Crashing out: Thresholds of anger in grassroots, competitive fighting game communities offline

Who gets to be angry? And how are they permitted to express their anger? We argue that exploring these questions in relation to grassroots competitive Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (Bandai Namco Studios & Sora, 2018) can help us understand how competition itself is negotiated, as well as who is welcome to compete. We do so by drawing on fieldwork conducted in Berlin in 2024 and 2025, and personal experience participating in tournaments in various cities across Europe. Competitive Smash is played in spaces that can be considered assemblages defined by relations between humans, gaming technologies including software, and infrastructures (Taylor 2009). We look at these relations to understand how emotions of anger and frustration are produced in competition, as well as how they travel and affect others. Competitive Smash events involve tension, and that produces affective responses. Typically played on a monitor shared with an opponent in a room full of other competitors (and spectators), one cannot escape being affected. Some of this affect materializes as frustration or anger, which are often tolerated to some degree. Yet, it can also lead to more explosive outbursts: thumping tables, ‘controller spiking’, kicking chairs, angry shouts and ‘crash-outs’. These are moments that pierce the atmosphere in the venue, potentially resulting in a player being reprimanded, removed or even banned from the event.

We are particularly interested in how the threshold of what is acceptable in the context of competition is negotiated and crossed. Building on Sara Ahmed’s (2014: 225) notion of affect, we consider which bodies Smash spaces are organized around. Moderation and negotiation of emotional responses and their affective consequences shows that spaces come with affective affordances, which afford their inhabitants to emotionally express themselves one way or another (Caravà & Benenti 2024, Krueger & Colombetti 2018). We contend, through Ahmed, that different people are afforded different kinds of affective engagement in different Smash spaces. This has implications for who gets angry, who is most affected by anger, and what regulation of this affect does for whom, particularly across gendered lines.

We situate ourselves also within previous literature on Smash and competitive offline gaming. Much of it points to a toxic, male-dominated space, in which “asking fighting game players to tone down or remove offensive language” is like “asking a basketball player to play with a football instead” (Harper 2014: 124). Christopher A. Paul argues that this is part of the toxic meritocracy of digital games which “seems blind to context and circumstance” (2018: 139). But much of this work is concerned with elite-level, professionalised competition. We are interested in adding the grassroots perspective, in which competition is more a social hobby than a business. There are very different dynamics at work at the local grassroots level that are worth examining, because that is where most competitive players exist. This has been explored with regards to online Smash communities (e.g., Adams 2016), but not so much offline.

In this presentation, then, we discuss how thresholds of acceptable emotional expression are crossed and trace their affective consequences in order to discuss how competition is defined, and, more specifically, for whom. This discussion moves beyond reductive notions of toxicity and instead offers a nuanced depiction of how emotions are negotiated in ways that do (or do not) produce more equitable and prosocial competition.