Fighting for Liberation: Uncovering Literacies of Abolitionist Worldbuilding in the Digital Fighting Game Community

• In Event: Civic Learning With, Within, and Against Digital Platforms

Abstract

While we are currently living in a renaissance of abolitionist engagement within the field of education (Anderson, 2022; Clarke, 2022; Coles et al., 2021; Love, 2019; The Education for Liberation Network & Critical Resistance Editorial Collective, 2021), few studies at the intersection of abolition and education center digital and online gaming spaces, and those that do exist (Cortez et al., 2022; Gray & Leonard, 2018) have yet to explicitly position the practices they reveal as potential guides in abolitionist educational study and practice. Thus, this paper intervenes to highlight how the communal practices of the digital fighting-game community (FGC), as experienced and refracted through Twitch, embody literacies of abolition that resist Western practices of individuality and domination and might be used as a model for creating needs-meeting and life-giving (Turner, 2022) and speculative civic futures (Garcia & Mirra, 2020) in the classroom.

Recognizing that “even violent video games,” say “many positive things” about them and the community of practices that surround them (Gee, 2007), this study seeks to bridge the divide between the studies of digital learning spaces and abolitionist educational studies through a close look at the digital FGC. Our work is particularly informed by abolition-studies’ emphasis on the necessity of relational practices in the building communities of care that might replace harmful systems of domination (brown, 2017; Kaba, 2021; The Education for Liberation Network & Critical Resistance Editorial Collective, 2021). We put these relational practices in conversation with André Brock’s work on “Black cyberculture,” or a collection of digital practices that have been built out of Black vernacular engagements with technologies that “decent[er] whiteness as the default”by bridging “hardware,” “code,” and “cultural” phenomena (2020, p. 5).

While the FGC as a community spans both physical and digital “scences,” as community members call them, as well as a plethora of different fighting game titles such as Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Tekken, and Guilty Gear, our study focused on one particular weekly tournament held via Twitch called the Can Opener Tournament. Can Opener is an online weekly fighting game tournament, highly attended by Black and other non-dominant people, and run by one of the FGC’s most influential community members: Michael Mendoza, a.k.a. “Yipes.” Data collection included field notes from over 10 hours of co-participant observation of Can Opener and interview transcripts from FGC players who participate in or are familiar with the Can Opener series. Preliminary thematic analysis has revealed how the members of the FGC resist traditional Western, capitalist ways of relating to each other through embodied and anti-capitalist cybernetic relational practices, or practices that facilitate the governance of the community wherein players' relationships to each other and to digital platforms are mutually constitutive. Ultimately, the FGC’s cybernetic relational practices bridge the gap between game studies and abolitionist research in education by lighting the way for educators in and outside the school system to see how we might build communities together beyond Western, capitalist modalities and epistemologies.

Authors

• Kia Turner, Stanford University

• Antero Garcia, Stanford University