One of the topics we talked about this week was the fighting game genre, namely Super Smash Bros. and the way gender is perceived and acted upon in the community. In the study Female Fighters: Perceptions of Femininity in the Super Smash Bros. Community, it aims to determine the perception of femininity, the treatment of female players and the performances of gender within the community. The study found that “with nearly half (46.64%) of the posts analyzed containing [vague feminine positivity], it seemed that there was not an overwhelming amount of negativity within the community’s perception of femininity, nor was there a strong preference for any particular performance of gender” (Adams, 106). It seemed that many of the players within the community seemed to pick their characters based on other reasons like playstyle instead of purely on gender. I believe that this is because of the way Smash Bros. is fundamentally designed. 

One of the biggest appeals of Smash Bros. is the large cast of characters in its roster. Other than mii fighters, there are no original characters in the series. The entire roster of Smash Bros. are all characters from their own respective series created by Nintendo or one of its second-party developers. These beloved characters are already a part of their own popular series and with that comes a higher level of recognizability. New players can pick up a controller and still be able to participate because even if they don’t know all the characters in the game, they can still recognize familiar faces in the roster like Mario, Pikachu, etc. Many players gravitate towards a character simply because they enjoy the series that the character originates from. 

Another conclusion that the study came to was that players seemed to pick their characters based solely on playstyle. “There did not seem to be a particular gender preference in the [tier list] and it seemed to be based on a character’s merits alone… A handful of female characters were near the bottom, but overall they were dispersed fairly evenly, and the presence of three female characters near the top of the list indicates that the community’s perceptions of character viability did not appear to be colored by gender” (Adams, 107). A big difference in Smash Bros. from other traditional fighting games is that Smash Bros. provides a much greater degree of control over character movement than most fighters and as a result, combat is much more free-form. Stages are larger and the camera is pulled further out allowing more options for players to take during play. As a result of this, many characters are given some ranged moves as well as gap-closing melee moves to allow you to still attack opponents if they choose to stay far away. This has given rise to different playstyles and character archetypes. Smash Bros. is ultimately (haha) a competitive arcade fighter with a highly competitive community of players who choose their mains not because of how attractive the character is but because of the player’s playstyle and their relationships with that character.