(Net)play, Alienation and Rejecting Convenience
Hi. What you’re about to read is a very personal, emotionally-driven diatribe about why I think the modern experience of playing fighting games online kind of sucks ass. This is entirely separate from any discourse surrounding the perceived popularity of fighting games in comparison to other competitive game genres, and it is not intended as a contribution to any form of public discourse about the genre more broadly. I invite you to read this piece and think about the ways it might or might not match up with your experience, and I sincerely hope it gets you to consider what it is that you find valuable about this wonderful genre and the community that has formed around it. I would only ask that you refrain from starting any flame wars over what is ultimately my subjective interpretation of my subjective experience.
Back in 2021, one of my best friends, Pichy, wrote a blog post titled “Antisocial Networks: Fighting Game Lobbies and Isolation”. In it, she outlined her growing frustration with the experience of playing fighting games online:
You are placed in a room of eight other players. The keyboard is too far away to reach with your arcade stick in the way. Console microphone support is still terrible to the point that using your voice is an identifiable category of Guy. Maybe you can kick a soccer ball around. After waiting for the previous match you couldn’t spectate while [you were] joining the room to end, you finally play a match.
You lose the match. Back of the line.
She argues that fighting games were born in an inherently and inextricably social environment, and that the push towards online play, with its myriad roadblocks to organic social interaction, led to a reifying of all the worst emotional aspects of engaging with the genre without any of the cushioning that comes from being able to talk to another person. Her piece ends on this note:
To me, the online lobby isn’t about community. It’s about atomisation.
At the time, I don’t think I fully understood what this frustration was. Playing online, especially in games with rollback netcode, was what allowed me to enjoy these games even when I couldn’t attend local events - especially important during a time where governments and communities were still taking more serious preventative measures towards the spread of COVID-19. It allowed me to engage with the broader community in a way that I couldn’t otherwise.
In 2024, my relationship to that broader community fundamentally changed. The culmination of an impulsive act of short-sighted defiance and a long-term waning of my connection to a scene I had been part of for 15 years resulted in my circles becoming a lot smaller. The people I wanted to spend time with became much more specific, and they mattered to me a lot more than they did before. Tragic - and frankly, stupid - as it was, it reiterated to me a fundamental truth about why I stuck around for as long as I did: this hobby is meaningless if I can’t share it with other people. So now, in 2026, I feel much more equipped to understand Pichy’s frustration, and in many ways, it has now become a frustration that I share.
In my article examining my complicated feelings about Starward, I voiced a major complaint about the game’s matchmaking system and how nearly every ranked match played prior to 6000 MMR is played with and against bots. Because of the structure of the ranked ladder, you literally have to earn the right to consistently play a competitive multiplayer game with multiple human players. This leads to issues I outlined in that post already; it makes a game with an already backwards player incentive structure feel even more grindy, and it risks setting new players up to fail when they actually do start fighting humans. For me, this experience was so utterly miserable that it got me to give up on Starward. But in a way, the fact that I might otherwise have been destined to spend so much time in the ranked matchmaking queue fighting non-human opponents is funny - it would seem that this manufactured solitude is not without a keen sense of irony.
The end of 2025 saw the first ever home release for Daemon Bride: Additional Gain, a fighting game by Team Arcana (née Examu) that had originally maintained arcade exclusivity since it first launched on the NESiCAxLive platform in 2011. Despite the timing of its release, it is, in many ways, a relic of a bygone era - not just because of its wild character toolkit designs or the fact that the game is basically Cyberbots: Fullmetal Madness filtered through the lens of Arcana Heart, but also because it was a game built with the arcade environment in mind first and foremost. Of course, here in The Future, the arcade is dying out even in Japan, and in Australia, the closest thing you’ll get to a fighting game in an arcade is probably blocking someone’s overtake attempts in Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune and calling it footsies. So a few days after release, and in the absence of an opportunity to play the game in its intended setting, I jump into Daemon Bride’s ranked matchmaking queue to play some matches and put my labwork to the test.
Each opponent plays the requisite first-to-two set with me. Sometimes I win, often I lose - but when it’s over, they disappear back into the aether all the same. I am always given a name by which I can refer to them, and a number which vaguely tells me how strong they are, but I do not know them, and I likely never will. Despite all of my logical knowledge to the contrary, despite the basic facts of reality, each and every one of my opponents are, in this environment, merely a series of alphanumeric characters attached to the actions of a digital game piece, functionally indistinguishable from the data packets which comprise the automated “players” that populate Starward’s low-rank matchmaking queue. They, too, are not human. And when I am here, neither am I.
In 1844, as he was developing a thoroughgoing critique of capitalist political economy, Karl Marx began to formulate an idea which would come to be known as the theory of alienation. For Marx, the defining, essential feature of humanity - what he called our “species-being” - is our ability to labour consciously, deliberately and collectively. He regarded labour as so fundamental to human existence because labour both supplements and affirms human life - it is how we provide for ourselves and each other, and it is how we develop ourselves mentally and physically. It is, really, our primary means of interfacing with the world.
Of course, under capitalism, none of us labour because we want to. We do it because we have to, because we exist in a world where our labour, and the products of it, do not belong to us, but to someone else:
Lastly, the external character of labor for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else’s, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another. Just as in religion the spontaneous activity of the human imagination, of the human brain and the human heart, operates on the individual independently of him – that is, operates as an alien, divine or diabolical activity – so is the worker’s activity not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self.
– Marx, “Estranged Labour”, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844
The alienation of workers from their ownership over their labour has wide-reaching societal effects. Capitalism perverts our primary method of interacting with the world and with each other into merely a way to maintain our own existence - a means to an end. This whole process isolates people not just from themselves, but also from each other; not only are we trained to see each other not as people with thoughts, feelings or desires, but as competition which we must clear away in order to prove our worth, in many ways we are trained to not even see each other at all. Nearly everything that exists in our world has had human hands touch it at some point in its creation, and yet the system obfuscates that very humanity behind the human world; there are no people, there are only objects. A world of labour, a world of humans and humanity, has been transformed into a world of commodities, a world of things - the human element behind everything that drives our society is rendered invisible, leaving us only with hollow objects that satisfy our most base needs, but can never provide true nourishment or enrichment.
As the crushing, depressing isolation of the matchmaking queue settled on my shoulders, it occurred to me that what I felt was also a kind of alienation - from myself, from other players, and from the very games I was playing. My opponents had been reduced to thoughtless, unfeeling game actions I was being made to respond to. It was as if my play no longer belonged to me, as if every aspect of the game and the people playing it had been cheapened, commodified. And if this is how playing the game makes me feel, it begs a question: can what I’m doing even be called ‘play’?
If you’re a fan of Hideo Kojima, you’ve probably encountered the term “homo ludens” before. Contrasting with other Latin designations for humanity - ‘homo sapiens’ for “man the thinker,” and ‘homo faber’ for “man the maker” - homo ludens means “man the player.” The term was first coined by Johan Huizinga in his 1938 book Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element of Culture, where he draws historical, anthropological connections between human play and the development of human culture. He argues that play, in and of itself, holds some significance for the human mind and body beyond mere satisfaction of an instinct:
…even in its simplest forms on the animal level, play is more than a mere physiological phenomenon or a psychological reflex. It goes beyond the confines of purely physical or purely biological activity. It is a significant function - that is to say, there is some sense to it. In play there is something “at play” which transcends the immediate needs of life and imparts meaning to the action.
– Huizinga, “Nature and Significance of Play as a Cultural Phenomenon”, Homo Ludens
Huizinga didn’t consider play to be a particularly unique characteristic of humanity, but he did consider it important and even somewhat fundamental to the development of human culture. This idea makes some amount of sense: for humans, group play acts as a form of communal bonding exercise. If play for humans is, as Huizinga contends, the genesis of the myths and rituals which form the basis for the rules and laws that govern our modern society, then it stands to reason that play is, at least to some degree, an inherently social activity - if not purely by virtue of group play requiring multiple players, then also by the thoughts and ideas conveyed to us through individual play, which we in turn convey to others. The reason Kojima is so fascinated by the concept of homo ludens, to the point that this vision of humanity is the mascot for his game studio, is that he believes in the power of games - of play - to create meaningful experiences and meaningful connections. In this view, play seems almost inescapably social.
So what happens, then, when the social element is removed from social play? I think I have an answer: when social play is no longer social, when its human element is obfuscated by the layers of abstraction built into the systems designed to put games into our hands as quickly as possible, irrespective of who sits on the other side of that session, all that is left is play as commodity. The game itself stops being a medium of play and instead becomes merely a means to an end - a game of human players and human play is reduced to an exercise of pure mechanical dexterity and strategy. It satisfies a desire, but it cannot provide nourishment or enrichment. Play without people, in a way, ceases to be play at all.
I understand that my position is probably, on its face, absurd to a lot of people. I’m basically arguing that matchmaking systems, designed to maximise time spent playing the fighting game part of a fighting game, are somehow anathema to playing the game at all. But over the last year and change, I’ve really come to believe it. If the people I share this hobby with are what make it worthwhile for me, then there’s nothing to be gained from engaging with it in a way that renders the humanity of my opponents almost entirely invisible. I don’t want to just play fighting games abstractly, I want to play fighting games with people.
But what most people want - or, what they think they want, anyway - is convenience. And ultimately, the purpose of the matchmaking queue, the purpose of the systems through which matches are delivered to players with as little friction as possible, is convenience. Unfortunately, this convenience comes at the expense of the humanity which sits at the other end, and indeed in the centre of what makes these games worthwhile in the first place. While I would love to tell you that the solution is to come back to Marxism and organise the global working class to lead a socialist revolution that can create a new society where we all have the time and energy to freely pursue all of our interests, that ultimately doesn’t help me feel any better about it right now, even if I do think it’s true. So what to do right now?
When I really dig down to try and find the source of all my issues with the modern online fighting game experience, I find myself sitting with the idea that fighting games just might not be built for convenience. As the broader fighting game social media space wrestles with why games like Deadlock, which are infinitely more complex and demanding than fighting games, see comparatively so much more popularity, I think there’s one thing that gets missed in all the discussion about difficulty and product quality: Deadlock can be played socially in a way that fighting games cannot. You can get five of your friends together for Deadlock and spend a night in the voice chat while you queue up for game after game, having a great time win or lose because you’re spending that time with your friends. Hell, at the very worst, you can at least queue up with one friend as a dedicated lane partner, and that still provides a vastly improved experience over the horrors of solo queue. Fighting games have precious little in the way of providing convenient access to on-demand multiplayer gameplay that doesn’t also allow for social play, and as a result, most instances of spending a night on ranked will feel less like going to the dojo to spar with your peers and more like wandering into the forest to fight bears. The convenience of the matchmaking queue only serves to exacerbate the very problems that it is trying to solve. So I think the solution is simple: reject convenience.
My friends lamented that I never played Starward with them before I abandoned the game. But to my mind, if the only reason I was going to stick with the game was to play it in pre-organised lobbies with my friends, then I may as well do the extra legwork required to coordinate an EXVS 2 lobby with my friends who are interested. For me, there’s a joy in that friction, in the ritual of turning on the server and guiding people through the setup process. So too is there a joy for me in the friction of meeting people in the Discord server, of organising games with them. There is a joy in setting aside a few days in every December to sit down, get in a voice call with friends and acquaintances and fumble around in a game none of us have ever played before. And there is no greater joy for me than that found in the friction of going to a local, talking with people, playing games with them and maybe even sharing meal with them afterwards.
Because to me, the convenience of the matchmaking queue is about the commodification of play - about alienation. But rejecting that convenience is about remembering why we play. It’s about connection, and about community.
It’s about humanity.