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“Okay it has to be said: fighting games are outright bad.”
With that steamy video game take, Mika, a Twitter user with less than 200 followers, sent fans on social media into a frenzy. Even now, she’s a bit mystified by the heated conversation she unwittingly started. “I was just thinking about designing the game from a competitive point of view,” says Mika Reverse.
Hot catches are a dime a dozen. In the age of social media, you can’t scroll the mouse wheel without finding an opinion that is sure to rub someone the wrong way. This is especially true in video game circles where avid gamers are no strangers to criticizing and defending online games. But a deeper dive into Mika’s post and the speech that followed highlights our odd tendency to pile on strangers when they deign to criticize something many hold dear.
The thread of 30 tweets is a furious and hilarious odyssey. Mika tears up an entire genre, taking no prisoners along the way. (It’s a familiar pleasure to see people’s brains override the opinion of someone who dares to be different from theirs.). She spits everything from awkward movement to insurmountable skill imbalance, and delivers some icy liners on some of the genre’s most beloved games.
“Any genre where the games are of the highest quality Dragon ball and Soulcalibur doesn’t deserve the embarrassment of existing, ”she wrote.
Within days, thousands of people flocked to Mika’s Twitter account to fill his responses and DMs with furious comments. Some laughed like a rant from someone bad at fighting games, while others resorted to despicable transphobic attacks. Reverse spoke to Mika, who chose not to provide her full name due to the doxxing she received in the fallout, which is why she thought it got people particularly hot.
“I think it comes from an attachment between people and the things they love and play as a kind of identity,” says Mika. “In a way, I feel validated. If the tweet thread did anything, it revealed negative things in the community. “
Speaking to Mika on the phone, she is nowhere near as aggressive as her tweets suggest. She is warm and level-headed throughout the conversation, offering a thoughtful, albeit pungent, review full of knowledge and nuance. What’s interesting, but not surprising, is to hear that she grew up loving fighting games.
“I grew up playing fighting games with my friends and family a lot. My first video game was actually Mortal combat on PlayStation 2, ”says Mika. “As we got older, fighting games took a back seat. I tried to come back Super Smash Bros. in 2015, and I just realized how different fighting games were from my perception of them when I was younger.
Mika’s opinions come from a place of love, not hate. She thinks there is a lot of value in games that have a high skill level, she just wants fighting games to do a better job of welcoming newcomers with more thoughtful tutorials or focused single player content.
The high barrier to entry for fighting games is a recurring theme in Mika’s review. When she criticizes the way fighting games handle movement, for example, it comes against the backdrop of the lack of intuition this can feel for newcomers. The same goes for the genre’s addiction to complex inputs, which leaves little trade-off between casual play and high-level play.
“For new players trying to get into these games, it’s very daunting,” says Mika. They won’t be familiar with extended combos. It goes into an environment where if a player wants to play at more than a casual level, a lot of the best aspects of fighting games come out the window. You just have to choose a character and get rid of your life. “
This is a fairly reasonable point of view. But rationality tends to fly out the window when it comes to large online spaces. Twitter is not well suited for one-on-one conversations; it is designed for maximum visibility. Personal opinion can turn into public discourse with just one click, opening the floodgates to a host of angry responses. Mika still doesn’t know how verified Twitter accounts with tens of thousands of followers ended up finding her profile virtually unknown.
She admits that some of her own language choices have clouded some of its nuances and exacerbated the response.
“If you play Smash you are honestly only a pedophile, ”reads one of his particularly catchy tweets.
While Mika wanted this to be a review of the Super Smash Bros. community and its recent revelations of sexual abuse, she says it’s not something she would have written if she knew the post would attract so many people. ‘Warning. She just thought she was letting loose in the abyss, but there’s no real void on social media.
Mika found an eerily heartwarming glimmer of hope amid the flood of angry SMs on Twitter. She received many messages from fans who invited her to their own communities to play games in a more friendly environment.
“There were a lot of really cool people out there who weren’t trying to start a firestorm, but to provide an inclusive space within the fighting game community that is safe, as opposed to more reactionary,” she says. . “Finding these communities and nurturing them is the best thing we can do as fans of these games.”
This good faith awareness contrasts sharply with the thousands of insulting responses that still pile up under the thread. By taking the time to understand where Mika was coming from and offer a welcoming helping hand, these fans are showing that human connection is still possible on social media. Meaningfully engaging with other players rather than blindly jumping on the bandwagon of rage can enrich our experiences online and shape communities for the better.
To put it in Super Smash Bros. terms: 1v1 me, no elements, Fox only, Final destination.
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