we have been asking of the arts community, we need to prove that we deserve it. We do that by shedding some of our outdated shackles and ideas of what gaming used to be.