“All right, it must be said: fighting games are extremely bad.”
With that scorching hot video game take, Mika, a Twitter user with less than 200 followers, sent fans on social media in a frenzy. Even now she is a little surprised at the passionate conversation she started unconsciously. “I just thought of the game design from a competitive point of view,” Mika says. Reverse.
Hot taking is a penny a dozen. In the age of social media, you can not scroll with a mouse wheel without finding an opinion that can surely rub someone wrong. This is especially true in video games where passionate players are no stranger to criticizing and defending games online. But a deeper dive into the message of Micah and the discourse that resulted from it emphasizes our strange tendency to uplift strangers when they show something that is much appreciated.
The 30 tweet thread is an ode that is equally parts furious and hilarious. Mika tears an entire genre apart and takes no prisoners with him. (It’s a familiar joy to see people’s brains short on someone’s opinion that dares to differ from their own.). She spans everything, from clumsy movement to insurmountable skill imbalance, and delivers icy monologues about some of the genre’s most beloved games.
“Any genre where the highest quality games are Dragon Ball and Soulcalibur does not deserve the embarrassment of existence, ”she writes.
Within days, thousands of people flocked to Mika’s Twitter account to fill her answers and DMs with furious comments. Some laughed it off as an outburst of someone bad at fighting games, while others resorted to despicable, transphobic attacks. Reverse talked to Mika, who chose not to give up her full name because of the doxxing she got in the dropout, about why she thinks it makes people very excited.
“I think it comes from a connection between people and the things they enjoy and play as a kind of identity,” Mika says. “In a way, I feel empowered. If the tweet did something, it exposed negative elements in the community. ”
In conversation with Mika over the phone, she is not nearly as aggressive as her tweets suggest. She is warm and even throughout the conversation and offers a thoughtful, if prickly, critique that is full of knowledge and nuance. What’s interesting, though not surprising, is to hear that she grew up with love fighting games.
‘I grew up playing a lot of fighting games with friends and family. My first video game was actually Mortal Kombat on the PlayStation 2, ”says Mika. “As I got older, fighting games took a back seat. I tried to go in again Super Smash Bros. in 2015, and I just realized how different fighting games were for my perception of it when I was younger. ”
Mika’s opinions come from a place of love, not hate. She thinks there is a lot of value to games with a high skill level. She just wishes fighting games had done a better job of welcoming newcomers with more thoughtful tutorials or purposeful single-player content.
The major barrier to access to fighting games is a recurring theme throughout Mika’s critique. For example, when she criticizes how fighting games deal with movement, it is set within the context of how unintuitive it may feel to newcomers. The same goes for the genre’s dependence on complex inputs, leaving little middle ground between casual and high-level play.
“For newer players who want to enter these games, it’s very scary,” Mika says. They are not going to be familiar with extensive combinations. It comes in an environment where many of the best aspects of fighting games go out the window when a player wants to play at more than a comfortable level. You just have to choose a character and throw your life away in it. ‘
This is a reasonable point of view. But rationality tends to fly out the window when it comes to large online spaces. Twitter is not suitable for one-on-one conversations; it is designed for maximum visibility. Personal opinions can change in public conversation with one click and open the floodgates for an angry crowd of responses. Mika is not even sure yet how verified Twitter accounts with tens of thousands of followers have finally found her virtually unknown profile.
She admits that some of her own language choices cloud her nuances and exacerbate the reaction.
‘If you play Smash you are honestly just a pedophile, ”reads one of her particularly striking tweets.
While Mika meant that it was a critique of the Super Smash Bros. community and the recent revelations of sexual abuse, she says it is not something she would have written if she had known the post would attract so much attention. She just thought she was going into the abyss, but on social media there is no void.
Mika found a strange heart-warming silver lining amid the flood of angry Twitter DMs. She received numerous messages from fans inviting her into their own communities to play games in a friendlier environment.
“There were a lot of cool people who were not trying to start a firestorm, but to provide an inclusive space in the combat community that is safe, as opposed to more reactionary,” she says. “Finding the communities and uplifting them is the best thing we as fans of these games can do.”
That good outreach of faith stands in stark contrast to the thousands of insulting answers that are still piling up under the wire. By taking the time to understand where Mika comes from and offer a welcoming hand, these fans show that human connection is still possible on social media. Talking meaningfully with fellow players, instead of blindly jumping on the bandwagon, can enrich our online experiences and shape communities for good.
To put it in Super Smash Bros. terms: 1v1 me, no items, Fox, Final Destination only.