Contours of Virtual Enfreakment in Fighting Game Characters

Characters in fighting videogames1 such as Street Fighter V and Tekken7 typically reveal a phenomenon that we define as virtual enfreakment: their bodies, costumes, and fighting styles are exaggerated (1) in a manner that emphasizes perceived exoticism and (2) to enable them to be easily visually and conceptually distinguishable from one another. Here, using both quantitative and qualitative methods, including crowd-sourced surveys and analyses of game mechanics, we report on the contours of virtual enfreakment in those games. We specifically examine differences in character design across gender, national-origin, and skin-color lines. Disappointingly but not surprisingly, we find racism and sexism manifest as stark differences in character design by gender and skin color. This has strong implications because taking on the roles of these characters can have impacts on users in the physical world, e.g., performance and engagement, behavior, and understandings of others (Lim and Harrell 2015; Şengün 2015; Yee et al. 2012, Şengün et al. 2022a; Harrell and Veeragoudar Harrell 2012; Kao and Harrell 2015; Şengün 2014; Kocur et al. 2020). Although the differences are not always straightforward, female characters and darker-skinned characters (typically, characters of color) are enfreaked differently than their light-skinned male counterparts. Our results also reveal the strategic use of “unknown” as a country of origin for villainous characters. Through our mixed-methods analysis, we examine in detail how virtual enfreakment is influenced by sexism and racism, and our findings are compatible with information about the development history of the Street Fighter and Tekken franchises. However, we also find that recent characters designed in dialogue with developers from their regions of origin are some of the least enfreaked and most positively portrayed—suggesting the possibility of designing and deploying such characters for implementing anti-bias character designs within popular videos

System-images

Thesis: S.M. in Art, Culture and Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Architecture, 2017.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis. "June 2017."Includes bibliographical references (pages 56-58).System-Images capture the movements, behaviors, events and running commands of the city at any given moment; they are key software architectures to understand how machines and smart objects see and record today. Computers aren't the only ones communicating and backing up programs and operating systems to a hard disk or cloud. In today's cities, the objects that we would least suspect--parking meters, traffic lights, navigation systems, mobile phones, airplanes, alarm clocks, wireless routers, name tags, doors, virtual private networks (VPNs), steering wheels, game consoles, and even groceries-- take images of us, using hardware and software like sensors and behavioral algorithms, with human characteristics programmed into them. Whether the information logged is visual is beside the point; vital information in the form of visual cues, numbers, audio signals, colors, interaction time, computational identity and location are enough to coordinate an imprint of user and societal behavior. If collated, what kinds of narratives, philosophies and aesthetics would this data generate? System-Images provokes questions and fictions about our new spatial configuration and the nascent language it has birthed, hastened by technologies which do can everything that we can...and more.by Yusef Audeh.S.M. in Art, Culture and Technolog

Contours of virtual enfreakment in fighting game characters

Qatar Computing Research Institut