Games as Knowledge Infrastructures: Community Memory, Competitive Skill, and Belonging in the Fighting Game Community
My dissertation project examines how the Fighting Game Community produces knowledge about history, skill, identity, and belonging. Rather than treating fighting games only as software, competition, or entertainment, I study the social worlds that form around them: documentaries, tournaments, photographs, archives, volunteers, organizers, players, spectators, and everyday scenes of community life. The project asks how the FGC remembers itself, who gets treated as important, what kinds of labor become visible or invisible, and how competitive spaces teach people what counts as skill, legitimacy, and participation.
The dissertation is currently organized around three evidence-rich chapters based primarily on work I have already gathered. The first chapter analyzes FGC documentaries as canon-making texts that shape how the community remembers its heroes, rivalries, origins, and values. The second chapter uses visual and photographic fieldnotes from major tournament spaces to examine how competitive gaming environments are organized through crowds, screens, signage, spectatorship, volunteer labor, gendered space, and everyday forms of care. The third chapter draws on participant observation from tournament work, including my experience as a long-term Evo volunteer and bracket runner, to study the ordinary routines that sustain competitive play: waiting, coaching, rule enforcement, repair, fatigue, informal teaching, and the small social practices that make large events function.
Together, these chapters argue that the FGC is not only a competitive scene but also a living knowledge infrastructure. Its histories are produced through media and memory; its spaces teach players how to move, watch, compete, and belong; and its events depend on forms of labor and care that are often overlooked when esports is reduced to spectacle. By focusing on already collected documentary, visual, and ethnographic material, this version of the dissertation is designed to be both intellectually coherent and feasible to complete. It allows me to return to the core of the project: showing how competitive play communities create, preserve, and contest the knowledge that holds them together.
