Contours of virtual enfreakment in fighting game characters

• Main Authors: Sengun, Sercan, Mawhorter, Peter, Bowie-Wilson, James, Audeh, Yusef, KWAK, Haewoon, Harrell, D. Fox
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2022
• Subjects: Videogames; Digital games; Fighting games; Representation; Gender; Race; Ethnicity; Databases and Information Systems; Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/7171; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/8174/viewcontent/VirtualEnfreakmentFightingGame_pvoa.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

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; Sengun 2015; Yee et al. 2012, S,engun et al. 2022a; Harrell and Veeragoudar Harrell 2012; Kao and Harrell 2015; Sengun 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..