Summary 

• Scoped and planned a nine-month research project surrounding a local and online community, making sure to gain permission to conduct research in arcades and at a variety of fighting game tournaments.

 

• Created interview guides for different experts within the community to learn about the community as it stands and it’s history.

 

• Conducted formal and informal interviews with a variety of members of the community.

 

• Used online survey data as well as online discussions, streams, and YouTube shows to learn more about the community and to see how different it was online and offline.

 

• Analyzed and synthesized data from field research against research from academia about video gaming and Internet communities to identify patterns and the differences of behaviors in the fighting game community versus other video gaming communities.

 

• Created a glossary of unique lingo used within the community.

 

• Wrote a 76 page report of all collected data including images.

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For my senior year as an anthropology student at Bryn Mawr College​, I was tasked with completing a year long ethnography project about a topic of my choice. 

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I chose to work on the fighting game community, a community I had learned about and come to love since 2009. This was a community of people who played fighting video games such as Street Fighter for money in competitions, which dated back to the earliest releases of these games in American arcades in the 1980's. However, since then gaming moved from arcades in tight urban areas to homes and online with the rise of video game consoles and online gaming. Therefore, I wanted to understand how this community started, how it worked, and how it had changed so easily from being a community that connected in small, localized areas to a community that connected internationally on the web.

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 Research 

To begin I frequented the most popular arcade for this community in Philadelphia, the University Family Fun Center. I also would attend local tournaments, both small ones that were hosted at the arcade, or the few major tournaments in the area that happened in the winter and spring. Through these contextual inquiries, I was able to meet several members of the community, ranging from enthusiasts of the game to event organizers to professional, sponsored players. This help me gain a basis understanding of the community I had mainly interacted with online, and allowed me to meet people who would be willing to do a formal interview.

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I conducted 3 formal user interviews, one with a prominent online content creator in the community, one with a local sponsored player, and an event organizer. I also conducted dozens of informal interviews at people's homes, in arcades, and at tournaments to better understand how people got into different games and this community as a whole, as well as understanding the history of the community.

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Along with user focused research, I conducted a wide array of book research. I read through books on Internet communities, video game history, gaming communities and controversies. I also watched documentaries on the fighting game community, player interviews, major tournament streams, and popular YouTube shows featuring prominent members of the fighting game community.

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I also tapped into the online forums of Shoryuken.com, the largest fighting game community website at the time. I ran a short survey and held several short discussions to hear people's thoughts on different topics in the community. I also followed them to hear what users had to say about tournaments, games, and preferences in arcades versus playing online.

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 Insights & Learnings 

Through my nine months of research, I was able to outline the history of the fighting game community and learn what made it so different from so many other e-sports communities.​