Performing the Self

Abstract

This article analyzes the quick-response binary combat game genre, suggesting that so-called "finger-twitch" games, often maligned by academics, are both complex and significant for cultural studies. While the game structure of binary combat is most often seen in terms of simple entertainment, lacking narrative power and encouraging an apathetic and passive attitude to violence, the author argues that games such as Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, and Soul Calibur are complex in terms of their construction of stereotyped identity and in the binary structure of combative play. Further, the significance of the genre lies in the performative aspects of gameplay, which problematize accepted models of identification and immersion. Once the player is introduced into the superficial binary structure of combat, then that player's choice and agency become the primary factors in gameplay, ultimately creating space for the inversion of stereotype, the subversion of gender roles and the possible transcendence of the binary system.

Mortal Kombat

“…Unlike a martial-arts film, where the viewer is given one or more sympathetic protagonists with which to identify, the fighting game continually returns to the Character Select screen, since one is not obliged to remain the same character after each two-player match or after suffering a defeat in one-player mode. Following Hutchinson (2007), then, this means that moral or political alignments between player and avatar are often fragmentary or tenuous at best. Still, a loud contingent of racist gamers led an online backlash against Jax's Mortal Kombat 11 (NetherRealm Studios, 2019) character ending-wherein the victorious Black character, having gained the magical power to control time itself, travels centuries into the past to prevent transatlantic chattel slavery altogether.…”

“…Still, a loud contingent of racist gamers led an online backlash against Jax's Mortal Kombat 11 (NetherRealm Studios, 2019) character ending-wherein the victorious Black character, having gained the magical power to control time itself, travels centuries into the past to prevent transatlantic chattel slavery altogether. Whether accusing the game's creators of injecting Black Lives Matter-era identity politics into the game or deploying the white-supremacist canard that the game promotes "white genocide" (Fahey 2019), this outsize response to a common trope of alternate-history speculative fiction supports Hutchinson's (2007) caveat that racist attitudes brought into the game's reception by a subgroup of angry gamers may be a stronger force than in-game representations themselves.…”

Problem-solving for STEM learning: navigating games as narrativized problem spaces for 21st century competencies

“…In this conception, one’s self is constituted of contradictory identities pulling in different directions, so that identifications are continually being shifted (Barker 2008). At the same time, the player’s performance of self within such structures also hinges on identifying with an individual customized character—either through varied subject positioning, identification with the given character in a number of different ways, or character customization followed by role-play identification (Hutchinson 2007). In such configurations, a sense of agency comes largely from freedom of movement (Carr 2003) both spatially and socially (Turkle 1995; McBirney 2004).…”

The Human–Computer Interaction of Cross-Cultural Gaming Strategy

“…Hutchinson (2007) uses the term binary combat games when referring to combat games which rely on rapid eye movement and finger control instead of differences in the character's combat programming. Hutchinson (2007) believed that character selection was based on cultural influences. For example, in Soul Calibur II the character models seem to be tailored to either Asian decent or European decent.…”