On Monday nights I run a small fighting game event at a bar. It’s a video game bar: you rent a TV for a certain amount of time and you get to play anything from the bars library of games. It’s got a couple of rows of PC’s too. Come by on any night and you’ll find people playing Starcraft, or League of Legends.

Most people just swing by for a couple games of FIFA before carrying on, but on Monday’s we play Marvel, Street Fighter and Injustice for a couple of hours whilst drinking a few beers. It’s nice. It’s fun. We’ve even got a couple of girls who show up too, and everyone goes home happy. It’s a world away from EVO or the other big fighting game events and communities, but it’s ours.

I got there early this Monday to watch the Microsoft press conference. I figure if I want to get into the industry eventually, I need to keep up-to-date and watch everything I can; stoically and critically.

I watched the conference with a beer and the subtitles on, the music of the bar reigning over everything. A couple of guys close to me were playing Blur and cajoling each other loudly too.

I watched in silence, until Killer Instinct was announced and I felt the need to punch the air a little. Fighting games pride, I guess. By this time a few regulars had turned up, and we reminisced as much as we could about the original. None of us could remember if the original had super moves, though.

Whilst the conference continued, we started playing. We caught up with each other from last week, and drank and laughed. I came third in Street Fighter, and we had a new person win the Marvel tournament.

None of us caught the rape joke. It wasn’t on the subtitles, so maybe it wasn’t scripted. I hope it wasn’t, because it’s getting harder and harder to defend the fighting games community by blaming on ‘just one asshole.’

In fact, not only is it impossible; it’s something we shouldn’t even be doing.

Fighting games remind me of boxing. It started out meagre, got richer, got scandalised and now just about manages to hold its cultural stature from the looming power of the UFC. It’s not hard to work out that the unrelenting hordes of MOBA’s are the UFC in this metaphor.

All we’ve done is replace the plaster in our gloves with some new unsavoury jokes. Biting with unneeded aggression. Dives for the mob with grand finals with split pots, and being fought between randomly chosen characters. Whilst this sense of lawlessness is enticing, it will only serve to compound its own problems. Our bastions of common sense and humility will be overpowered by the unchecked masses, until we’ll have walled ourselves in. And everyone else out.

Trapped inside these monstrous walls, with our filth and our squalor.

The first thing I did the next day was check for news I’d missed. I knew that Sony had had their press conference whilst I was asleep, and I had to catch up. That wasn’t the first thing that caught my eye though; the first thing was a piece about Killer Instinct, and its rape joke.

I read it through and at its closing line of ‘this is institutionalised misogyny,’ I shook my head and got ready for work. But a working day later, I realised that was exactly what it was. There is no other perfect definition. Girl goes on stage, plays a game with a guy, guy slurs at her, guy beats her, normality reigns.

I’d like to think they chose that guy because he was good at the game, better than everyone else in the company. I’d like to think they chose the girl because she was a confident, interesting speaker for the Smart-Glass segment, and just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I’d like to think he apologised for the joke backstage.

Maybe no-one thought about; but just because you didn’t think about it doesn’t make it misogyny. It makes it exactly misogyny.

Fighting games get shown in public, someone makes an offensive comment, the public sagely shakes their heads, another brick gets added to the wall around us, normality reigns.

I’d like to think that the joke would have gone down badly at my event. Maybe it wouldn’t have. Maybe we would have snorted at it, and carried on playing.

Chances are we would have just carried on, talking about getting the PS4, new characters to play and about whether or not the first Killer Instinct really had super moves or not. And we wouldn’t touch the walls. We’d glance to check that they were still there, maybe even rap a knuckle on it. And we’d just shake our heads, and nothing more.

And the walls would get bigger whilst we sleep.